Module eleven
marketing
Disclaimer: This is the most hefty module of the course! Many students feel grateful for the content shared but overwhelmed by how much there is. My goal is to provide you with everything you need to get started, so as you work through this module, go slowly. Implement what feels right now, and come back when you’re ready to add more. Don’t let the sheer volume of information turn you off from making small, baby-step improvements in your business. You can do this!
Watch the video below to listen to this page’s content, OR scroll to read the content instead:
What’s the point in creating things and developing your talents into a business if you’re not going to make every effort to spread the word and get eyes on your products or services?
Marketing seems a little daunting when you don’t have a background in advertising or sales. It feels spammy and uncomfortable to ask people for their money.
Well, let me tell you a little secret: you’re already a pro at marketing.
Have you ever sold your kid on the value of eating a bite of broccoli at the dinner table, or promised them a reward in the morning for going to bed on time? Hello — that’s marketing at its finest!
You weren’t lying about the broccoli being good for them — it really is healthy and does pack value into their diet. You just pointed out all the benefits and held it in a positive light until they were willing to take a bite.
And by offering a reward for completing the bedtime routine, you are simply capitalizing on the idea that your solution will solve a need (or a want), which is exactly what we’ve been talking about when brainstorming the internal motivations of your target audience and how you can appeal to them.
MARKETING DOESN’T HAVE TO BE OVERWHELMING.
It might seem like a chore or a daunting task, but really, if you’ve set up your business with a solid foundation and a clear purpose, the marketing strategy just falls right into place.
Remember how I stressed the importance of understanding your target audience at the start? Now that you are familiar with the type of person you should be marketing to, you can write your marketing content as if you know them — because you do. You have already defined the exact person you’re speaking to, so marketing is now just a matter of speaking to them.
I’m all about purposeful marketing, and that means not doing more work than I need to.
As you go through this module, consider what sort of content you can create that could serve multiple purposes or ways you can develop your content creation workflow to be more efficient. It’s not about how much content you can create, but rather how effectively you can communicate with your audience.
One way you can look at marketing to make it feel less overwhelming is to recognize the three main pillars your marketing efforts should fall under: your website, your online marketing strategy, and your social media strategy. We’ll talk about each in this module, but remember that you know your business and your schedule best, and you can be successful with any combination of those three. You don’t need to go hard at all three at once.
WEBSITES + SEO
There is something so warm and comforting about a space that is yours. It’s familiar and welcoming because you designed it to be. Your business and brand need a home too — a place to call your own that you can control. You decide what stays and what goes.
Your website represents that space for your creative business.
I’m going to walk you through the most crucial components of a website as well as the optimization strategies you’ll need to understand in order to give yourself a boost in Google’s search engine rankings.
Your website will become the home base for your online marketing strategy, allowing you to further your reach from a solid starting point.
You can spend days on end advertising your products and services across all kinds of platforms, but there is a crucial player in this game that you can’t neglect.
A website acts as your home base, the destination to which you direct all incoming inquiries and traffic.
If your customers don’t know where to go, they can’t purchase. A confused customer will not buy. You need to make things as easy as possible for your target audience to convert into booking clients, and your website is the key to that.
There are a lot of businesses operating online, and if you let them, they’ll dominate your target client’s feed or browsing history.
But, on your website, you get to control the narrative, which means YOU get to be the featured product, YOU get to be the business showcased prominently, and YOU get the chance to win their sale, without anyone else getting in the way.
Getting your target clients to your website so you can market to them with no disruptions is a huge win. When you’re selling on Etsy, think of how easy it is for a potential customer to bounce around to different shops. They’re recommended to your customers right along the bottom of your own shop listings. Or on Instagram, how hard is it to actually land your post in front of your audience with a ranking algorithm working off a completely different agenda than you?
Having a website is the only way you’re going to have their full and undivided attention.
THE ELEMENTS OF A WEBSITE
Let’s pretend you’re building a new house. There are several things you’re going to need to think through, including finding some land to build on, probably some sort of blueprint or plan, and choosing a builder to oversee the construction.
The land you’re building on is equivalent to your website’s hosting. Before you can break ground, you first need a place to start digging. Paying for hosting is like renting space on the internet, upon which you can build your house/website. You can pay for hosting through a third party, like BlueHost, or, if you’re building on an all-inclusive platform like Squarespace, it may come included in your website subscription.
