I want to share some thoughts about a question I recently received from a store owner regarding establishing an online marketing presence.
Specifically, the question was about the transition from a brick-and-mortar store to an online business. This person asked me: “What do I do if I don’t have enough money to market myself online?” The honest truth is in business, whether it’s online or in person, if you’re going to market yourself (and your services and your products) to the outside world, you’re going to have to do one of two things (or some combination of these two, depending upon your strategy). You are going to have to spend money or you are going to have to spend time.
When it comes to spending money, this is often on advertising or for specialized help such as an agency or people to do publishing for you. A great method that we use in our agency for sewing machine retailers is lead generation ads on Facebook.
This can also be in the form of your employees or your team as well -- anyone you are paying to publish, or advertise, or whatever means you are using to create awareness and put your offers and brand before potential customers. One strategy I used to use in sewing machine retail was making it part of our sewing teacher’s job to regularly post live feeds and cool content on our Facebook page.
If you don’t have the money to hire an agency, you
SO TWO THINGS: TIME OR MONEY. MARKETING IS GOING TO COST YOU ONE OR THE OTHER.
need to spend your own time publishing on the internet, building your website and social pages, shooting videos, and engaging your community. If you are doing a combination of strategies, then you are having to juggle doing a lot of your own publishing and spending money on marketing.
So two things: time or money. Marketing is going to cost you one or the other.
Circling back to the question, if you don’t have the money, you need to start funneling your time into doing your own online marketing. You will need to figure out what works by doing a lot of it. That’s how you test. You publish a bunch of content and see how it works and what you’re comfortable with. (Check out the videos on my blog for tips that I’ve learned from lots of experience in organic social media marketing.)
But honestly, even if you’re uncomfortable with something and it’s working, why would you stop? I would just keep going. If it’s working and you’re able to close deals and sell product and services, keep at it until you can figure out how to get somebody else to do it or you find a way to automate it.
You have to figure out what works for the market and what the market wants. Once you get the hang of it, hopefully you’ll start to see the revenue that will allow you to hand off your marketing to someone else or start running ads to scale up your business.
I run a company where we handle digital marketing for businesses in the sew and vac retail space. If you would like to explore handing off some of your online marketing, let’s talk!
We’ll start with a free consultation where I’ll help you think through your present strategy and how my team can help. Even if you just want to talk marketing, a strategy session always helps, and it is free!
Use the following link to book a time with me:
accelerationenterprises.as.me/sell-sewingmachines