In today’s digital age, solopreneurs providing online business services often find themselves wandering through a dense forest of marketing options. The marketing landscape offers a wide range of options, from social media platforms and blogs to podcasts and email marketing. It’s often touted you need to engage with every marketing channel to succeed. However, each platform and strategy requires careful attention and effort to be effective.
With so many resources, tools, and strategies available, it’s easy to lose sight of your path that leads to growth on your terms. The abundance of choices can make it hard to know where to plant your roots, which branches to nurture, and how to cultivate meaningful progress in any one area of marketing.
The search for the ‘right’ strategy
Many online business and marketing coaches offer guidance on which marketing strategies will bring the best results. The promise of a $10K month if you follow their pathway with their chosen platform. Some may emphasize the power of email marketing with a lead magnet and automated sequence. While others advocate for the vast potential of social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok. Many promise to be the silver bullet to sales on autopilot.
Even with the effort to follow a course program or commit to content creation with a dedicated fervor, there’s no guarantee that your target audience will be there and your content resonates.
This efforting can lead to frustration as you spend hours trying to master the program you purchased, learning different platforms, or repurposing unmeaningful content. You might question whether your struggles are due to poor execution of someone else’s proven methods of success, ineffective messaging, or simply focusing on the wrong platform. It could be any one of these things, but at the heart it may be the strategy doesn’t align with you to begin with.
Aligning your marketing with your strengths
Many solopeneurs face the pressure to pursue strategies that don’t align with their natural strengths or values. This is especially apparent when we first start our business and learning how to market our businesses. The reality is much of the advice out there pushes right pathways to success which may not work for you energetically, with your service delivery methods, or your audience. The truth is what has worked for others may not work for you out of the box.
To uncover what will work for you, one approach to take is to identify how you feel most empowered in communicating about your business and focus on fostering channels that align with you. This entails tapping first into your strengths in how you feel most empowered communicating and then aligning the marketing channel that works best for you. For example, if writing is your strength, blogging might be the most effective way to reach your audience. If you’re more comfortable with video, platforms like YouTube or TikTok could be your best option. If you enjoy speaking, podcasting and workshops might be the path for you. If you enjoy talking with people directly, networking may be the strategy and finding people through meetup.com, FB groups, and aligned community spaces to set up or join conversations.
Building on your core strategy
Once you’ve identified your strongest communication strategy, focus on developing the marketing channel that aligns fully. When your marketing efforts stem from your natural strengths, they’re more likely to be effective in sharing your message and it will ultimately resonate with your audience. You are also likely already aware of where your audience is when you think about your own journey into the field that you’re in. Who are voices in your space you follow that you like their perspective, where do you spend time in community, what are similarities in the service areas of your business with potential collaborators that could help you expand your audience. This is an area to tap into deeper to find the natural alignments to call in your ideal clients.
From this strong foundation of focusing on how you communicate and aligned channels, you can gradually expand into other channels as your growth edges expand. For instance, if you start with blogging and feel like that comes easily, you later explore email marketing, SEO, or social media to further optimize and maximize the content. Or perhaps there are people in your space where you can collaborate by contributing articles to their blog or to their email newsletter to further extend your reach.
Focus on what works for you
In a landscape full of options, the key to effective marketing as a solopreneur is to focus on what aligns with your strengths and feels right for you. Rather than trying to engage with every platform, start with the strategy that suits you best. This may help reduce overwhelm and over time create more authentic and impactful connections with your audience.
