DIY Marketing Advice Every Small Business Needs - Teacher: Anna Bravington

Hello, and welcome to the Useful Content Podcast. And today we have a brand new teacher in the Useful Content Classroom. Anna Bravington. Hi, Anna.

Hi, great to be here. 

It's great to have you on, Anna. I, we, we know each other from LinkedIn and I was once able to grace the halls of your podcasts, crossing the content chasm, and that was a good time. And now you're here on my podcast, which I'm happy to have you on. It's so, so good to have you here.

So glad to be here. So get to see how it's what it's done from the other side now because I had to be the host last time.

Yeah, and a good host you were. Um, and today we, we have a lot to cover and talk about, cause we're going to be talking about do it yourself, um, marketing strategies for small business, and that's something that is very important for anyone who wants to build out their business, but before we get into the actual content, could you tell the people what you do and how you help your clients make useful?

content.

So I actually do two things now. So last time when we spoke, I was just doing the one thing which was owning my own business, which is marketing strategy for customers. And it's a variety of from SMEs to bigger companies. And it's helping them understand from all the way from What their business goals are, how to Translate that into marketing and then how to communicate to customers to reach those goals, really, Um, and since I last spoke to you, I'm also, um, innovation director at Oxford Innovation Space, which is Uh, we have 33 innovation centres across the UK, and what I do is I coach SMEs on how to do their own marketing, their own sales, so that they can do them themselves, which is brilliant.

So I get to do the doing and the teaching at the same time.

Oh, that's a big deal. Coaching SMEs on how to do their own marketing. What have you found to be like the common thread when it comes to SMEs?

and and building out their marketing?

That they start marketing before they have every, all the foundations in place. So, one of the big things is when people come to me, they say, right, I want to do some marketing, I want to blog, I want to do some social media, and we get, I say to them, okay, right, what are your business goals? What do we need to do, um, and, and get to in order to, for this to be a success? And they say, um, Make more sales. Yeah, that's that's their business goal. There's no smart business goals where they're, um, you know, they've got a time and they're, and they sort of a structure to them. So I find that's sort of the biggest thing that we have is that we'll, we'll try and I think it's sort of jumping ahead of In the sort of marketing space, we're actually knowing, you know, do you need more customers?

What space do you want them in? You know, what type of customers? How many products do you want to sell? Because if you don't know any of those, marketing doesn't work. And I think that's the biggest issue that people have.

and so I know that we're going to get deep inside of how to do some of those things, but, you know, there's a problem, like, for example, um, it's a cash 22 situation where you need one and you need the other one. So when you're starting off, you just. Kind of let's just suppose the business you're good at something and you start it and it starts to grow.

Uh, you don't really have that in your mind, like, what am I trying to accomplish in your mind? You just want to make money and stay alive type of thing. And, um, and how in reality is that worked out in the mind of a business person in terms of starting to look at their critically and saying, I need to set these goals.

How do you show people that?

Yeah, I mean, it, it needs to be fairly early on, but like you said, when you're just starting out, you don't know your customer base. You're not quite sure where you want to, a lot of people start off with an idea in mind and they want to create a product or a service. And it might be something that they had difficulty with and they think they could create a service around that.

So. What you do in those early stages is lots of exploring of who else needs this service. And I work with a lot of people that actually don't know who they're trying to sell to, why they're trying to sell it, and that makes it difficult. So it's when you're starting, you'll know that you need this, um, you know, to start looking at it when you're struggling to make sales. And you're struggling to connect with your audience or your conversion rate is really low because if you're not connecting with your audience and telling them what they want to do or what they need from you, then you're just not going to get those customers on board. So it's that when you're getting stuck and really struggling, that's when you really start to need to look at it.

And it could be for different businesses. Some might be really early on. Some might be able to naturally. Get a few cells, but then then start to struggle. And is it is that blocker point where you think, actually, now I need to have a look at it and start making an effort to focus.

So some need it earlier on. Some can organically get sales because maybe they're just talented or charismatic and they're able to build this business out in the early stages. But then they kind of hit a wall with their sales and they don't know why. And when you analyze that, they say, well, maybe we need to really 

figure out what our marketing should be. All right. So let's, let's talk about how we can help these SMEs now and what do they have to do in order to figure out what type of marketing they need and how they can set those goals. Where do you start? When you start to speak to someone, you come and they come to you and they say, I have this business.

It's going okay. It could be better. Um, and I want to start addressing my marketing. What is the first thing that you look at when you talk to these people?

