Looking to Market Your Business? Start Here
Guest Blogger: Anna Powell

Founder, Evergreen Agency / Partner Consultant, Spool Marketing

If you’re a small business and marketing isn’t your forte, it’s easy for it to get lost by the wayside. I get it, marketing is time consuming, often involves busy work and requires effort to be successful. If you’re looking to scale your business and can afford to partner with a PR or marketing firm, I think you’ll find it’s well worth the investment. But, if you’re one of those scrappy individuals that wears a lot of hats and decides to take marketing on, here are a few feathers to plop in your cap.

1. Strategize with the end in mind
   When game-planning marketing strategy, first start with your end goal. What do you want to accomplish? Who do you want to reach? How many new customers, users, clients, etc. are you hoping to gain? Where do those individuals spend their time? What are the profiles of those consumers? Start with the big picture and then work backwards. Ask yourself, how are you going to get there? Is it a local partnership you need to forge, an event you need to sponsor, a group of people you need to get in front of? When you have your ultimate goal in mind, you can reference it when determining which marketing opportunities will be the most valuable. Always go back and make sure each initiative is aligned with your end goal.
2. Stay organized to stay on point
   I can’t express enough the importance of creating and sticking to a weekly timeline to ensure you nail key dates and deliverables. I find it helpful to start with end dates and then work backwards, breaking things down week by week. Then, each week you can narrow your focus to knocking out your immediate next steps, knowing you have all your bases covered in due time. Marketing initiatives can often have loads of busywork and intricacies. It’s easy to either get stressed out by the big picture or forget to do the minutia. A detailed weekly timeline is a lifesaver.
3. Connect with your targets
   Understanding your target demographic will help you hone your marketing tactics. For example, if you’re looking to connect with young families, sponsoring a softball team or league can help you network with your people and get business visibility. One of the most creative and on-point marketing tactics I observed took place at a local park at a weekend family-friendly Halloween event in Chicago. There was this music class that pretty much anyone and everyone with a toddler attended at some point in time, called Mr. Dave’s Music. Outside of his regular classes, he often played at events and boy, did they drive crowds of tiny tots. At the Halloween festival, Mr. Dave was playing a show right before the costume parade kicked off. Of course, we went. As did every other family – there were HUNDREDS of young families with children taking in his tunes. The kicker? His performance was sponsored by a local real estate agent. Genius – he even sang a diddy about the guy. Thank goodness someone in residential real estate finally looked beyond sending postcards to random people in the mail and creatively marketed to their target demographic!
4. Stand out from the masses
   On that note, distinguish yourself. Do something to make yourself or your business memorable. Marketing is all about establishing a connection with people. Paying attention to what other businesses are doing, regardless of their industry, can spark creativity for you to mix things up. Don’t be afraid to take (calculated!) risks and push the envelope, while staying true to your brand.
5. Own what you do
   The way you communicate your business matters. If marketing or developing communications is foreign to you, make it a goal to outsource it. Find someone to partner with who can come alongside you and complement what you’re good at. No one is an expert at everything – focus on your lane and align with strategic partners.

About Anna Powell
For more than a decade, Anna Powell has built an accomplished career in public relations and communications, leveraging her creative thinking, keen intuition and unparalleled drive to connect with people and get her clients in the limelight. A specialist in lifestyle, culinary and hospitality PR, Anna is an expert at launching new concepts, planning and executing events, generating organic word of mouth buzz and elevating brands through traditional and non-traditional media relations.

With a mastery of language and pitch-perfect grasp of people, Anna knows just how to reach and win over demographics through her strong relationships with media and influencers. She thrives off of telling stories that resonate.

Anna was named PR News 15 to Watch in 2012 and PR News Publicist of the Year in 2015.