A radical bite-sized guide to improving your marketing… and your life!
Marketing is a business discipline that’s often not very, well, disciplined.
It’s an area of business that’s buzzing and popping with new ideas. It’s a responsive area of business, as marketing is about connecting with your prospective and actual customers – and while their core wants and needs might remain the same, how they want them met and how they want to communicate with businesses and brands shifts and moves. You have to shift and move with them.
When we listen to our members, who are owners, directors and marketers, the words we hear them say about marketing are: ‘overwhelming’, ‘hate doing it’, ‘too much to do’, ‘never-ending’.
They are often on that cycle of ‘doing’ marketing and that is tiring.
The antidote to all this negativity and exhaustion around marketing is space. Space to think and plan. Because, as we all know, when we stop to think, we can plan better. When we stop to think, we can see which marketing activities to ditch, which to keep and which to say ‘NO’ to.
Here are five ways to make space to think and plan so you can radically improve your marketing. Oh, and a happy by-product of making space is that it improves your life too.
Book thinking space out in your diary
Book it out. You need at least 30 minutes once a week, mixed up with half a day every month. Put it in your diary. Guard it ferociously. Keep it there.
Top tip: Do this during the working week. Avoid the trap of making ‘space to think about marketing’ in the evenings or weekends – you need that time away from your desk to play, be with family and friends, moving. All the key things that bring you health and pleasure, and therefore rejuvenate the creativity that great marketing needs.
Have a structure to follow
Sitting there with a blank piece of paper or an empty screen, willing yourself to ‘think’ can be very daunting. So, make sure you have a structure to follow. Something where you can open it up, hop in and start thinking.
These include:
- Reading a book or article which is about how to create marketing strategies and think about your marketing.
- Doing an online course that is about marketing thinking (our marketing courses are deliberately designed to facilitate you reflecting on and thinking about your marketing, giving you an easy way to structure your thinking so it’s easy to sit down and crack on)
- Networking events like our online Coffee Breaks, webinars or workshops can really help you focus on elements of your strategic marketing.
- Filling in your Strategic Marketing Plan or elements of it.
Top tip: Part of our ‘thinking’ time is spent opening up our Strategic Marketing Plan and the accompanying workbooks, updating them, revising them or honing in on key areas that need attention, such as our Client Personas or Competitor Analysis.
All of our marketing courses come with these workbooks and templates that we are using in the business.
Do it in a group
Hearing other people discuss their marketing strategy, being asked questions about yours and then having to think about and articulate your answers can really boost marketing thinking. So, find ways to build this into your thinking space.
Our fortnightly Coffee Breaks are all about marketing strategy, networking and thinking. Our members meet online for informal conversations which are deliberately kept at the level of, ‘What’s your approach’, ‘What’s working / not working’ rather than diving into, ‘Tell me how you set up [insert a very specific piece of marketing such as LinkedIn Ads]’. We work hard to keep our community members thinking about marketing at a strategic, top-level.
It might be you are ready to engage a consultant who offers 1-1 marketing coaching sessions and who will make you step back and see the bigger picture. Or you could be considering a programme like our 5-week Scale Sales, which really makes you step back and think through the live workshops, 1-1s, and tea breaks.
Whatever you choose, find someone to think about marketing with.
Top tip: make sure you stick to ‘thinking’ about how to improve your marketing and high-level thinking rather than getting side-tracked into discussions about how to do one area of marketing. These things will come up, so make a note of them and then research the ‘how do I this’ later.
Do it alone
While thinking in a company is important to get a different perspective, challenge yourself, and be stimulated by new ideas, a core part of your marketing thinking time needs to be done alone. This solitude allows you to see all the pieces of the puzzle, how they are or aren’t fitting together, and then how to rearrange them.
Top tip: make sure you aren’t interrupted during this time so your ideas can flow and you have time to capture them.
Capture your thinking
There are different levels to capturing your marketing thinking.
First, there’s writing notes, drawing them out, scribbling on a whiteboard, and popping it on Post-it notes. Anything that works for you as the ideas are flowing and you want to capture that ‘step back’ output.
Next, there’s structuring it so that you have put everything in logical order. This is why following a structured approach or having a template to fill in is really useful.
Finally, there’s having something that anyone else could pick up, read, and see what you have thought, why, and how it is going to work.
When we run our Scales Sales Programme and quarterly online workshops, we always provide workbooks with plenty of space to make notes. It is essential that people capture their thinking as we move along.
On our Scale Sales course, the workbooks also have templates to ‘put everything in’ and then a ‘clean’ version to complete before finally transferring the key points to the Strategic Marketing Plan template. This neatly gives people the three different ways to capture their thinking.
Top tip: Make sure you capture your thinking at all three levels. It can be tempting to not move past ‘lots of notes’, which means you end up with all your thinking done but makes it harder to progress.
Your next steps
If the thought of making space to do marketing thinking is feeling too hard or too unlikely, do two things: focus on why it is so important and take a baby step.
Why it is so important: This space to think and reflect is utterly crucial to the success of your business. The success of your business is utterly crucial to the success of your life in terms of health, wealth, well-being. It’s worth doing and persevering.
A baby first step: A baby step might be committing to something like our fortnight Coffee Breaks (30 minutes once every two weeks is doable) and booking out one hour asap to see how it feels. Whatever you decide to do as a baby step, do it. Let us know how it goes. If you subscribe to our newsletter, you can join our Community Only LinkedIn Group which is a great place to share things.
Remember: The Marketing Spaces is designed to give you space to think about marketing, so keep checking back in, stay in touch by signing up for our newsletter if you haven’t already, and enjoy everything we have to offer.
