entrepreneur

Nov

2017

Marketing: For the Discouraged Social Entrepreneur

You’ve come up with countless ideas, created brilliant products, useful services, and are eager to elevate your company and community to levels far beyond what you’ve ever seen.

The thing is, you’re not alone.

So many business owners like yourself have wanted to do the same, but lack the knowledge, the time, and the strategy.

At A.R. Marketing House, we have noticed a consistent pattern amongst the socially conscious clients we have worked with as well as businesses we have come across. That is, when it comes to developing and implementing a marketing strategy, many business owners struggle because they either 1) lack a strategy with objectives and subjective goals 2) don’t have a strategy that aligns with their personality +brand 3) don’t have a strategy that aligns with their long-term marketing budget 4) do not stick to their plan long enough to see expected results.

But we see your success, we support your amazing ideas, and we want to help you launch your potential to new heights and bring your dreams into reality. So, we’ve come up with this little cheat sheet for you to wash away your discouragement and get back on the marketing horse. Here are 6 ways to amplify your business and bring to life those brilliant ideas toward making a positive impact while achieving great long-term success.

Imagine the Greatest End-Goal First, THEN reverse engineer it

One trait we see often is leaders seeing an end result without really taking the time to understand the methods of getting there. It is so important to set goals, work on a strategy, come up with clear objectives, and understand what tactics you need to take to ensure you are reaching these milestones. You need a plan, a CLEAR plan with measurable results. But sometimes this is easier done in REVERSE. Yes, seeing the end result and working your way back from that vision has proven to be the method that some of the most successful entrepreneurs and change makers actively use.

What do you need to get there? Visualize the end, then close your eyes and walk backward from that goal to narrow down the steps it took to get you there. You might find that you need to do some additional research. Have others achieved similar results to those you hope to achieve? How can you be different? Greater? More creative? Help others? More than just wanting to get to that point of success, you need to plan for it strategically and cleverly. Understand the possible repercussions of steps that can go awry and mitigate your risks by having options within your plan, like a roadmap with alternative routes.

Strategize and Re-strategize

Often times, it is easy to get discouraged when you don’t see immediate results. The important thing to understand is immediate success rarely means long-term success. Sure, maybe some businesses start off with a bang, but this is not the norm, especially if you are in a field that is either not widely understood or is shrouded with miseducation. Sometimes your brilliant ideas will have to be introduced and reintroduced many times over before even the brainiest of people begin to grasp what you are truly trying to do. Whether you are introducing a politically controversial product or educating on a spiritually profound message, you will not only need to give yourself some time to find your voice within your message, you will also have to give your audience some time to become educated, by you, of course. However, after about a year of solidly sticking to your plan, assess what worked best and look to see what new methods are currently out, then…re-strategize! Trust your analytics and your instincts, then move forward with the knowledge you have gained. In what ways did your strategy lack? Did your audience grow? Were you able to convert leads into sales? You already have a plan in place, just look for gaps and focus on what can be done to improve going forward. It won’t happen overnight. If you don’t believe us, check out how long these “overnight successes” ACTUALLY took. *Hint: It definitely wasn’t overnight. Of course these are larger companies but the reasoning and logic also applies to small and midsize businesses.

Timing is Everything

Marketing is more than just posting on social media here and there. You need to be strategic. Create a calendar. Know when you should be posting your original content, how frequently, and know why this all relates back to your overall marketing goal. More than just posting on social media, you need to create conversation on more than just one platform. Start a blog, newsletter, social media strategy, and more than that, focus on collaborations with influencers.

Digital technology allows numerous avenues to educate based on your business or practice. But it’s key to narrow down the focus on how each platform leverages your strategy best. When do you want to reach your goal? Is this plan going to do anything for you in the short-term? If not, is it worth what it will do for your goals in the long-term? Now, I know this sounds like a lot of work, but creating a marketing calendar will greatly help you along the way. Creating a calendar will allow you to improve your time management and ensure you are relaying a consistent message across various platforms to the right people.

Remember WHY you started and tell people

When you first decided you wanted to start this business, you knew what you wanted to accomplish. You knew your skill, gift, or wonderful product was worth a formal delivery to the world. Keep this in mind as you continue on this rollercoaster to success. It won’t be easy. If it was easy, everyone would do it. The important thing is to remember why you did this and why you want to continue to do it. Constantly remind yourself of the WHY and work on achieving small milestones that will set you up for long-term success. Add the WHY into your messaging, make sure that you are storytelling and capture your audience with your true motivations, they will appreciate and relate to you more for it. What’s more, you will hit some emotional health markers with your vulnerability, see Brene Brown.

