5 Quick-marketing tips for successful creative businesses
5 tips to help you create marketing content for your business quickly.
I listened to a fantastic podcast recently - I highly recommend listening in to it - it was with an artist called Diane Hill who paints on silk, she has a very successful Instagram following and a successful e-commerce store selling prints, she revealed that she spends about 70% of her business time on marketing. This may come as a bit of a shock, but it goes to show you how much you must put in if you are going to make actual sales and have an engaged army of subscribers and followers. Realistically I know many of you can’t commit to 70% but with these few tips, I can hope to bring it to about 6 hours a week or 25 hours a month that’s out of 120 hours in a month if you work 6 hours a day 5 days a week that’s around 20% of your working hours spent on marketing your business. I would recommend that you learn to enjoy this process as the secret is- it will show in your content that you are happy and enjoying yourself in your work!
Here’s how my easy marketing method is broken down
One
Plan a strategy for the next 3 months ahead. This sounds like a massive time-consuming affair but it’s not, all you need is 2 hours, a stack of post-it notes, and a mug of tea (biscuits optional) to write 12 ideas for blogs one per sticky note. Think about what your followers, clients, and subscribers want to know and drive them towards your products or services each time. If you are a jewellery designer you might write about different stone settings, how to tell a story in silver, 10 beautiful engagement rings, buying jewellery for gifts, earring styles, or a ring sizing guide…. A printmaker might write about: different Lino options, favourite inks, the story of a print from a sketchbook to the frame, life drawings or keeping your drawing brain active, sketchbook updates...
if you are short of ideas try researching keywords and find out what’s popular with trends - https://answerthepublic.com/ is a good place to find inspiration. Remember less is more, so short blogs on tiny subjects are easier and don’t forget you know more than you realise!
Two
Batch create content once a month once you have 12 blog ideas choose to write 4 each month, it will take a bit longer maybe 4 hours ( I do mine on a Sunday morning) write 4 blogs at once if you can. See my free download for writing blogs Checklist. You won’t need to do all of them at this stage, but I would recommend researching key phrases for each title. For instance “Quick marketing tips for successful creative businesses’ was a title created for engagement, but it’s got to be what it says it is or you will get a high bounce rate when people leave due to disappointment! These 4 blogs will see you through the whole month for supporting content on social media.
Three
Use predesigned social media post templates on CanvaPro to create branded graphics introducing your blog. If you are not confident in your design skills there are lots of templates to choose from on Canva to speed things up. Don’t forget to use your logo and brand colours to keep the branded feel going. I like to spend around 2 hours per blog on supporting content for social media.
Four
Share content across platforms after publishing the blog -one blog can be shared to Facebook, Linked In, Twitter and Google as you hit publish, this can be done each time you post so you don’t need to go to each platform, and upload a link or write an intro, also share/push posts to Facebook when you post on Instagram or use a scheduler like the free one on Facebook’s Meta business suite. I have recently started using Flick to plan social media posts, they have an excellent hashtag strategy tool. Scheduling your posts on social does save you time. You do need to remember to pause scheduling if there’s a ‘moment’ event to avoid being inadvertently insensitive. Time to schedule posts with content downloaded from Canva - 1 hour
Five
Create a quick monthly newsletter with interesting and relevant links for your subscribers, also include links to your blogs for that month for further reading. this can be sent out to all your subscribers using the marketing platform on Squarespace.
1 hour
self marketing strategies, marketing tips
Top Tip
For Instagram algorithm-friendly marketing activities, Document your work daily with very short video clips for making 3-second reels. Seriously - the shorter the better. (The algorithm pushes a post that gets viewed until the end) Spend half an hour in the evening playing with your footage from the day and post when your traffic is the highest. Choose trending audio, sometimes instrumental is better for short reels. I’ll refer you back to the blog featuring Diane here!
I hope you find this insightful, I can support you in your social media marketing, see here for my packages. My hourly rate for social media support is £40. I have a couple of clients that I help regularly in this way and I have space and time for only the right client. This partnership is a joint effort, I work with you on your content, making sure you are completely happy with the work, and it will always be your work, supported by me. This is important to me that I point this out, as I would never feel happy with someone else creating my content, I help with the technical side and work to your brand’s style guidelines, you have the final say on everything!
Contact me today if you would like to see if we could work together on your social media marketing, or sign up for my newsletter for more tips on digital marketing for creatives.
Read more…
How writing Blogs and Newsletters is better for your business than just posting on Instagram. Here’s an explanation of my favourite marketing method to help you understand why I keep banging on about blogging! Instagram is volatile. Your account can be hacked, you can be randomly shadow-banned, you are a slave to their algorithm, and there’s no guarantee that your followers are seeing your content.