Let's face it, planning marketing campaigns can be tough. There are so many variables at play that it can easily wind up feeling like rocket science. You have to consider the goals you want to achieve, the type of campaign that should be run to meet those goals (awareness vs. action – and a thousand different types of action campaigns), audience demographics, the message of your campaign, the channels you're going to use to deliver it, how your going to test it and optimize it…and this is all before you even start considering what media you want to use or even what your messages might be! It's easy to get overwhelmed. A good way to help simplify this process is to create a template like the one included in this article. One of the most important things to when preparing to set up a marketing campaign is to thoroughly plan it out! Let’s break down how to do so in an effective way.

You’ve probably heard the expression “Content is king.” It still holds true, but only when managed with an effective content marketing strategy. While it's been said that this is the golden age of content, it's not always an easy thing to see all of your content efforts pay off. Everything from SEO driven content to social media content creation is getting harder and harder. ​The good news is this means your need for a content distribution strategy isn't going anywhere. You need strategies for better discoverability. The best way to get found is through compelling, engaging and fresh content that gets in front of your target audience in a natural and organic way. This article outlines tips and strategies you can try out in 2023 to help you distribute your content in front of the right people. A consistent distribution strategy is key to successful digital marketing efforts.

Small businesses typically have limited budgets, support, and time. Lead generation is one of the most important aspects of any small business and yet it is also one of the most challenging aspects to master consistently. It’s not surprising that most small businesses feel that struggles with lead generation and attracting clients in a reliable way is their biggest risk to their business. Within this article we will breakdown our 8 top tips to help you improve your lead generation for your small business. Lead generation has been an area of my own business that I haven’t had to worry about for many years. I have been solidly booked with clients, and at many times waitlisted out for months in advance, to the extent that I have not had to actively promote my offers to the public. This is possible for you, too. Let’s discuss what I’ve found to be tried and true methods for generating leads!

How you prepare for the holidays as a small business determines not just how you are likely to close out the year, but it also speaks volumes as to what matters to you as a business owner. The holiday season is a time of year where we can practice values-driven marketing and encourage conscious consumerism. As a business owner who has navigated many holiday seasons, I have learned a thing or two about different ways we can approach the most consumerism-driven time of the year. This article breaks down different content ideas to help you creatively stand out while upholding your business values and creative ideas for how to market your business as well as your beliefs during Black Friday week. Let’s dive in!

Social media marketing has revolutionized the way small businesses create awareness around their products and services. Instagram is one of the most popular social media tools among businesses and for good reason. There is incredible potential to not only build a strong brand presence on Instagram, but also generate quality leads that help you grow your business. Most small businesses spend all of their time planning and creating content to share on social media, and some even know how to apply strategy to their content and marketing efforts in an effort to produce growth. But few know how to analyze content performance. It’s one thing to be consistent with publishing content on social media, yet it’s another thing to know how to understand and review performance metrics. Today, we are going to look at why we want to pay attention to our content performance insights and how to start tracking our analytics. Let’s dive in.

More likely than not, we already understand the importance consistency plays in helping us to achieve results we desire. The concept of consistency is not a foreign one, especially in business. Consistency is one of the most important skills we can exercise as solopreneurs and brands working to grow our presence online. Yet, with the word consistency tossed around all too often, when it comes to being consistent at marketing your business, we want to understand what that actually means and how we can do so in a way that is sustainable for us. Within this article, we breakdown why consistency matters in relation to your marketing, how to redefine consistency for yourself, and ways that you can begin to become more consistent at marketing your business online. Let’s dive in!

Every small business owner should understand the power a strong brand has in helping them to elevate their online presence. Developing a strong brand becomes something that you cannot copy from your competitors as well as your competitors cannot copy from you because it is what makes you unique. As small business owners working to grow our businesses online, emphasizing your brand quality can help you not only stand out in a sea of sameness online, but it can also help you enhance your marketing in a way that helps you create more business for yourself in a sustainable and long lasting way. Within this article we are going to discuss how branding helps your marketing, specifically touching on ways you can take your marketing to the next level by improving the quality of your brand.

