Should You be Marketing Your Business Right Now?
Small business owners everywhere are worried about a lot of things—and rightly so. Because in a time where there is no experience to draw on or exact answers to find, it can feel like your world is spinning out of control and the only thing you can do is watch it all happen. And, while a lot of us are struggling to see past the anxieties of right now (postponements, cancellations, requests for refunds, and the tremendous impact that all has on life), questions about the future loom just past our field of view and, in some cases, are the thing that keeps us up at night.
Crunching numbers from outstanding invoices to see what our future cash flow might be
Looking at lost income and wondering how you’re going to recover it
Wondering what in the actual fuck you can do right now to make sure your business survives this
Guys—I’m right there with you. And, while I don’t have any information that is different from what you have, my mind has been racing with ideas about how we can create some calm out of this chaos as well as ways that we can make our businesses as resilient as possible. So today, I wanted to (frankly) share my thoughts about one specific question that you might have asked yourself in the past few weeks, “Should I be marketing my business right now?” Please read on and feel free to totally disagree with me or implement any of these tactics (even if it’s simply because you need a positive distraction).
Should You Be Marketing Your Business Right Now?
In my opinion—yes. And here’s why:
Almost every wedding pro I have spoken with is telling me that inquiries are non-existent at the moment. And, while your inbox is likely to stay quiet for the next undetermined amount of time, once people start to feel safe again, the spigot will open. Marketing is the entry point to your sales funnel and if you do nothing to keep your business somewhat top of mind, I honestly feel like it might be harder for you to hit the ground running again
How much time are you spending on the internet right now? My guess is a lot more than usual because you have a lot more time on your hands. What do you think your future potential clients are doing right now? I’m pretty sure the same things you are
Now, I completely understand that marketing your business might feel (for lack of a better word) “icky.” So, if you feel strongly against it, don’t. All I am asking you to do is consider the ideas I am about to share and implement what feels comfortable to you.
How You Can Market Your Business Right Now
The first step is to change your narrative
People are in a completely different emotional state right now, so you cannot speak to them like you are used to
Consider softening your tone so that you and your business are seen as calm and confident; acting as if “everything is normal” can come off as insensitive
Redefine your goals; you can continue to market your business with the express goal of bringing comfort to your audience, which is also an opportunity to show your leadership skills and expertise
Work on your SEO
In a time where you might not have a lot of control over things, you still have complete control over how optimized your digital brand assets are. So, the first thing you should do is finally figure out what keywords are best to target for your business
Then, do an audit of your website. Can you work keywords into your copy? Can you update headlines with them? Can you change some URLs?
Based on some of the keywords you’d like to target, come up with a plan to incorporate them into your blog and Pinterest strategies
Focus on more passive marketing channels
What is a passive marketing channel? It’s anything that doesn’t require you feeling like you have to be overly concerned about your messaging; your blog, Pinterest, and submissions are perfect examples
Use this time to build a backlog of blog posts that you can drip out on your website over the coming months (with a goal of publishing an optimized article twice per month); so if you write 2 articles per week for the next 4-6 weeks, you are pretty golden for the rest of the year
Plan on hitting Pinterest pretty hard right now. Think about it, just because couples are having to postpone things, doesn’t mean they any less excited to get married. Start by going through your portfolio and downloading the best detail shots from your best weddings and then get them uploaded onto your boards
Prepare and submit all of your best weddings from last year for publication. Focus on submitting the galleries that would be seasonal for fall and winter features but if you have an amazing summer wedding, there is still time to submit that as well
You can also update your listings with all of your best work from the past year! If you are paying for advertising on any platform (or even if your listing is free), update it to make sure it is perfect
If you have any questions about this stuff—let’s chat! I am here to support you any way that I can. Don’t let this (albeit big) speed bump crush your spirits. Come up with a plan and know that even if things don’t go according to plan, they’ll go as best as they can.