The next thing we need to do is lay a foundation and start building walls. You likely had some sort of blueprint or map drawn up prior to starting the build. This map represents your sitemap, a wireframe of pages that outlines what areas exist on the site and the trail you follow to get to them (sort of like the rooms and hallways in the house you’re building).
What if someone wants to visit your new home? Obviously, you’ll need to give them an address. Your domain name, or URL, is the address or direction that will take visitors to your website, the internet version of sending a letter to a physical address.
Like a free mailing address, you can usually get some sort of domain name from your website platform. It might look like rachel-cottrell.squarespace.com or yourbusinessname.weebly.com. However, if you want a more professional, custom domain name (sort of like buying a PO Box) like yourbusinessname.com, you’ll need to purchase your domain from a site like GoDaddy that sells domains. A custom domain helps establish the legitimacy of your website to potential customers and allows you to get a custom email address later on (something like yourname@yourwebsite.com).
Lastly, let’s talk about the construction companies available to handle your home build. Each company has its own unique style. You can choose to invest with a custom home builder and design a new home from scratch, or you can sign on with a construction company that has pre-designed plans for you to choose from. There are many choices, and it may feel overwhelming to pick who to go with. The same can be said of choosing a website platform.
FINDING THE RIGHT PLATFORM FOR YOU
As arguably the most important decision you make when it comes to getting set up, your website platform can control a lot of things about how you operate. It might make blogging to bring in website traffic a real pain, or it might give you lots of “floor plans” (templates) to choose from so you can change things up whenever you’d like. Maybe it includes e-commerce, or maybe you’ll have to bring in third-party software to do that.
There are plenty of website platforms to choose from for your creative business that cater to all kinds of needs and budgets, but ranking at the top of my list of recommendations will always be Squarespace.
Despite the many great options for creative businesses (Wordpress, Showit, Wix, Shopify, etc), Squarespace is my all-time favorite website option. Squarespace makes it so easy for creative entrepreneurs to manage and grow their website and online marketing strategy.
You’re in charge of balancing a lot of different things in your business. Make sure your website isn’t contributing to the stress or pressure.
Among all the great benefits of the platform, a quick summary of my favorites include:
It’s easy to access all the critical search engine optimization (SEO) opportunities, and Squarespace plays advocate to Google on your behalf by filling in its best guess on things you’ve left blank (we’ll talk more about SEO later on!).
All their templates are beautiful and ready to use right away for those who aren’t ready to design from scratch themselves or invest in a custom site design.
There are plenty of opportunities for even more customization to your site if you hire a designer skilled in CSS (a form of styling/coding) or if you had an interest in exploring custom styling hacks yourself, but it’s not necessary. Just an added bonus!
It’s a great start for newbies who don’t have all the time in the world to figure out how to use a website in addition to all the other new things about running a business.
The website subscription covers everything but the domain name, and I appreciate that simplicity.
You can get started on Squarespace for about $16/month* if you don’t need to sell products online or $23/month* if you do (those are the month-to-month plans — if you sign up for an annual subscription, there is a significant saving). That’s a pretty manageable monthly expense! *Obviously I don’t control these prices, so they’re subject to change from the current rate at the time of this writing.
YOUR WEBSITE SHOULD WORK FOR YOU
You’ve spent so long polishing and priming the content on your website to perfectly cater to your online traffic, but where is everyone?
Your website shouldn’t be just a pretty portfolio page to send people to when you’re interacting with them directly. It should be bringing in traffic all on its own, ranking in search engine results at the top of the page for searches performed by your ideal customers.
The best kind of website is a purposeful one, a site that funnels your audience where you want them to go, showcasing what they need front and center to create the maximum opportunity for bookings or purchases.
When you design your website, keep the following goals in mind as you put together a site structure.
✓ Does this page serve a strong purpose?
✓ Does this page communicate a clear message?
✓ Is this page the last step in the visitor’s journey through the website, or should they be directed somewhere else?
✓ Is there a clear call to action to wherever they should go or whatever they should do next?
✓ Is this page easy to understand and navigate?
If checklists are your thing, I’ve put together more checklists for you to use for each page of your site, as well as for the site as a whole, so you can be launch-ready when the time comes in my Website Launch Checklist worksheet.
Your website should be pulling its own weight. No one likes a lazy roommate who just sits on the couch all day, taking up space and eating up all the snacks (unless that roommate is four years old and singing along to the PJ Mask theme song).