Great client and customer experiences start way before a person arrives at your website or begin working with you. Long before people get exposed to your brand on a personal level, they’ve followed a series of customer journey touch points that empowered them to get to know your brand more. In this article, I’ll show you how customer journey touch points help shape an unforgettable customer experience that makes it easy for folks to say Yes to getting involved in what your business offers. We’ll also take a look at the different types of customer journey touch points, from those focused on the pre-purchase period to those focused on the post-purchase period.

Personalized marketing has many benefits, from helping you to better understand and connect with your desired audience to tailoring your marketing to create unforgettable experiences. It comes as no surprise that personalized marketing can help increase the quality of leads that come into your business as well as help you build stronger brand loyalty. Yet, if done wrong, the data and insights you gain about your audience could quickly cause you to exploit the very people you want to serve and help. Within this article, I will be discussing what personalized marketing is and how we can practice it without exploiting our audiences in the process.

Building a tech stack for your small business will not only help you better manage your organization, it will also help you streamline your processes and keep your business functioning in a balanced and sustainable way. Your tech stack can also help you manage team members as well as clients, supporting you in creating a stellar experience for those who are involved in your business. There are countless tech options out there for small business owners to choose from, which can be overwhelming. Small business owners can wind up choosing the wrong tech for the type of business they are running, choose tech that they don’t even need, or choose tech that is too complicated for them to actually use consistently. Within this article, I am going to share with you my top recommendations for technology to use to manage your small business. As well, I will share with you some of the best options out there and ways you can choose the right technology for your business. Let’s dive in!

Making content to publish online is the easy part. Creating content that stands out in an overly crowded online space is another story. If you want to create great value for your brand that organically attracts your target audience to your business, this article is for you. There are core content practices that can be commonly experienced on each and every online platform. There is a reason that causes certain pieces of digital content to go viral, even if the person who created a viral piece doesn’t know why or how it got the attention it did! In many ways, our brands reputation is built largely due to the content it shares. When we work to create content in meaningful ways, we can support our brands in creating a memorable experience for people, ultimately helping our businesses become associated with that praise. Within this article, I am going to share my top tips for creating stand out visual marketing content in hopes of helping you enhance your online brand presence in a way that drives business growth.

In the world of business, success metrics are often referenced as Key Performance Indicators (or KPI’S). There are standard indicators that most business considered to be the go to metrics to track in order to determine whether a business is performing in the direction one wants it to go. Yet, most of the metrics we often track to indicate whether a business is performing up to a level of success standard typically relate to profit. There are many other indicators that a business can (and probably should) track to help them gauge whether a business is successful. Other indicators can not only help a business owner feel more satisfaction regarding the performance of their business, but also gain a deeper sensation of pride, fulfillment and accomplishment. When we only gauge the success of a business in response to monetary indicators, this can cause business owners to center all of their beliefs about success around money. There are many indicators that can point to the successfulness of a business, and within this article I am going to share with you what they are. My hope is that this article can help you determine what the best metrics are for you to track in order to determine the success of your business.

If you are anything like me, where you enjoy searching current keyword and topic trends, then i’m sure you have noticed an uptick lately of the topics of both burnout as well as mental health. When I recently was doing research for Summer 2022 marketing trends, in numerous occasions I came to articles that stated that discussions around both burnout and mental health are quite big right now in the realm of online business. If I know one thing for sure it’s that we should not ever take the angle of glamorizing the concept of burnout. Rather, we must consider why this topic is currently trending and what we can do to not just simply attempt to avoid or cure burnout, but get to the root causes that are creating such things in the first place. Within this article I dissect ways we can look at as well as approach burnout, providing alternative approaches to this topic that you may not have considered before. As well, I share ways to determine whether you are in a state of burnout (no shame if you are! In reality, most of us probably are) and how to get to the root of your burnout woes.