So, most of the time, people have got at least a few customers, so we start with the customers. If they've sold some product or service, then those people must want their product or service. So, we think, well, that's a good place to start for looking at a, looking at customer personas, because you need to understand what your customer needs, what are the pain points. that they have. Um, so what I often do is I either make people or I'll do it for them. I'll call their customers, pick up the phone. Now, a lot of people hate this stage because I'm a big fan of picking up the phone and talking to people. So I have a big list of questions that you can ask your customers. Why did you want the service? How did you find us? What was the journey like? Um, you know, were there any sticking points along the way? How was, um, How easy was it to get us on board? Did it have to go? Did you have to go through and ask your, your business, your friend or your co-founder, founder, or did you just make the decision yourself? Did you look at competitors? Um, and one of the big things is if you hadn't had this service, what would it be like? You know, what would, would your pain points still be there? And what difficulties would you have? And we ask them all these questions, or sometimes the business owner will ask these questions to really delve into. Why do people actually need your service? And through those calls, what we do is we record them, and from them we make big spreadsheets of common themes and text snippets of things that people have mentioned. It might be, oh, you know, I, I had two projects to run at the same time, and if I hadn't had this company on board to run the projects, it just wouldn't have got done, and then my boss would have been upset, and you know, and all these sort of points that they, they come up with, and we make a big sheet, and we look at the common ones, and you'll find in these calls, there's always common threads between all of the customers, so that tends to start an inkling of what the customers need, and why they need it. From that stage, you'll also be able to get an idea of Sort of, are they happy with the pricing? You know, how often they might need it, which, when I sort of mentioned SMART goals earlier, you know, if you haven't got any SMART business goals, and by SMART, just to give an example of what I mean, you know, it's not get more sales, post more on Instagram, it's scale the business by 20 percent this year.

It's a figure and a time bound thing. Break into a new sector, uh, with ten new clients in the next five years. It's very specific targets. So when you're talking to these customers and they say, yeah, it's a good price point. I might need your service, you know, three times a year. Um, it took me three months to, uh, find you and to be ready to buy from you.

And you can take all these figures and say, okay, so it took them three months. to buy from me and they're probably going to need me three times a year. So how much did they pay? They paid 500 pounds each time. So from each client I can get, you know, maybe three times 500 pounds out of the year. If they took three months to sign up for me and I need, um, to get, you know, to live, I need probably five more clients if they're sort of 500 pounds each year. three times a year, I need five more clients, you know, you're sort of starting to figure out how much money you can get from each client, how long they're going to last. And if they took three months, right, well, I should have started marketing to them three months ago because I need customers now. So you're trying to sort of figure out this stuff.

And it's not easy when you're going, going through this stage of difficult, this difficult stage because you're It's an investigation, and it's a piecing together a jigsaw that might not even piece together very well. Um, so it makes it incredibly difficult, and the thing is that small business owners are a great place to do that, because they understand their product, they understand their customers, and when they're talking to their customers and getting feedback, they can, in their head, try to piece together their understanding of, you know, if I've spoken to five clients, three of them are in tech and said it was really useful to them and two were in HR and said it wasn't useful.

Okay, then I've got the tech sector and they're the people that I need to target. See, there's no one answer to this, this stage that we do because it is a big fact finding mission. Um, but it is really, really valuable. If you haven't got any customers at this stage, so say you're struggling to get customers, what I do is I just phone potential people up.

So they're not customers, but I ask them similar questions. So I will just go, okay, well, we think that HR people might need this product. I'm HR people, quiz them and ask them, right. If we had this service, how much would you pay? What would you like the service to be? How would it help you? What pain points would it cover? So there's this huge bit of, and with SMEs, it's very, very difficult because you do have to do a lot of it manually. You don't have reams of data. You know, I've worked for big e commerce retailers before, and you can just dive into the data. And have a look through and it all becomes obvious in SMEs, you tend to have to sit there, get on the phone, manually ask people and it is a bit of legwork, but it's so worth it because once you've done that fact finding mission, you have, you're presented with actual real figures and insights into why people are buying from you or not buying from you and, um, and then you can sort of figure it out from there. Yeah. Yeah. The thing is going to pass again. Okay. Hold on one second. Okay. I can hear it. I know you can't hear it, but I can hear it. I want to make sure it doesn't come on the recording. All right. Okay. So that's great stuff. And I love, I love

So that's great stuff. And I love, I love what you, you highlighted us sort of great points there. Um, I think I want Just zero in on a couple things. So the first thing I want to zero in on is the fact that it seems like you need a lot of detail when you're going through these things.

Like you, it's not just, um, all these people are, might be, but it seems that you try to drill down and get down into the detail of why, what would their life be like, and you ask sort of very specific questions. And the second thing I think that's important Is that one of the biggest questions I hear often is what?

I don't have any customers. How do I know what customers I should get? Or how do I know who is my ideal customers? And I like that approach of at the beginning. You have to make some assumptions because you just don't have any data and in through making the assumptions and kind of pursuing those assumptions.

You begin to get a sense of. Oh, this might actually be a thing for me, or this might work. And in, in that process, you discover, okay, this might be the client that I need to target and you discover in, in, in that process. So, okay. So all those things considered, is this something that a business owner should even undertake for themselves, or should they always hire somebody external to engage in this process for them?

It's a really good question. And I think they can undertake it themselves. Um, if they have someone, so if there's more than one of them in the business, if there's someone who's not customer facing, who hasn't met the customers before, they're probably best place to do it. If you've already got a relationship with customers, it can be a little bit awkward and you're going, What don't you like about me? And, uh, you know, they're not always so honest. And the, when we've done it, when I've done it for customers and my colleagues done it for customers, it's been very revealing and they will say stuff that they wouldn't say normally. So it can be useful, even if it's just the phone calls to get someone else to, it doesn't have to be employed.

