Creative Brainstorm – How to market your business in tough times.

Creative Business Marketing 

How to connect to your audience and stand out from the crowd!

Knowing the right way to market your business at any time is tough – add-in a completely new scenario, with companies and individuals isolated and disconnected from a lot of their usual networks, and you have to think about things a little differently.

So to try and get a few ideas flowing, I brought together a group of creatives to share their thoughts in a Facebook live chat, which you can see below: 

Creativity in Marketing – Stand Out and Be Heard!

What can you do to work ON your business rather than IN your business?

I’ve discussed marketing with Lucy before on The Personal Connection Podcast, and wrote about how to Market Your Business With Personal Branding in an earlier post. 

Owning your personal brand, and putting this out there, allows your audience to make a connection with you; it enables you to stand out and make a noise! And also, if done right, you can have a lot of fun doing it!

And after all, when people know, like and trust you, that is when you do business!

To do this with personal branding, as Lucy says it is all about understanding what type of quiche you are!

Let me run that by you again – what type of quiche you are. 

No, it’s nothing to do with pastry, but instead, it’s about understanding what makes YOU different and makes what you offer UNIQUE. 

Just offering what you do, is not enough – you need to be unique, have a point of difference, and make your clients want to come to you. 

Lucy covers this with herself perfectly – she’s a copywriter, but she doesn’t market herself as this. She markets by saying, “I create mischievous marketing and copy to personal brands”. 

You only have to take one look at Lucy’s website, social media or indeed LinkedIn profile to see she wants to stand out and indeed stand up for what she believes in. You know what you’re going to get with Lucy, and that’s great. 

Marketing is as much about discouraging people as it is encouraging – you are in a much stronger position if you speak directly to a select audience, rather than trying to please everyone!

Lucy’s tip at this time is simple – use this quieter time to look at WHO it is you truly want to serve. Whether it’s looking at past clients that you truly connected with, or building your perfect client avatars, construct your audience and market directly to them. 

Work on your website – from a technical and marketing POV.

Chris from Eagle Design understands the power of a great website – from the design aspect to customer experience and usability. But he says it’s also essential to look at the technical performance of your website. 

The technical aspect of your website involves many points – Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), keywords, alt-tags, loading performance, caching etc. – the list is pretty endless, and that’s why you need the professionals!

Chris came up with a brilliant point in our chat, at that was to look at things in a little more depth now while you have the chance. 

Investigating strategies for marketing with Google Trends can undoubtedly be a great way to start, and can give you topics for content creation – whether that’s right away, or in a few weeks when you can get out and showcase what you do!

I loved Chris’ simple tip for creatives too: use this time to work on your own online presence! As creatives, we can often neglect our own websites, putting our focus on delivering client work, but now could be a brilliant time to get our store-front looking (and performing) perfect!

Animation and video editing – something that you can do right now to showcase your business

As a videographer, James from JCFXMedia – much like myself – is not able to head out on location and capture imagery for clients, but something possible is the video editing and especially animation. 

Animation can be a great way of introducing what you do and stands out online! Short animated videos can be brilliant on social media too and are far more attention-grabbing than simple posts.

James is working with a few companies who are exploring this idea, and over Zoom-calls are planning for animated videos to being produced over the next few weeks.

Another great way James and JCFXMedia can help is bringing together your existing photographs and video, with animation and voiceovers to bring together a new business video, pitched perfectly for the current climate! 

You can then always add to this production in the coming weeks when James can be back out on-site capturing ground and aerial imagery.

Embracing the move to an online world

Jason from Hickman Hughes has seen the whole shift to an online market place as a positive – and something his clients were already in a position to embrace. 

Most of us use applications on our mobile devices daily – but have you thought about the possibility of a custom app for your business?

Whatever your business type, providing an instant solution controlled by yourself, could be a game-changer. Think of a restaurant able to provide their food-ordering and delivery service without paying the third-party ‘branded’ choice. See the opportunity to availability, be it for product or appointments, and reward your customers all in your app. 

Of course, another great opportunity with applications is push-notifications. In essence, the open rate for notification on a customers device compared with an email, or social media post is quite astounding. 

Of course, this has great potential right now for businesses. Still, it’s also a way to improve the market position of a company moving forward – being in a stronger position has always got to be positive. 

If you want to explore what a bespoke application could offer your business, get in touch with Jason and the Hickman Hughes team today. 

360 Degree Tours allow your customers to visit you from the comfort of their home!

Jason from Hickman Hughes understands the power of immersive imagery – and what can be more immersive than a 360 video that your customers interact with!

Google has long loved Street View to add that further dimension to their maps. With Google Street View Trusted Partners like Hickman Hughes, you can keep that immersive experience from Google Maps straight into the door of your business – this is something very exciting indeed!

Do something different – you have the time, so why not build your community.

Lucy, entirely as expected, saw an opportunity to build conversation and connect to her audience. 

As an organic promotion to start a conversation on her page, Lucy offered to create limericks for people – it got shared by everyone involved – yours-truly included – and brought a little brevity. 

What could you do to start a conversation?

Take a leaf out of Lucy’s book – be creative, get people talking. 

If you have something to offer like creating limericks, go for it – if not, share a post to get people leaving an answer, ‘How many movies can you spot in this picture?’ – essentially, anything that can get people interacting!

Take time to take stock – get your website in order.

Chris’ big thing to focus on is making sure everything is in order. 

Not just from a technical standpoint, but also user experience. 

If you’ve designed your website yourself, you will know how you intended it navigate, for instance, but are your visitors following the same pattern?

There are tools available that will monitor your website and how people navigate. One I’ve used in the past is SmarkLook, but even if you ask your friends and family to browse the site for you and record their screens, the data you receive can be invaluable – just make sure to deploy changes that are needed! 

Get on a call – discuss your options, and see what you could do!

While not able to work in your business, it is time you can work on your business. 

Whether it’s booking a creative spark sesh with Lucy to unlock your brand or give you direction on your rebrand, talking to Chris about the services he can offer for your design and website or Jason about getting your business in the most influential position possible with a mobile app to sell your business, or taking the opportunity to talk to James about animation to get your message out there right now – take the opportunity!

And if you get in touch with them, let them know who sent you!

Stay safe, stay healthy, and get excited for the opportunities on the other side of this situation!