How have you been taught to set your pricing as an indie biz owner? Or maybe you haven’t been taught and you just wing it?

Pricing establishment as well as pricing strategy are two things that each and every business owner should take incredibly seriously. In the current era of small business, unethical pricing practices are becoming standard in most industries. If we wish to do business in a way that is most beneficial for people as well as the planet, then taking into consideration how we implement ethical pricing into our organization is essential. Within this article I unpack signs that point to unethical pricing, including examples. As well, I walk you through ways to begin implementing ethical standards for your pricing practices so that you can walk away understanding what is needed in order to ensure your pricing is morally sound.

If you are trying to grow your online presence, then developing both your business and your brand can help you get there. Developing a business and developing a brand go hand in hand. Your brand will support your business and your business will support your brand, yet developing each requires taking a slightly different approach. I find that it is helpful for indie biz owners and growing founders to clearly understand the difference between their brand and their business because this helps you identify as well as better strategize how you will grow your online presence in an ethical, sustainable and authentic way. Within this article, I break down the differences between a business and a brand, providing readers with tangible takeaways that you can apply right away to help you distinguish yourself online.

Editorial planning is a daily process that connects your short-term content to your long-term strategy. The editorial calendar helps you prioritize your content by aligning it with your audience's needs and your business goals. This is an incredibly important practice for any online business owner for it will not only help you see better results from your content efforts, but it will also help you establish sustainable strategies to support your business in growing both now and into the future. What I appreciate the most about using an editorial calendar system is that it helps me provide my content with a direction as well as a purpose while also giving me room to be flexible with my plan in response to the ever-changing nature of online marketing. Within this article I share what an editorial calendar is, how it differs from a content plan, and ways you can set up an editorial calendar for your business.

Having strong brand awareness can help you increase the chances of people noticing, connecting to, and trusting your brand. In turn, your strong brand awareness can help you grow your business and help more people with your products and services. Within this article I break down what brand awareness is and why it matters, providing you with some tangible tips to implement to begin establishing your own unique brand awareness strategy. You will learn about my 4 step brand awareness process that will help you to walk away fully understanding how to begin improving the awareness as well as experience of your brand!

Quarterly business planning can help you to streamline your planning process, focus more effectively on the projects and activities that will drive the most results, and create more direction and structure within your business. Since implementing a quarterly business planning practice, I have noticed that I start and complete projects with much more ease and feel more focused as well as productive when working on tasks. What I love about quarterly planning is that it leaves room for flexibility, creativity and innovation. By looking at each year in 4 quarterly seasons, you can plan in a way that honors your own seasons within your business and life, helping you to create more balance in the process. Within this article I am going to break down my 6-step quarterly business planning strategy that you will be able to take away and begin implementing!

Impact-focused businesses that are prioritizing community connection are beginning to see the importance of instilling a holistic approach to working with other people. Social ecology can help conscious business owners to instill styles of service that expand beyond traditional structures of working in community and with other people. A community based program can help to encourage the development of collaborative relationships between facilitators and participants, creating a more immersive and valuable experience for everyone involved. Within this article we discuss what community based programs are and how we can incorporate them into our service based businesses as a way to make more positive impact on people’s lives.

Our usage of the internet has evolved over time into a highly-interactive multimedia communication and entertainment medium. With our increased usage of the internet as ways to communicate, learn, and share information, it is only to be expected that higher levels of inclusivity have become necessary. One aspect of inclusive design examines ways in which we can design with diversity and gender inclusion and in mind. In the world of design, there are many traditions that unfortunately uphold stereotypical norms that can cause the way you design things to create environments of exclusion as well as lack of accessibility. Within this article, we discuss ways we can begin to incorporate gender inclusion into the design process, as this is a great first step for any business or organization to take to ensure they are creating an accessible and inclusive environment for their clients.