Are you actually following a strategic marketing plan for your business? Many of us simply throw spaghetti at the wall and hope it sticks. In today’s episode, Tayler Hollman joins us to explore what we should be doing with our marketing plan, how to track our results, and what to do when it’s time to pivot. She also highlights how her company Enji has created a tool to help small business owners create a marketing plan with intention and stick to it.
Succeeding Beyond the Plan
Tayler imagined a life where she would always be in a classroom teaching—until she realized it wasn’t for her. She found herself always looking to improve things and make changes, which wasn’t received well in that environment. This left here dumping the plan she’d set for herself to find a new adventure. Eventually, she landed in the small business space as a marketing consultant. After working with a startup client, she started to explore her own startup, Enji.
Launching Enji
Enji is easy-to-use marketing software that helps you create a marketing plan in minutes and start making progress with the tools you need.
What does Enji mean?
When creating this new brand, Tayler knew she needed some outside help with naming, so she brought in Jillian Griffith of GG Copywriting. She filled out a questionnaire and gave a few parameters:
She didn’t want it to be something that meant anything to anyone.
She wanted it to be short.
Jillian came back with about 50 different names, and Tayler chose Enji. It’s a play on the word engine.
Is your marketing working for you?
For a lot of entrepreneurs and small business owners, they’re not making intentional or strategic decisions, and the marketing that they’re doing is accidental. It’s based on a gut instinct at the last minute.
When you’re marketing by accident, there is not structure and no way to measure the success.
The first step to marketing is to establish goals, objectives, and targets. This will give you something to judge your performance against.
Setting Goals for Your Business
What does it mean to set a goal and how do you actually establish them? Consider them as tiers or stepping stones:
Big audacious goals (the dream)
Realistic goals for a focus
Objectives (with numbers)
The reason so many people struggle with goals is they set a goal, but aren’t creating objectives to getting there.
Setting & Tracking KPIs
When you’re tracking your goals, you will need to have KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). There is truth in the data—which is where these KPIs will play their role. If you’re not sure what’s working or wasting your time in your marketing, take a look at the data.
When you’re getting started, consider 6-10 KPIs that you can track. Your goals will guide you to know what numbers to track to understand success and performance.
You could track marketing channels, leads, inquiries, and more.
Shifting Your Marketing Plan
After tracking your numbers, you may come to the realization that it’s time to change your marketing plan. Before you make any rash decisions, make sure you’ve given a strategy or channel enough time. At minimum, give it 30 days, but realistically 3-6 months is a better length of time to test for advertising and marketing.
Once you’ve determined it’s just not working, you can either stop that effort or refine it, which is sometimes the harder of the two. Keep in mind that you don’t want to change too many things in your efforts, because once the results are impacted, you won’t know which change improved it.
Utilizing Enji in Your Small Business Marketing
Enji was created as a marketing consultant turned into software so that small business owners can actually have a fighting chance at managing their own marketing. The goal of Enji was to streamline your marketing plan, document it all in one place, and help you to accomplish your goals.
Some of the features and tools that set Enji apart from the rest include:
Create a marketing strategy with artificial intelligence
Develop a marketing calendar
Schedule your social media
AI copywriter
Marketing campaign templates
Metric tracking
Brand file storage
Right now, their focus is on AI tools and integrations.
Unpopular Opinion
If you hate marketing, it’s because you’re not doing anything to make it better. Simply dig deep when things get hard and work through it. If you tell yourself that you hate marketing, you’re not going to do it.
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