You could, you know, if you've got someone, your great aunt, that's really good at making phone calls, get them to make the phone calls. You know what it's like in small business. We get everyone involved. So if you've got someone you can, it's, it's better. For example, a business that I work with, they got their marketing chap who hadn't. had any customer facing role. He did the calls and that worked really well because he knew about the business, but he wasn't the face and they didn't know him. So it was a bit that they would say more to him because they knew that it wasn't him in the, that they'd had to deal with. Um, so it is difficult.

And also I, you have to think for different personality types that. Depending on what your personality type is, sometimes it is harder to make phone calls. You know, if you are more introverted, you know, people that are neurodiverse. Yeah, I have ADHD. So I'm quite outgoing and I quite like giving phone calls. Um, but if you did not like that, you know, my son has autism, he would hate picking up the phone to people. So, you know, thinking about the different personality types, if you're really struggling with that, it is something you can outsource and it doesn't have to be to like someone like myself, it could be like a virtual assistant or someone who can just do it. a tiny bit of help and do that, that difficult task for you. Um, when I've, uh, worked at a, uh, software as a service platform, a very small software software as a service platform, we were looking to our offering and we weren't sure if we were hitting the right audience. And I came in because I had I wasn't afraid to sort of make phone calls and I phoned up agencies to see whether they wanted our service.

It was an integration service and very quickly found that they didn't really want it. They needed it. But they didn't really want it and couldn't really be bothered to source anything. So we discounted those and then I spoke to loads of people in different platforms like point of sale platforms and e commerce platforms and there was much more of an interest there because they want their platforms to connect to other platforms but In if you create your own integrations, they're hard work and take a lot of upkeep.

So they like the idea that we would do that for them. And so we decided to pivot that way and make some partnerships in a partnership program, and I found a lot of people and I went to quite a few networking events as well to find all this out and visited some offices of different people. And it probably it did take a few months in total.

But we got to a stage where we're like, Okay, this is where we need to go. We found it. A hole that needs filling and we can do it and it works.

Yeah. Yeah. It seems like it's a really involved 

Yes. 

and, um, and it does take a lot of doing so it might be useful for them to put, give somebody else to do. And I am thinking if this person is an amateur, like for example, if you like in your example, if you hire your great aunt and she's not, she's not.

Accustomed to having these conversations. It might be a little stressful for her.

so, so so maybe, I don't know, maybe you can hire someone to do it or something of that sort, but for the people who really, really, really, really insist on doing it, or maybe they can't afford to hire somebody based on their current cashflow.

What are some of the key questions that, that, uh, Business owner should be asking a customer or potential customer in order to find out what kind of information are they looking for and the key questions they should ask in order to find out what they can use for their marketing.

So starting with the first sort of questions that I ask, I actually ask about the person and their role, how many's in their team, what their, um, what they do day to day, uh, who they report into, because that's really interesting for finding out. The type of person in an organization that you need to hit. Um, then I start talking about, Why did they go on this search for this product or service? Or, you know, where did this sort of initial go, Ah, I need something, come from. So, asking them around, Did they search, start searching for it themselves? Or did they, did, did they see an ad? Or something that suddenly ticked in their brain, I need this service. And then we talk around. Why, at that point, that, you know, whether they needed help or, or, they saw something, what was it, what was the thing that made them pursue it? You know, why did you pick up this phone to the person? Why did you message them? What was the turning point? Because there's always a turning point where someone's doing nothing and then suddenly goes into action. And then once we've sort of established why they went into action, we ask about how long that time frame was. So, was it that they saw an ad and they immediately sprung into action? Or they saw a need and sprung into action? Or was it four months, five months, six months? Because that's really useful for understanding maybe the beginning of the sales cycle. And then what we do is we normally ask them about their journey to the customer. So that could be, um, you know, how they found the customer. Um, where, where they sort of found them, you know, did they find them online, et cetera? Um, how many emails or interactions did they do with them? What questions they asked when they needed to be on boarded?

What any obstacles they needed to overcome to, to get on board? For example, was there an issue with price or invoicing? Was it that, um, they didn't have enough time to just really find out sort of that entire journey from their perspective, getting on board with the company. And then, uh, we ask about competitors.

Did they consider any competitors? What they, why they didn't go with them? And then we talk about the first stages of when they're with the company. You know, how easy was it to onboard? How easy was it to, uh, work with them? Did they fulfill everything that they need to do? Sometimes in this stage, some really difficult things come out, like Oh, it was awful.

You know, they did, they didn't answer my emails and things like that. So you get lots of really tasty tidbits around, around there. And then, um. Um, sort of we just talk a little bit about the service in general, we tend to get them to give us some key words that would describe the company, you know, as happy or, you know, useless or joyful, or just some different ones that just sort of describe the company. Um, and then after that, we. Talk about the issue that they had that we talked about at the beginning of the conversation and do they think it's fulfilled? And if they hadn't found this company, what would have happened? Would they have tried to find someone else? Would, you know, would they have got fired?

Would that, you know, what would have happened and what would their life be like now without this company to get a sense of How in you know how much it's changed at that point if there's something really juicy you can potentially turn it into a testimonial as well So these are really good these conversations And what I do to help save time is I record my conversations and I, um, pop them into Otter AI to transcribe them as well, which is really useful. Um, so just thinking about SME business owners that don't have much time, it can be really useful to transcribe them. And then what you could do, um, is you, if you like chat GPT, you know, get getting into the AI era here. You can pop those conversations. If you've got the um, pro account, you can pop a load of word documents in and you can ask it to summarize them and actually pick out key themes and that if you're short on time.