SMARKET yourself

It is so easy to put your marketing strategy on the back-burner when you don’t see results right away. But doing this before you’ve accessed the intelligence of your content and the strategy of your delivery, is not fair. When you find yourself on the slippery slope of doing nothing and re-sharing other people’s content, STOP and focus on the various ways you can contribute to your own smart content creation. With smart content creation, your success is dependent on following an educational purpose, an audience generating data collection format, utilizing various and specific avenues for delivery, consistent implementation, tracking, adjusting based on analytics, patience, and spiritual alignment. Actually, you might want to start with the latter.

You can’t expect your audience will show up without knowing who you are and why you’re special. By creating smart content, you are allowing your readers, followers, and clients the chance not only to get to know you but to develop and understand and be educated by you; a relationship built on trust developed by you.

The modern marketing plan, or as we call it, smart content creation, is more than just posting ads online or in the local paper, but more about nurturing a relationship and moving from tangential to tangible continuing past the sell, into the long-term.

In the digital arena, smart content creation relies heavily on making yourself known and leveraging yourself to your best-suited audience, then demonstrating leadership with your unique expertise.

6. Hire a Pro.

If you’ve made it to this point of the blog you’re either struggling pretty hard or you’re eager to apply the best tactics to your marketing strategy. Under both circumstances, tip 6 can easily get you where you want to be. There are professional marketers whose job is to put you and your business out there. They already know how to discover the intricacies and the methods that would work best for your goals and are dedicated to meeting your needs while you are out there perfecting your craft, improving your product, and working on sustaining your business. At A.R. Marketing House our goal is to learn the ins and outs of what it is you offer so we can reach the right people with the right message to get them to invest in what you have to offer. We have done this for a variety of industry leaders and are eager to elevate you to unsurpassed levels.

With these tips, we are confident that your business will flourish! Whether you’ve just decided to market your business or have been working at this for some time, but need a little help, we are eager to help you and encourage you to seek help from pro’s, like the A.R. team.

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Feb

2017

Philanthropy: 6 Winning Reasons to Boost Positive Engagement

Your Philanthropy Legacy is your Marketing Plan

The hustle of running a business is sometimes so time-consuming that we put aside the bigger picture that we started out with in order to perform the day-to-day tasks that must get done. But since you are the person that dreamed up your business and created it to fruition in the first place, you know how important it is to take a step back and reassess your place in the world, your growth, your philanthropy, and ultimately your LEGACY.

Philanthropy offers us a WIN-WIN situation when considering a mode of marketing and where we can leave our stamp of grace on our employees, vendors, communities, and the world.

What is a Company Philanthropy exactly? A philanthropy is defined as a company giving to a cause, whether it be through charitable donations or giving their time and resources. Although many corporations get the credit for doing philanthropic work (Yay to their $$$ P.R. Team), many small businesses don’t have the time or resources to express all that they actually give and are involved in with their community. Fortunately for the businesses that have put time into marketing and fulfilling their philanthropy, the rewards have been fruitful.

So, what is your company already giving to its community? Is a philanthropy program something your company already has in place? Yes? then GREAT!!! You need to create a marketing program to share all the amazing things you do in the world! If not, I’m going to make this clear and simple: you need one.

Here are 6 reasons to start creating and living by that philanthropic legacy you’ve always dreamed of that will actually help boost your earnings.

1. Establishing an Identity and Purpose

For many people, a business that lives within their purpose gives people a reason to choose that company’s brand over another brand. Companies like Lyft, Burt’s Bees, Dove, and Whole Foods have all focused a lot of time and money into fulfilling their purpose and standing by their philanthropy in order to make a valuable contribution to society. In order to establish where you fit in, think to yourself: What are you passionate about? Education? Homelessness? Environmental Conservation? Health? How do you want to help your neighbors? What do you want your legacy to be? There are so many different charities all focused on different causes. Find something that feels right for you and your business, or acknowledge what you’re already doing, and focus on using this to market the identity of your business. By establishing a purpose, people feel a need to help your cause knowing that some of their investment into your company invests in a good cause.

2. Networking Opportunities

Many organizations run events with large numbers of volunteers. I attended an event for an organization called L.A. Works that was focused on building up a local community while working at homeless shelters and schools in need. We painted murals, planted flowers, built benches and put together care packages for the shelter residents and local students. Target was one of the companies that decided to donate to the cause with their time. They sent over a group of volunteers in matching red Target shirts all eager to work on these projects. Not only did this show the 1000+ volunteers how even outside of their store, they were still trying to make a difference in the lives of their neighbors, but they were a united team of givers. Not only was this team talking amongst each other but they were cheering, working, and spending time with other volunteers that were there for the cause. It allowed their team an opportunity to speak to locals outside of the transactional world. Customers are the core of your business, so this is a great way to engage with the people who keep your business running in the first place.

3. Public Relations

My previous example demonstrated how Target made a positive PR move by actively participating in this event with over a thousand people in attendance. Although it was a chance for them to network, it also boosted Target’s visibility within the community as a company that lived by its philanthropy.