The key to setting your website up for online success is through optimizing your site for SEO, which means you’re adding notes and descriptions throughout the site that are chock-full of the keywords your target audience is using to search for products and services like yours. Google will crawl your site and recognize the placement and consistency of these keywords, resulting in stronger signals that indicate you should rank for searches including those terms.
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
SEO stands for search engine optimization, which is the practice of optimizing your website to rank higher in search engine results on places like Google, Bing, or even Pinterest.
Search engines use algorithms to rank content. When you perform a search on Google, Google’s bots search and scan all available data on the accessible internet and evaluate which content is most relevant to your search query.
Their ranking algorithm is made up of a million ranking factors, not all of which are even within our control as the business or website hoping to rank, so it’s a pretty true, authentic ranking result (paid ads notwithstanding, of course).
Here are a few examples of ranking factors that you can play a part in:
Having fresh content on your site to show Google that you’re a legitimate, currently-operating business
Sharing quality content to prove to Google that you’re worth ranking because your content is valuable
Frequently sharing your website content in other places to gather more external links to your site and encourage others to share your links, showing Google that you’ve got clout
Here are a few examples of ranking factors you can’t really control:
The length of time your site has been live — if you’re new, you’re new; there really isn’t anything you can do about that
Your social signals — if people aren’t sharing your content or following you, which creates more impressive social signals, then maybe you need to consider a change to your social media strategy because you can’t force anyone to do anything
The location of the searcher — you might be willing to travel to them, but Google doesn’t know that and might rank you lower than other businesses that are geographically closer
Dedicate yourself to regularly updating your website so it can stay live and active and keep getting attention from Google.
OPTIMIZING YOUR WEBSITE
Besides regularly updating your site with fresh content, here are a few other things you can keep in mind that will improve your site’s potential for ranking:
Upload web-optimized images so they don’t bog down the page load speed of your site
Include lots of links internally between pages
Clean up any broken links or pages that are missing by creating a 301 redirect to more applicable pages on your site
Include your keywords all over your site: your page and post content, page titles, domain name, and image descriptions, everywhere
When it comes to choosing what keywords to optimize your site with, people tend to overcomplicate this. Keywords are simply the words you use to describe your service (bohemian, budget-friendly, Seattle-based, made-from-scratch, eco-conscious, etc).
In fact, the best way to get your website chock-full of high-quality, keyword-rich content is to simply write about your business the way you talk about it to potential customers. Pretend you are sitting down with a friend to have a conversation about your business. What sort of phrases would naturally come out of your mouth? Those are the kinds of things your target audience is thinking, and that’s the type of language they’ll likely use when they perform a Google search.
The best keywords you can use are those that describe what you do (commercial films, watercolor family portraits, custom meal plans, etc.), where you do it (if you’re limited to a geographic location or want to target somewhere specific, like within your shipping area or another location if you want to travel), and what sets you apart (you’re detail-oriented, each client gets a custom service, your materials are eco-friendly, etc).
Again, simply writing about your services and sessions using the words you’d use to describe them to a friend will give Google a good understanding of how that content should be ranked.
GOOGLE-PROVIDED TOOLS
Google Search Console is a great tool to help you get a gauge of how your site looks from Google’s end. It will tell you if Google is encountering any visibility issues with your site or if you’ve got broken links that you can attend to. Google Search Console is a free tool and would be my next recommendation for you as you research and learn more about SEO.
You can also spend time setting up and claiming a Google My Business listing for your creative business. Google gives priority in rankings to businesses that have these listings established and claimed, and it’s a place for your customers to leave a review, which in turn gains favor with the Google search crawler bot.
That being said, as a creative mama, you are likely operating on minimal time, and it’s important to stay efficient so your business can be as profitable as possible with however much time you’re able to devote to all the different areas. Besides, keeping track of all these various ranking factors and strategies involved with search engine optimization can get pretty overwhelming. It definitely has value, and I’d recommend you spend more time researching and staying on top of SEO changes because it is critical to online marketing.
However, I’ve got a better “catch-all” solution to start implementing a solid SEO foundation on your website now, as you’re operating on minimal time and without a marketing team. The best way to keep your website search engine optimized is by blogging regularly, on a schedule that fits your capabilities, and sharing high-quality content.
BLOGGING IS THE ULTIMATE TOOL FOR SEO
Consistently updating your website with fresh content that attracts your target audience is the most efficient way to spread the word about your business without wearing yourself thin, which is crucial for creatives who hold many roles and responsibilities in their business, not to mention all the responsibilities of being a stay-at-home mom.
