Do you want to Build Snowman? We are probably all freezing at the moment, so this felt kind of right and marginally funny… Freezing jokes aside, let me take you back to your childhood briefly, let’s go…
Christmas is around the corner… Puzzles, Legos, Hopscotch, Dominos… What were your go-to games? We all built something in one way or another, some of us (or maybe just me), took up a hobby because of a boy… I started doing origami to befriend the mum of the boy I liked… Yup. Even as a young girl I had my strategy in place to achieve my goal…Problem was I enjoyed spending time with the mum more than spending time with the boy but that’s a different story… Let’s talk about building your success.
Are you Scared to Build?
The origami passion may have started for the wrong reasons, but it stayed with me through the years. If I was stressed or having a creative block or even needed to refocus, I would go back to origami and switch off from everything for that minute or two (sometimes more if I forgotten it) until I created something pretty from nothing. I think this is my number one tip, to anyone who wants to create anything worthwhile. Take a break, if life gets in the way and if it all gets too much, STOP and regroup.
Back to our childhood… We all took something and converted it to something new, a puzzle, a Lego town, or a beautiful origami bird. What is it about building something that made us feel satisfied as a child? And when did we actually start getting scared of Building the important things in our life? Building a business, a career, our skillsets, our dreams?
Marketing Nest tagline is #BuildNurtureGrow, and those three little words tell you everything you need to know about us and our founder Antonella Ragona. Those three words were the beginning of our rebranding journey a year ago and are the essence of our changes.
One thing you may not know… the first Marketing Nest logo was originally an origami bird. It came from the concept that you take a piece of paper (any piece you can find) and when you fold it in the right places, it creates beautiful figurines.
Time to build your Strategy!
So is building origami really that different from #STRATEGIES? Just like in origami in strategy if you apply the right analysis, ask yourself the right questions you can then turn your strategies into a blueprint for success. This is the first blog of our 3 series of Blogs, Build Nurture Grow…
1. Know your business: your strengths, weaknesses, values, USP (Unique Selling Point) and set clear aims and objectives
2. Know and Understand your Audience and your Competitors
- Your Audience: It may seem an obvious thing to say but do you know who you want to attract and work with? Run an in-depth target audience analysis and truly understand what your audience need and want. Their pain and passion points and their buying behaviour. Remember the sentence in the Field of Dreams film “If you build it, they will come” find out who your THEY are and understand what your audience needs and make sure you “build it” make their journey as easy as possible.
- Your Competitors: We were wrongly taught that competitors are rivals to hate. Trust me sometimes you might not like some of them, but in general they are potential partners you can work with IF their values and ethics are in line with yours and if there is mutual respect and true interest in supporting each other. If a competitor doesn’t like you to succeed, puts you down and never compliment you in your success then he/she is a rival. Either way learn from them, what do you like about what they do? Do you like their videos, or maybe how creative their website is or maybe you like how they engage with their readers and followers.
3. Build your support Network and be ready
- Your Support Network: These are the people you can genuinely go to for support. Those who have years of experience and with whom you share values and vision. This network can be both online and offline. Ideally to be honest you want the two worlds to collide but this may not always be possible. Build your own community. They can be your mentors, your suppliers, your partners and even member of your own company. These are those people you could even refer to as fun because they talk highly of you even when you are not around.
- Be ready: Have all your contracts, pricing, documents and paperwork ready and start building a framework for your business that will make it easier for you and your client
Let us give some Pre-Christmas gifts…
here are a few tools for you!
What tools can get you there?
1. Know your business: This is the first step for any strategy, You need to know, your strengths, weaknesses, values, vision, USP and setting clear aims and objectives. Now, we can either help you with this or you might want to do it on your own in this case we can still support you by providing a few exercises we have designed at Marketing Nest that will help you with this task.
Once you have selected your aims and objectives and know what you want to do next there are other online project management tools that can help you monitor and deliver your marketing campaign on time, manage interactions with your customers and maximise your productivity
Online Tools: Asana, HubSpot, ProofHub, Monday
2. Know and Understand your Audience and your Competitors
To get you started we have few exercises we can share with you to support your Target Audience and Competitor Analysis. Then you can use data from your Google analytics, Google Trends, Social Media analytics from either the platform or from Social Media management tools like Hootsuite, CoSchedule, Buffer or Zoho Social.
You can also conduct surveys and get to know both your audience and competitors a lot better.
Another way to target your audience with your content is to use tools like AnswerThePublic.com which will give a selection of most popular searches that might help you decide your next blog, blog or even webinar or podcast.
Online Tools: Google Forms, Zoho, SurveyMonkey, Answer the Public
3. Build your support Network and be ready
For this you probably know my recommendations. Yes, you’ve guessed it Social Media is at Number one, which ever platform you are comfortable with use it to create a group or a chat or building a community. You can even go to online forums and answer questions from your audience.
The second tool could be something simple like WhatsApp group chats, arranging zoom meeting for your community and basically anything that helps you communicate better.
Online Tools: Social Media, WhatsApp, Quora
Hope you enjoyed this blog? Let us know which tools are your favourite, which you will test out and if there are any tools you think we should test for you.
Now you know where the BUILD came from, and that I technically started strategising at the age of 10 because of a boy.
#Build #BuildNtureGrow #BuildingStrategies
That’s all for this side of the year, but before we go we would like to wish you…
Merry Christmas and a truly
Fantastic & Prosperous new Year!