I do it manually most of the time because uh, we're good at We're experts at picking out those things manually, and when we've spoken to multiple people, we've already got themes and that going on in our heads, so we already know, but you could, you know, this is where I really is good at helping because it can, um, spot patterns. Um, and a lot, that's what we're doing a lot of time trying to spot patterns in the conversations of what people are talking about. And then what we do from there is we create a document with, um, sort of just the sections and little just snippets of, uh, of, of conversation of, uh, you know, if they said, um, when they signed up, they didn't get many emails, you know, that will go in there, but it might be that we get a theme that onboarding was really easy.

So then that's a nice big theme that we put in there. Um, and we try and condense it to just like for each part of those. So sort of the onboarding, the finding them, the, uh, being with them and then how they feel now. It's literally only comes down to about four bullet points each you'll find where it's narrowed it down that much. So it's, it's, it's a really good place to start. And then from that, you get lots of useful information. So for example. The voice and language that they use to talk about, um, the pain points and how you helped. Goodness, that makes great content for websites. You know, you can use it in your marketing messaging. It's absolutely brilliant. So this is not just It's just a thing, I'm a big, big fan of reusing stuff. 

So although this is to help you define your audience and your customers, you've got tons of website content from this where people have given you their pain points. And also you probably find there's a few blogs that are in there as well because people have said they've had certain issues and I'm like, Oh, that's a good blog. So it's a, it's great. So it's not just one thing. Um, it, it leads into your entire. marketing strategy from then on.

Oh, that's great. That's a good, good, good overview. It seems like when you're talking about this and I don't know if this is a thing, maybe it might be a thing. It's almost like you're doing customer driven marketing

and, um, uh, it's, it's taking all these insights, which are real. And, uh, which are from the people you actually want to buy from you.

And then not creating those marketing materials that are relevant to the people who would buy from you. So you're creating essentially taking real people, but creating an avatar to. Um, sell to, so this one person is like another person who is like another person and what you said just then too, is that the, like, when you, the first question that you ask, like, what was the moment of decision?

And I think, um, and you know about the jobs to be done, done framework, you know, what our framework.

I don't know. I don't think I know that one.

Yeah. Job jobs to be done framework. Um, Bob Moist, uh, it's, it's a framework that's pretty popular among marketers. Uh, So one of the, one of the things that, uh, as there's a guy called Bob Mowaster, he talks about it. He's one of the co creators of the jobs to be done framework. What he says that when you ask the question, it has to be, there's a time when the customer says today is the day.

When,

so like you have a problem and it's, it's, I, I need an example I always draw is like you have a dripping faucet and then the drips get, gets bigger and bigger and it starts to run and, and there comes a day when you're like, this is gonna flood my kitchen. And you say, today is the day I get this fixed, and therefore you have to look for somebody.

So that. Drove the decision for you to find someone. And if that person is out there talking about, uh, uh, you know, leak the dangers of leaking faucets and they've created content or their marketing is around how you keep your house from getting flooded, then they will be the one that will get chosen if they're easy to find and all those different things.

So I, I think that's, that's great. Great insight. that is, Is this process different, uh, from a service based business to a product based business? Is there a difference in what you ask?

does depend on the sector because it depends on, um, B2B, um, when we're doing those ones in service based businesses, you can, um, they can be actually easier to talk to, mainly because when you're doing service based, you've already tend to build a relationship with them, particularly sort of B2B service, where you're maybe more hands on and you've already got a relationship. They can be a little bit easier because, um, they've probably had more interactions with you. If you're like an e commerce shop. And they've not had so much interactions with your team. You, you might need to change the question slightly because you know, sometimes it's not a pain or a need. So it could be a desire, you know, you don't go and buy Nike Air Force Ones probably because you've, you've, uh, you've got a pain.

You buy them because they're lovely and everyone else has got them. Or maybe your pain is that everyone else has got them.

So you, you know, you, you, buy them for different reasons. Um, so then you might look at your questions towards, you know, what is it, you know, why did you want to buy these? Uh, what was the turn point?

And then talk about, it might, instead of being the human process, it might be the online shop process, taking them through, was there anything? You didn't understand what was the pricing like, um, and you'll find the answers are very different to product debt based businesses because they'll be talking, probably talking about how they found you, um, you know, through social search engines and then went on and they obviously did the entire process themselves pretty much.

So you might want to put things in like, for example, if you've got a chat service or a customer service, you might want to add those in as well, um, where you've where you've got human elements that, uh, that aren't normally in B2B business. You might not have a chat service in B2B service. So you might want to think of like little tweaks about the journey, but most of it, you know, every business that they have, like you said, there's a need that wants to go, uh, get there. Um, they've somehow made a decision and done some touch points. They've onboarded with you, whether it's by person or by buying something on a shop, and then they've come out the other end. And the answer to, you know, if you hadn't had your Nike Air Force Ones, how, what would your life be like? I mean, social outcast, obviously. So, um, but you know, it will be different answers, but the general. way that people buy things doesn't change across the different types of, of, of marketing. It's just, you'll just have to tweak them for, for their potential journeys.