Simply by keeping to a schedule and publishing high-quality content with lots of your target keywords for Google to crawl, you’ll give yourself a much-improved chance of ranking in searches performed by your target customers.
We’ll talk more about blogging in just a bit, but I bring it up now because it can be the primary channel for implementing the SEO tactics we’ve just discussed, especially the keywords you can optimize your site for to start ranking in search engine results.
ONLINE MARKETING
Now that your website is up and running, let’s really dive deeper into online marketing and how you can develop specific, impactful strategies that will help you bring in an exponential audience.
If your website were a party, then online marketing represents the act of handing out invites.
Which of the following seems like the more purposeful invitation strategy to get the people you designed this party for at the party location:
Tossing invites at random to people you see on the street, or
Posting about your party in highly-trafficked areas around town that you know are frequented by the type of people your party is geared to?
It’s not hard to see which invitation strategy would produce a greater turnout. It requires significantly fewer resources and less time to follow a more focused, targeted strategy to spread the word about your party. So why would you bother wasting your time by marketing without intention?
Online marketing is the best way to market to a large audience all at once and utilize somewhat passive techniques so your content is continually bringing in new party guests without you having to stand at the door to greet them. Employing online marketing strategies will ensure that you’re spending your marketing time and efforts as efficiently and purposefully as possible.
Online marketing is defined as the overall strategy to grow your audience online, but there are several specific strategies you can utilize to work together, which makes all your business efforts that much more purposeful.
Just like there is no point in advertising something that isn’t well-established and ready for your target audience, there is no point in creating a business if you’re not going to advertise your offerings to try to earn more money.
Why would you go to all the work of getting organized and legitimate if you weren’t also willing to put in the effort to spread the word?
TYPES OF ONLINE MARKETING
Besides search engine optimization, I want to use this chance to go more in-depth into the strategies I use in conjunction with SEO on my website to further expand my reach, namely blogging, Pinterest marketing, and email marketing.
In my opinion, creatives are uniquely suited to produce the best kinds of blog posts. People get how it works: I book or purchase from you, and in return, you deliver a service or a product. It’s a well-established procedure.
And, as a creative, your work is often highly-visual and speaks for itself — it’s easy to see the value or benefit of your service and share it with the masses when you have something physical to show, like a photography style, a portfolio of custom pieces, or beautiful packaging (another reason to invest some time, effort, and finances into establishing a high-quality brand).
Blogging is a great way to regularly share this highly visual content. And by adding Pinterest into the mix, you can rapidly distribute links to your blog post content online to all those people who are looking for exactly what you offer.
THE ULTIMATE ONLINE MARKETING COMBINATION FOR CREATIVES
Whether you’re just starting out or a seasoned entrepreneur, I highly recommend you plan a blogging strategy that combines with Pinterest marketing to form your overall combination online marketing strategy. Once you’ve had a few months of high-quality content blogged under your belt, with plenty of images optimized with alt tags, it takes hardly any additional time to throw all those images into a pinning queue and start getting more exposure for your time spent marketing your business online. That’s like getting quadruple the bang for your buck!
Included with your purchase of this course is The Ultimate Marketing Combination for Creatives bundle of mini-courses, Blogging for Creatives and Pinterest for Creatives. Download your free copy by clicking here and using code CMAFREE at check-out.
After you’ve reviewed and started implementing a strong online marketing strategy using blogging and Pinterest, it’s time to learn about how you can compound those efforts by connecting with your audience in their inbox.
EMAIL MARKETING FOR CREATIVES
Time for the harsh reality: You don’t own your Instagram followers. Those guys can leave you in a second, and you’re at the mercy of Instagram’s algorithm, which you must trust won’t block your content or rank it lower in an effort to cater to any specific follower.
However, most inboxes won’t filter your content.
Use email marketing as your direct line to your audience to guarantee you get eyes on your marketing content.
Sending out regular marketing emails is a way to create an additional funnel with which to draw attention to the things you want to feature, like your latest products or blog posts.
I use Flodesk to send out regular tips and resources to my email list. My list grows steadily thanks to embedded sign-up forms on my website (in my blog posts, with my freebie downloads, at the bottom of each page, etc). All traffic to my site comes into contact with a newsletter sign-up form. It’s easy to convince new subscribers to join my email list after I’ve captured their attention with a lead magnet (like that freebie or blog post).