4. Employee morale

A recent study of more than 2,000 individuals found that “nearly two-thirds of people between the ages of 18 and 34 were at least somewhat more likely to want to work for a company that gave to charity than one did that not”. Not only do employees feel better about working for a company that is active in making a difference, but especially in this generation, employees are likely to stick around if there are common values and a strong foundation that the company is based on.

5. Respected leadership

Leaders that make a point to improve the lives of their employees and the people around them are likely going to be respected to a higher degree than those leaders who are only focused solely on the profit they are reigning in on.

6. Trust and value of mission statement

Having and sticking to your mission statement establishes trust. It gives your brand a purpose and a REASON for people to trust you. You stand for something other than yourself, and that alone is a respectable trait.

So, decide on your legacy, whether it be through corporate funding, volunteer work, product donations, partnerships, or pro-bono work–every company should reassess their role in the world to make philanthropy a part of their mission and thus grow their business in a sustainable fashion that helps not only themselves but also the world around them.

Feb

2017

5 Proven Strategies for Growing Your Eco-Friendly Business with Education-Based Marketing

The field of marketing has evolved significantly in recent years, and one of the most effective strategies is education-based marketing. Also known as inbound marketing, this approach focuses on attracting customers to your business rather than trying to reach as many people as possible with one-way communication.

Be the educator

Before inbound marketing became mainstream; the goal was to cast a wide net, getting a message in front of as many people as possible to finally turn them into customers. Now is the time to put yourself in your consumers’ shoes. Do you enjoy commercials? Do you love telemarketing calls? These practices are called “outbound marketing.” Sometimes these methods are necessary; often, they can cause overload; we want to meet customers where they’re at by delivering the content they want. We have officially moved into the day of practical education in the form of helpful content.

Taking the role of educator to engage and empower your audiences is far more beneficial to society than just converting. Get excited; this method of marketing is not only empowering for your audience but also elevates your business and your brand.

Use an Inbound Marketing Strategy

Adopting an inbound marketing strategy can be a highly effective and cost-efficient way to reach and engage with your audience. Instead of interrupting people with outbound marketing techniques like commercials and telemarketing calls, inbound marketing draws customers to your business by providing valuable information about your industry and sharing relevant experiences. This approach is preferred by many modern B2B and B2C customers. It can help your company stand out among competitors by offering a range of resources and options that benefit those seeking your services. Say goodbye to traditional marketing methods and hello to infographics, educational videos, and other engaging content that helps you attract and retain customers.

Attracting your customers to your business instead of trying to reach massive amounts of people with a one-way conversation is the preferred way to approach your potential customer base in a more effective, impactful way. Say bye to commercials and hello to infographics & educational videos. Providing your target audience with a range of resources and options will allow your company to shine amongst competitors and benefit those needing your services to improve their lives and communities.

Lead your customers to educated decisions

In today’s digital age, consumers have access to a vast array of options and information. To stand out in a crowded market, it’s essential to establish trust and provide value to your customers. This can be achieved through educational marketing, which helps lead your customers to make informed decisions that benefit their health, community, or environment. By sharing your expertise and providing valuable knowledge, you can differentiate your business and build a loyal customer base. Use educational marketing as an opportunity to enrich people’s lives and improve the world around us.

What consumers yearn for is knowledge, education, and wisdom. So, be the leader that delivers your specialty knowledge to them. Educational marketing is an opportunity to lead your consumers to make educated decisions, whether it’s for their health, community, or the environment. Realize how you can incorporate these ideas to enlighten people and improve lives.

How much to share? Using the 80/20 Rule

When it comes to sharing information with your audience, it’s important to follow the 80/20 rule. This means focusing on what your audience wants to know and delivering value to them rather than constantly promoting your products or services. For example, instead of discussing how you built your first product with a small budget, focus on how your product meets your customers’ needs and addresses their specific concerns or interests.

To effectively deliver value to your audience, provide them with useful and relevant content about your industry. This might include addressing common misconceptions, highlighting important issues, or simplifying technical information for beginners. By becoming a trusted source of valuable information, you’ll encourage your audience to continue seeking you out and, eventually, consider your products or services.

Of course, you want to generate publicity for your company, but balancing that with a focus on delivering value is essential. Use your content to encourage your audience to visit your site, attend an event, download an e-book, or schedule a consultation. By continuing to add value to their lives, you’ll build trust and create a deeper, more meaningful connection with your audience.

Be consistent with content

Implementing an effective educational marketing strategy requires dedication and consistency. At A.R. Marketing House, we specialize in creating compelling content for environmental companies that helps to expand their reach and drive business growth. We understand the power of education and are committed to providing valuable information to our clients and their audiences.

If you’re ready to see your company thrive through inbound marketing, we’re here to help. Our team of experts can research, create, and share content that engages and empowers your audience. Contact us to learn more about how we can support your success, or check out our other resources for additional insights and inspiration. As Nelson Mandela once said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”