Okay, great. Wonderful. That's a good insight into that. So it doesn't make a huge difference. You just have to pay attention to particular details if you have a product versus a service based business. And I've never owned like Air Force Ones, just letting everyone know.

Me neither. I can't afford them. They're too

expensive. 

I used to be so, so obsessed.

I gave up on Nike last year. I'm like, I'm done. My relationship with Nike is over. Uh, you know, so I'm now a Saccone guy, um, Love it. shoes and so on. So, okay. So, all right. So let's, let's talk about. A couple of last points. Um, so I know one of the things that you talk about is like tightening of the processes and that will make marketing less time consuming.

What do you mean by tightening the processes? You're talking about like, um, how do they discover who to, to market to? What, what is meant by tightening of the processes?

So for me, there's processes sort of underlines all of marketing. And I think the problem is that a lot of marketing is done quite ad hoc, which is my worst, worst fear. What happens is, you know, someone. will just suddenly decide, I want to talk about this today. I want to talk about this in the future. And it doesn't matter if you're a one person business or you're a 100, 000 person business, this always happens.

Whether it's, you know, your big business and the CEO goes, Oh, can we put out something about this? Or you're on your own, you've been really busy and you suddenly decide you want to talk about something. And the problem is if it's really random and ad hoc. There's no purpose behind it, because you might want to talk about something, but is it actually in line with what you need to talk about?

Is it in line with your customer? Is it in line with those business goals? So for me, the process is about Starting from the top, so like I said, starting with those smart business goals, you know, do you want to sell, uh, products in five of the late UK's leading supermarkets in the next five years? We'll take that one. Um, so if that was my business goal, it might be quite tempting at some point to put out a post on. You know, my product and how it's, um, I'm selling it at local market, which probably isn't in line with getting it into supermarkets because you're talking about local rather than global. So, but that often happens if you haven't got this direction that you're going in.

So you set your business goal. And then from that you set your marketing goals. So if I want to get this product into five UK supermarkets. I need to look at my sort of the content I'm putting out. Is it appealing to buyers at supermarkets and to customers of supermarkets rather than maybe the local farmers market that I usually sell at? So So, then all of my content needs to be around that, you know, I want to get them into, so Tesco is a big supermarket here. I want to get them into Tesco. So, let's start looking at Tesco's posts. What are they talking about? Who's the buyers there? Let's start tagging them in. Let's start talking about the same things that they're talking about. Um, so that I'm, I'm getting in there. Um, If I start talking about selling, you know, two products or, um, you know, the difficulties of setting up early in the morning, that's probably not going to resonate with the people I'm trying to get to. And I find often if you don't have these processes of setting up your business goals, your marketing goals from that.

So for marketing goals, if you're trying to get into. I'm going supermarkets now. It doesn't quite work like this, but your marketing goals might be that you need to connect with 25 buyers at Tesco supermarkets. I don't know how many buyers they have. I'm just making numbers up. But you want you want to connect with 25 buyers of those supermarkets in the next two years. And then of those 25 buyers, I want to have had conversations with five of them. That's where you get, right, I need to have conversations with these five buyers from these supermarkets. Right. How can I market to get their attention and to build those connections and the marketing could be across, you know, social media, it could be a one to one sort of ABM strategy where you're targeting each one individually with messages and useful things. And then, um, that sets your entire strategy. And with that, you've got to be quite targeted with your, your contents. You've, you know, you've, you've identified your buyers and then you need to look at how often you're posting, making sure throughout the week that you do a calendar. So this is my process.

You've got to have a calendar. What am I posting about on each day? What can I think about? Because otherwise, if you don't have a calendar and you don't know what you're talking about, then you, um, you lose track and, and you start posting for the sake of posting. So it's really, it's really difficult. And then we think, well, I need a webinar, you know, because these people are really interested in X. Thing for, so I'll build a webinar. But once again, you need this process of understanding why, why you are doing it, who you are targeting, and what they're interested in. Um, you know, I'm a big fan of things like Clickup and Asana for making plans and keeping everything on track because what you, as soon as you stop doing that and having these processes of tracking everything underneath and really making sure that everything is aligning to your goals, you start. Just spamming your own social channels or your own email channels with stuff that you've thought about today. Oh goodness, I haven't done a post today. I haven't sent an email today. What am I gonna write

about? And you'll just write something.

Yeah.

So it's

a, it happens too often.

Yeah, I see that all the time. I have, um, I have this thing I'm working out where it talks about three different types of marketers. Uh, well, content creators are the spontaneous, the batcher, and then there's the core, um, creator. So the name should tell the story. Uh, so People who just do things spontaneously, people who like battery content, and then people who have a big, large, a large core piece of content that they pull from, but you have to have a structure.

You have to have a plan. That's the main thing. Um, when you were talking to me, I was thinking about, uh, suppose there is a business owner who like has no idea about what to do. And in their mind, when you come and you ask them, well, what are your business goals and they, their business goals are to make more money.

Right. Uh, and Common one, a common one.

it's like, well, that's the purpose of business to get a profit, you know, how, how do you train, uh, a business owner to remove themselves from that for, uh, for some time, as I start to think about the things that come before, what, what do you tell them to point them in that direction?

