Tie everything together in a personal marketing strategy

We’re going to talk today about personal marketing strategies. The first thing that I want to point out to everyone is, listen to ALL the past episodes of season 2. A lot of what we’re going to say is going to make a lot more sense if you do. This episode is about tying back to things and then showing you how it all comes together. 

The first thing that you need to remember when you’re trying to think about personal marketing strategies is your goals. Because what your goals are, is going to determine what the strategy needs to be. It’s important to know who your target audience is and where they find you.

Marketing strategy in general is very similar to what we do as designers. It’s just a problem to solve. There’s really two or three basic things when you’re designing, you need to have a problem to solve, you need to have a goal, and you need to have a target audience. Obviously there’s a lot of little intricacies in each of those things, but if you know those three things, you can come up with a strategy. Knowing your strengths is also important, especially when you decide on which platform to utilize. 

How to promote yourself on instagram?

My journey of using social media, specifically Instagram, has changed significantly when I knew more about who my target market was, and what the story I was trying to tell them was. I realized that I’m here to help them, and not talk about myself. My captions went from ’it was a pretty wedding’ to giving real value to my followers. Suddenly, my captions are like paragraphs, instead of a couple of sentences.

Right now with the Instagram algorithms, people sharing and saving your post is going to get you the most engagement. So with that in mind, if you just say, this is a beautiful wedding, or you just say like this client was fun to work with or whatever, that puts all of the pressure on what the actual photo is to be content that is worth saving or sending. When you have really great captions, then if that’s helpful information, people are going to want to save that for later. 

If you find that your strategy requires you to be on Instagram, based on your goals and based on where your audience exists, then you may have to practice writing a little bit, because there really is a formula. There’s formulas on how you write a caption, because in order to get people into the meat of your content, you’ve got to have a hook to draw attention to it. Basically, you need an eye catching headline, then you have the body and then you ask a question at the end to get them to want to interact with you. 

The other thing about Instagram is learning how to use your hashtags. We talked a lot about hashtags in the SEO episode, which is really helpful. And also make sure that your caption does tie into the photo somehow. I cannot tell you how annoyed I am by the influencers that show a picture of them having coffee on their bed and the caption has zero to do with that. It needs to tie in, because then you not only get the left brain activity of reading and understanding your content, but it also connects with the right brain because it’s creative, it’s pretty, it’s visually appealing. And then when those come together, it actually creates that little spark of understanding between your client and what you’re saying. The ultimate goal is for them to understand what you’re trying to say and to want more of it.

Try new things

Take heart that your first try is also going to take time. I tried doing reels, just to see how the platform worked. All I did was make coffee, but I know that that was a test just to see how the platform worked. Just trying new things, and seeing how how you work with it is really, really key. 

Something else that I think is a really big strategy that I think people need to harness is other platforms like Medium, to share your knowledge. And I know that not all of you are content creators the way I am, but something that everyone needs to understand is that if you start writing about what you do, even in short bits, or talking about it on a podcast, or talking about it on a video like YouTube, there are people out there that are just a few steps behind where you are or they need what you have. They don’t know who does it well, because nobody is talking about it. But you can talk about it, that can be a strategy. 

Share your secrets

‘Oh, this is a pretty photo of my work’, that doesn’t show your expertise. It shows the final project, but it doesn’t show that you took a lot of care and strategy in getting to that point. When people can see you are putting that strategy and expertise into getting to the final product, then they’re more likely to value your work and be more likely to actually want to hire you. So your captions or behind the scenes videos are super powerful. People love to watch the behind the scenes videos, especially if it’s an industry that they don’t know anything about. That shows your expertise again, it’s just putting you as the expert. There is really something unrelatable about just seeing the finished product. I think that’s why people are really leaning into the TikTok stuff, because it doesn’t feel polished,

When you can share your secrets, people will trust you more. Trust adds to more business. Trust also counteracts your own fears. When people trust you more, you start to trust yourself more, and your confidence grows. And then you put yourself out there more, and then people trust you more. And it becomes this cycle of growing and changing and being more willing to be more vulnerable, because that’s what people relate to.

Money is also part of marketing

Strategies for marketing also need to incorporate money and figuring out what you want to charge. Figuring out should I spend money on ads? Well, I don’t know. Because it depends on what you’re trying to get.

If I’m charging for my course, I’m going to need a strategy for how much I need in order to cover my fees, in order to cover the taxes, in order to actually come out on top for the time that I’ve spent putting into this. Because also time is money. So how much time are you putting into a thing? Is it worth it? So thinking about how much money you want to make and how much money you think you can spend is another really important strategy. And I think people don’t talk about the money side enough. All of those things should be part of your strategy and thinking about what your goals are and how much money you want to make.

Stay tuned