After you’ve amassed a few followers, you can start sending messages tailored to them, straight to their inboxes.
Remember our analogy at the beginning of throwing a party? If blogging and using Pinterest to spread the word about your business are like posting flyers for your party in highly-trafficked areas, using email marketing to connect with your audience is like getting their addresses and physically mailing them your party invite.
In many ways, it’s a more convenient and engaging way to address your audience. That being said, I definitely prioritize it after blogging and Pinterest when you take a look at the time required to develop a solid email list. It can still have a big impact, though, so don’t skip it!
Speaking of lower-priority marketing efforts, it’s time to chat about social media marketing — the marketing strategy you’ve likely been prioritizing above all the others.
SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
Social media marketing is left for last in this module for a reason. Before you continue on, I want you to pull a Winnie the Pooh and *think*think*think* long and hard about how you use social media and where it comes into play.
The most important things you need to keep in mind as you’re putting your marketing game plan into action are the following:
Which strategies are taking up the most of your precious time?
Which strategies are resulting in the greatest increase in reach and sales?
In my opinion, the best marketing strategy is one where the answer to both of those questions is the same.
This course won’t discuss social media growth, but rather explain how social media platforms can operate as part of a greater, overarching marketing strategy. Since most creatives flock to Instagram, that’s the platform I’m most often referencing. It’s also the platform I’m most present on, but it’s still not my greatest source of incoming traffic or inquiries.
Keep these thoughts in the back of your mind as you start planning your marketing strategies to ensure you are making the most of your time and efforts while balancing your business responsibilities with your personal ones.
Most side hustlers jump to Instagram as their first stop when they create a small business, and I was no different. Instagram got all of my attention and efforts, until I realized that I was spending a disproportionate amount of time on the platform that brought in the least amount of website traffic.
Despite all my efforts, the growth I was chasing on Instagram was never going to happen until I was more established.
Ultimately, social media is a great tool for connecting and engaging with your audience to drive them to take action on your website or in person, but not for fast growth at the beginning of your creative business journey.
In my opinion, Instagram is a phenomenal resource for gaining a better understanding of your audience. You can literally scroll through their lives and see what they’re interested in and who else they follow, and start a connection with them that brings your offerings to their attention.
But it can’t match the value provided by more purposeful marketing strategies because it’s designed to foster relationships, not make a sale. It has value, but not as much when you’re just starting out. Instead, you’ll be better served using your time to really understand who you’re marketing to, rather than focusing on followers.
I use Instagram as my example to represent all social media platforms throughout this portion, but most other social media sites operate the same way. They thrive on engagement and use an algorithm with specific ranking factors to display content, which is just not convenient when you’re still a small business with not a lot of things to post.
When you’re reading this module, remember that these tips and strategies don’t only apply to just Instagram — you can find tons of social media platforms on which to share your content, and you’ll be able to apply these same strategies in virtually the same way on each of them.
Included with your purchase of this course is my Intentional Instagram mini course. Download your free copy by clicking here and using code CMAFREE at check-out. Review this mini-course to learn more about marketing on Instagram specifically.
I believe the best way to spend your Instagram-devoted (or social media-devoted) time is to engage with your audience rather than plan your content to post. If you find yourself spending more time planning content than engaging with other users, then it’s time to rebalance your priorities.
As a general rule, spend the most time marketing wherever you’re making your money, as well as wherever your ideal clients are hanging out. If you’re bringing in more people from Pinterest and blog posts than Instagram, then scale back the time spent there to focus on the money-making sources.
Social media is a great tool, but it’s not the only tool. It should be treated as a channel to funnel people to your business and a way to engage with and further understand your audience, not as your only source of new clients.
If you’re finding that things don’t feel as purposeful or that you’re not making as much money as you feel you should, consider how you are spending your time, and if most of it is spent “marketing” on Instagram or other social media platforms, come up with more purposeful opportunities through online marketing, networking, and other revenue-generating opportunities on different platforms.
As you gain more exposure for your products and work out more efficient ways to run your business, your time and your budget will open up so that you can start implementing a positive trajectory of continued growth. Let’s move on to see just where these efforts can take you!
quick links to resources:
The Ultimate Online Marketing Combo for Creatives
(Download for free using code CMAFREE at checkout)
Intentional Instagram
(Download for free using code CMAFREE at checkout)