Um, I mean, most of the things that the biggest thing is how much do people need to live on? So that's where we tend to start. If you're a small business owner, um, Because that can shock people into action. So I often go to business owners and we get to this stage where they haven't got any business goals.

And we literally start, if they're a single, you know, a single person or they've got five different employees, we go back to a cash flow forecast of understanding how much money they actually need in the bank each month to, to, um, to actually just stay afloat in their current status, ignoring that they need to get customers on. Right. to stay afloat, to keep your office or to keep your house or, you know, to keep your two employees. How much do you need to, because you would be surprised how many businesses don't even have a basic cash flow forecast and don't know how much money they need in each month to actually survive. So we actually do that. And I find that's really good for shocking people into action because they'll go, oh. I actually don't earn enough to live. So, um, or I'm going to lose my office in two months if I don't do something. So that's a really good. So, going back to actual reality of where we are, so I really recommend anyone who is just a bit unsure at this stage, go back and you have to be quite brutal, you know, don't forget to take 20, in the UK it's 20 percent tax, so take 20 percent off taxes. What you, you know, what you think your earnings need to be. Look at, you know, your mortgage, your bills, your, if you've got an office, your office, your office bills. Whatever your computer breaks down, you need to split that cost probably across the year. You know, travel, food, everything. Break it down, go really back to basics and go right, Okay, this is going to scare me, but how much do I need?

Because from that, great business goals come. because you've got the facts and you know how much you need to live on. So then you can say, right, okay, I need to increase my, you know, my turnover by 10 percent this year to actually live, you know, so that's a base business goal. It might be that you do, sometimes you do base and stretch goals.

So you've got a base business goal to live. I need to get 10 percent more, you know, to live really comfortably. I need 20 percent more. So you can set two goals and try and reach the first. And then if you reach the first go to the second. And then that is a really good place to start. And then, once you've done that, you can say, OK, I've got, I need to increase it by 10%.

That means I need to earn another 20, 000 this year. Okay, each of my products is a thousand pounds each. That means I need 20 customers. So we then say, right, we need 20 customers. My conversion rate is 10%. Oh God, I'm trying to work it backwards. That's 200 customers, 200 prospects I need in to get to 20 customers. So then you're like, right, I need 200 prospects, right? Okay. So, um. Uh, right. That's, that's my sort of marketing goal, 200 prospects. And then you start working out where you can get those 200 prospects from. And I feel like that proper grounding back to reality of figures is a really good place to take you back before you move forward.

Yeah, I think some people operate on the principle of it works better when I don't know, you know, 

Ignorance is bliss.

exerts its place, you know, they don't want to get into these, um, anxiety inducing numbers, but you need to know as a business owner, you need to know, uh, cause you wonder like, how is this business surviving, you know, what are you doing in order for it to survive?

Are you just kind of, uh, uh, uh, responsive? You just, um, just. Reactive to things. You're just doing stuff to keep it afloat. But if you have a plan, then you're able to craft the marketing to address the goals that you actually have. And it's more than just make more money. It's like these are the specific things that I want to accomplish over the next couple of years.

And therefore I can structure my marketing around those goals and I can make a plan that works for me. based on how I want to build out my business. And so that's good. And this has been so good. Is there any, are there any last things that you want to share with the people about, uh, uh, do it yourself marketing for the business that the, that is, you think is really good and they would might gain benefit from.

I just want to say, so for example, all the things that I've shown, like doing the Um, the talking to customers up front and the, or the planning, et cetera, and going back with your business goals. They seem like an effort, but like you said, if you don't have those, you're like living day to day and it's really stressful.

It's actually less stressful to do that upfront work and spend time doing that because it makes everything so much easier. It really does. And, um, you know, I've done it with customers and then suddenly they're. Oh, okay. Right. I've got a focus and I've got a direction. I'm not wasting hours on stuff that actually didn't mean anything. Um, I also like, I don't know if you've seen that matrix of tasks. So I, big thing that I do with SME business owners is we do a list of tasks that they have to do. And then I think it's the Eisenhower matrix where it's the urgent and important, not urgent and important. Uh, Unimportant and basically not urgent.

Um, so there's four, four boxes. And I make them, categorise them, because the stuff that's urgent and important needs to be done. And the stuff that is important but not urgent needs to be scheduled. And pretty much the other things in the other two boxes. You can probably get rid of, if it's not important and not urgent, you actually need to do it. So, you know, as part of this exercise of doing your processes, do that as well and get rid of all of the gump that you don't need to do because you'll probably find that actually you have time to do all this upfront work if you get rid of all that stuff.

That's good stuff. That's good bit of closing advice. Thank you so much, Anna, for sharing your marketing expertise with us today. The people may want to find out more from you or contact you. Where can people find you online?

So LinkedIn's best for me. Um, I'm, I would say I'm the only Anna Bravington on there, but someone set up a spam account, which has also got my face on it. 

Uh, so I am the Anna Bravington with the rainbow top on and still haven't got LinkedIn to get rid of the other one, but I'm quite easy. I'm a LinkedIn top voice.

