No one ever said that stepping into entrepreneurship would be easy. It takes a lot of courage, strength, patience, and faith to get the ball rolling. When business owners often start, there’s a strong sense of commitment and excitement. But then suddenly, for whatever reason, there’s a shift and they stall.
Perhaps they think there’s not enough time or money, or maybe they flat out lack clarity or belief in themselves. No matter the justification, they stop. They stop actively marketing and start waiting for customers to show up. Eventually, business starts to dry up instead of expand.
Do you find yourself feeling this way? If so, there’s good news for you: You can start again.
Here are five things that I share in my RoadMap program that will help up your game around marketing your business and help you move forward in getting started, or starting over.
1. Get Clear
Ask yourself what you really want. Where are you right now in your business and where do you want to be 24 months from now? What has to change to close the gap between where you are and where you’re heading?
Be honest with yourself about the problems you’re facing and look for potential solutions that can help you close the gap quickly.
2. Revisit Your Customer
You can’t serve everyone. Decide who your perfect customer is and do the work of understanding what problems they have and how your solution can help them.
When you take the time to really understand what your customer needs, you can start to cater your marketing and content creation to their needs.
3. Create Content Weekly
If you don’t have time to create content, you don’t have time to be in business. Content creation is the foundation of your marketing and unless you do it, and do it regularly, you’ll always be praying for customers.
Start blogging or doing video weekly. This content is the foundation that will allow others to find you and understand what you do. It’s important that you make time to do it.
5 Ways to up your #marketinggame. Tweet this out!
4. Pick a Channel
You can do anything, but you can’t do everything. This is true for social media, too. Stop diluting your marketing efforts by trying to be in all places at all times. This leads to lazy marketing and over posting of the same content on multiple channels.
Instead, pick a channel, go all in and do a great job sharing content AND connecting with people. Social media is social, that means you need to be sociable in order for it to work.
5. Establish KPIs
These are key performance indicators. In my book, Pilot to Profit, I speak about the need to measure what matters. If you don’t set and measure KPIs then you have no idea if you’re improving and or if your marketing is even working.
You should measure sales, website traffic, reach and the size of your mailing list regularly.
Do these 5 things and you can change up the results in your business – provided you commit to doing the work.
If you can’t commit to the work, the best plan in the world is useless. If you won’t do the work, hire a coach, a helper or… decide to quit instead of starting and stopping over and over again.
This article originally appeared on lisalarter.com.