So I've got the little blue badge next to my name. Sounds very posh,

doesn't it? 

yeah,

that's me. And I, yeah, I've got some rainbow top on and bright red hair. So I, if people want to connect with me, please do. I'm very social and love chatting to people. So, and if anyone wants any more advice, just DM me. I'm always happy to help.

that you do. You are very social. Thanks so much, Anna, for joining us and sharing your expertise with the people once again, this has been a useful content podcast, useful content classroom dismissed

and we're clear.

Yeah. 

Nice.

Was it all

right? 

yeah, yeah. Well done. Well done. Well done. Well done. Fair play as they say. you know, um, I, I tend to, I didn't get to one question, which was don't try to be everything to everyone.

Um, yeah. You want to just talk about that for a minute? And this post credit scene, like Marvel.

I, I think that's going back to going back to the understanding your audience and understand your customers. If they don't. know their audience. They tend to try to talk to everyone and everything, you know, and talk about everything at the same time. And it's really difficult because as SMEs, they don't have the time to talk to everyone. And it means that every single person does not have the same issues and they do not have the same wants or needs. And some businesses are tailored to have maybe 20 different audiences, but you just don't do it all at the same time. So for example, I worked with a company, I mean, they probably had probably about 100 different sectors that they could work with. And so we would spend three months targeting the plumbing sector with pictures of plumbers and testimonials of plumbers. Didn't mean that they only did plumbers. It was just that that's who we were targeting and plumbers had certain issues. And then three months up, we do another three months talking with lawyers and pictures of lawyers and testimonies of lawyers and lawyers use the same product, but for different issues. So it was making sure that we were speaking to the audiences. And, um, I SMEs, if they haven't gone through this stage of customer persona creation, understanding who's using their audience and why. It's very easy to go. I'm just going to target everyone because you don't know what you need to target and who you need to target.

And

I think it's a very marketing thing that you need to know about campaigns and how you target campaigns at different people at different times. People worry that I'm going to target plumbers. People think I only do plumbing, 

but they 

don't. The plumbers take notice because it's pictures of plumbing.

Everyone else ignores it. And then the lawyers, next time they see the picture, the lawyers go, Oh, that's for me. So people ignore stuff that isn't relevant to them. So, and I think there's a scared, there's, there's people are scared to do that because they just think it's going to put everyone off.

Yeah. I think that's a big problem with how people, uh, understand marketing. Uh, like for, for example, we have, we're working with a company and the company, the service that they offer is offered to a ton of different industries. Like they don't have a vertical, they don't have a specific vertical. It's like, you know, it's like tech and it's communications and government agencies and NGOs that the type of service that they offer can apply to almost anyone.

And they are doing some marketing and in the marketing, they want to list everyone. And I'm, and I'm telling them, well like, what do these people have in common? You have to define what these people have. And what was the problem you were solving for them? And you have to begin to focus on talking about that particular thing.

and not listing every single industry. The list will be endless eventually because what the service that you offer is a problem that all of these industries can have. And, um, and I'm trying to get them to not say. 12 different verticals as, as opposed to like, just say the one thing, what, what problem do you have?

What problem do you solve for them? What's the thing that you, you know, and you might say somewhere we've worked with these people. And if you have some big names, you want to include those. It might be a bank or it might be, you know, some company energy sustainability or whatever it is. If you want to seem like you're hip and you doing.

Look for good people, but then you're not really serving the company itself. You're serving the problem. You're trying to figure out what, what is this thing that I'm solving for them. And I think that's a generally a problem.

and sometimes it's, you know, it's the job title you're going after. So, you know, you might be going after head of marketing and there might be a head of marketing at 30 different sectors, but generally the head of marketing role has the same issues no matter what sector you're in, you know, so yeah, it might be that that issue is, uh, you know, When someone says like they do 30 sectors, we do 30 sectors, but you actually only have one customer in the in the entire of those sectors, and it's a head of marketing. 

So talk to them and talking that talk about heads of marketing, talk about the issues they have and actually sector doesn't matter because you're going after the persona. I think You know, there's, there's so many different ways to niche down your conversation, isn't there? It's by the person, by the pain point, by the sector, you know, by, you know, some, some issue they've had, you know, there's so many different ways to do it and you have to work out what's going to work best for your business. Um, cause there's so many different ways to do it. I think that's, what's confusing about marketing. It's

so individual for each company and it's so based on, you know, who they are, who their audience were. I used to have a customer and there were two customers, property companies, almost identical. And yet the same thing did not work for them.

There was a slight tweak in their audience and, um, and the same thing didn't work. So you couldn't go, Oh, that worked for so and so, so it'll work for you because it didn't. It was, it was really, really interesting.

Yeah. 

And, you know, I see that, you see it all the time with businesses, they look at their competitors and go, Oh, that's what they're doing.

I should do that. But that's not always, it's not always what they should be, should be doing. You know, it's these, these research tasks are so important at the beginning, chatting to your customers or potential customers and really having a conversation with them. I think that's lost a bit in marketing now we're all very data driven, but actually even when I worked, I headed up digital marketing at game. We had an insight team that had a real customer panel and they talked to them and they got so much wonderful insight from them, it was amazing.

Oh, I have such big stories about this, um, for my personal and business experience. Um, what, what, what I don't want to keep you much longer.

That's fine. 

This is like the post credit, the post credit might be a different show altogether. Um, but I agree with you a hundred percent. And I think that's lost on a lot of companies and as well as marketers.

Cause sometimes we don't advise people. Well, we want to do the quick and dirty thing and just kind of like, we run ads or. You know, or something and then a B test along the way and figure it out. So for business people, they have, you have to experiment for yourself and you have to get into your own customers and your own and get well, own data from your customers to figure it out.

You can't just look at a similar business and say, I am them, right? Because if you are them, unless you suppose, um, and there's somebody recently who has. I heard talking about a situation where they, um, you know, they were talking about positioning and they were saying that they were working with this company who gave this particular service.

And every time they were going to pitch the service, what the people will say is, Oh, you like these people? And, um, they would describe them as the bigger company. Now, when you get that response in a pitch, you could tell where the people's heads are already. They are going to say. Well, maybe you might be a little cheaper, but they are more experienced.

They can do it better, you know? And so, you know, it's part of it was a position positioning problem. But the other part was that, um, you, you can't just look at somebody else and say, Oh, let me just do it. Like they are, you really have to dig into. What makes you different and

differentiate and talk to your customers and find out what they say about you.

I love those conversations. I really do love them. I love to talk to the clients of my clients and hear what they have to say.

And they tell you things that they would never, ever say

to the actual client. They're like, you 

Yeah. It's so fun. It's so fun and I absolutely love it. And uh, it's very, you know, as a, you know, as a business owner myself, you know, Sometimes people, we, we like to talk about sort of like our differentiators because myself and my, my colleague from my business, we're both ex programmers, which surprises people, uh, so we're quite techie, so, um, Our USP, we tend to go for, have a lot of, um, tech clients because we're ex programmers, we understand what it's like to build stuff, we also understand what it's like to be able to try and communicate that stuff to people. Um, so, so for our, for our niches, it kind of came from that experience, oh, marketeers that know tech. That's really interesting. The only problem is, when you're known for being techie, Everyone gets you involved in, uh, in tech things, which is wonderful because I love tech and a bane at the same time, you know, because I, I'm a soft software background.

So, you know, programming and software. I don't build computers. I'm not a hardware person yet. When people hear computing, they hit, you know, they think you can do everything. Um, so,

install windows for 

yeah, it's funny because, um, You know, it's nice because that's our sort of USP and that's something a bit different about us, you know, to someone who else that might have done marketing strategy.

And also I've always been a business mentor for many years and Anne Marie is also a trained business analyst. So this is why we talk a lot about business goals. This is where this comes in. Um, and at Oxford Innovation Space, I, that's the innovation director is like a business support. Mentor and coach.

Um, marketing is my obviously area specialisms. Um, And so we're a bit different. And this is what we try to do because we could make ourselves a bit like other strategy agencies. But actually, you know, we got the business side. So we understand business. We've got the tech side. So we understand tech. So we have to think about, People make an organization.

What makes us different? What makes us a bit unusual? And that is, that is some of our differentiators. And we may offer the similar service, you know, marketing strategy, or we do a bit of business strategy as well, as other people. Like you said, you've got two businesses offering similar stuff. But, you know, we have some very specific things that we're good at and that are unique to us.

So you have to start picking those out and then working out what customers are going to find those important to them, I think.

Yeah. I, I, when we talk to customers, we, we have this trifecta. It's your values, your expertise, and your story. Those three things. Right. What do you believe in? What are the intangible things about you that won't change your expertise? What are you good at? What are you trained in? What you've learned and honed over the years that you can serve people with?

And then what is your story? How did you get here?

What are the things inside of your journey that you want people to know? And every, all those things come to bear inside of what kind of brand you're building and what kind of company you have, because they come out, you know, your expertise is back in tech, you know, your stories are very specific.

You're neurodivergent, uh, you know, you have a son who has autism. And, and so that comes out, you know, um. And, and so, yeah, so those things add up and then you could, it could present you around a particular 

I think those are the, things, you know, people say about AI, um, taking over a lot at the moment. Those things, the three things that you mentioned. are going to win the war against AI. I love AI. I use it all the time, but it doesn't have a story. It doesn't have 25 years of experience.

It doesn't, not your lived experience where, you know, I'm, I'm a big fan of Mark Schaefer and, um, I've seen a few of his

talks. I'm part of his rise group.

I'm going 

are you,

I, 

few weeks, hopefully, hopefully, I keep my fingers 

I love him. And the one thing that I love about his, Um, and he has blogs and his talks is he go, he talks about his experiences when I went to this business and this happened or I saw this, there's one about a bar of soap.

I saw this bar of soap and I thought, oh my God, you know, oh my goodness, this, it was about, um, handmade soap and why people buy sort of that specific handmade brand. You know, AI can't replicate that and as much as I'm a techie and I love AI and I think it's really useful, if people want to differentiate themselves, you know, in this sort of current climate, those stories and your background are irreplaceable. So you can't replicate them. So you're really going to stand out. So I love, I love your three, your three, uh, areas. They're brilliant. Brilliant.

Thanks, I appreciate that. All right, let's, let's, let's stop this now before we cross an hour. Ha ha ha. We're going to stop the 

Okay.