A common question that I often get from small business owners is:

"How can I ensure that my marketing is attracting the right type of customer?"

This is a great question because your business is not for everyone and the wrong type of customer can be a very expensive drain on your business.

I recently realised that one of my marketing channels was generating the wrong type of customer. This meant I was spending a lot of time talking on the phone to people who were simply never going to buy from me. This is not a productive way to spend my time, so I immediately worked out a way to tweak this marketing channel so that it communicated more clearly which clients we are best suited to.

And in this episode of #snacktime, you can find out how I did just this.

About Jane Hillsdon

I'm a passionate award-winning marketer dedicated to helping small business owners make good decisions about their marketing.

I am the founder and Managing Director of a marketing agency called Dragonfly Marketing and the author of How To Do Marketing – A Comprehensive Guide For Small Business.  It's my mission to ensure that marketing is on the agenda for every regionally based small business in Australia. Why? Because I know that when marketing is done properly, it can help your business grow.

I believe small businesses are the backbone of our nation. When your business grows, it benefits not only you, and your family, it benefits your whole community. Small businesses create a vibrant and connected economy. We employ local people, we donate to local charities and we work together to build resilient and thriving regional communities.

On the marketing front, I am a Certified Practicing Marketer (CPM), a member of the Australian Marketing Institute (AMI) NSW Committee and a head judge for the AMI Awards for Excellence. I was awarded the Small Budget Marketing Award at the AMI Awards for Marketing Excellence in 2017, 2018 and 2019.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

How does what you wear affect your daily interactions with the people you do business with? 

How you present yourself contributes significantly to people’s first impressions of you. It tells people a visual story about you. How you dress and style yourself can be seen as an expression of your inner being and in business, your personal brand.

In this episode I speak with the fabulous Vanessa Lawrence from The Style Vibe. Vanessa is a personal stylist who works predominantly with corporate and professional women to help them feel more confident and empowered within themselves by developing their personal style.

And she is amazing at what she does. She has helped so many women (and a few dudes) identify and then really own their unique sense of style so that they can worry less about what they look like, and more about creating successful outcomes in their professional and personal lives.

Vanessa has some incredibly helpful and practical tips about how you can create and nail your personal style so that you feel more confident and content.

If you would like to find out more about Vanessa or The Style Vibe you can find her here:

Website: https://thestylevibe.com.au/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thestylevibe_/

About Jane Hillsdon

I'm a passionate award-winning marketer dedicated to helping small business owners make good decisions about their marketing.

I am the founder and Managing Director of a marketing agency called Dragonfly Marketing and the author of How To Do Marketing – A Comprehensive Guide For Small Business.  It's my mission to ensure that marketing is on the agenda for every regionally based small business in Australia. Why? Because I know that when marketing is done properly, it can help your business grow.

I believe small businesses are the backbone of our nation. When your business grows, it benefits not only you, and your family, it benefits your whole community. Small businesses create a vibrant and connected economy. We employ local people, we donate to local charities and we work together to build resilient and thriving regional communities.

On the marketing front, I am a Certified Practicing Marketer (CPM), a member of the Australian Marketing Institute (AMI) NSW Committee and a head judge for the AMI Awards for Excellence. I was awarded the Small Budget Marketing Award at the AMI Awards for Marketing Excellence in 2017, 2018 and 2019.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If I was to ask any of your customers which organisations that your small business sponsors, would they be able to tell me the answer?

One of the best things about small businesses based in regional Australia, is that when it comes to supporting local charities and fund-raisers, you are by far the most generous!

However, what I see happen way too often, is that business sponsorships and donations often happen sporadically and spontaneously. From a philanthropic perspective, this is fine. However, from a strategic business perspective, there are really smart ways that you can leverage your generosity so that it strengthens your brand.

Find out how in this episode of #snacktime.

About Jane Hillsdon

I'm a passionate award-winning marketer dedicated to helping small business owners make good decisions about their marketing.

I am the founder and Managing Director of a marketing agency called Dragonfly Marketing and the author of How To Do Marketing – A Comprehensive Guide For Small Business.  It's my mission to ensure that marketing is on the agenda for every regionally based small business in Australia. Why? Because I know that when marketing is done properly, it can help your business grow.

I believe small businesses are the backbone of our nation. When your business grows, it benefits not only you, and your family, it benefits your whole community. Small businesses create a vibrant and connected economy. We employ local people, we donate to local charities and we work together to build resilient and thriving regional communities.

On the marketing front, I am a Certified Practicing Marketer (CPM), a member of the Australian Marketing Institute (AMI) NSW Committee and a head judge for the AMI Awards for Excellence. I was awarded the Small Budget Marketing Award at the AMI Awards for Marketing Excellence in 2017, 2018 and 2019.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Clinton Griffiths is a physio. He is also a small business owner. He runs his own physio practice in Southern Sydney in a suburb called Cronulla.

He runs a fabulous practice with a great team, and one of the most amazing things he has achieved as a business owner is the relaxed and friendly culture that he has built.

This culture runs strongly throughout every touchpoint of the business; including his team, and the overall vibe within the practice itself. A great team and a great level of service has meant that Clinton has always experienced a really healthy and steady flow of word-of-mouth referrals. 

However, while Clinton thought this was great – he wanted to be a bit more in charge of his own destiny when it came to marketing.

Word-of-mouth referrals are always fantastic, however he knew he needed more than that to grow his business further. He knew that there were still plenty of people outside those that were being referred that could potentially be perfect clients for his clinic. 

Plus, he was always just a little bit nervous about what would happen if the word of mouth referrals dried up? He just didn’t really feel that he had as much control over that form of marketing that he would like to have.

So, in June last year, Clinton jumped on board with our How to do Marketing Academy. Since then he’s grown his revenue by 30% using a marketing system that allows him to have much more control over his own destiny than simply relying on word of mouth.

Listen to this episode to find out exactly how he has achieved this. 

If you would like to find out more about Clinton or his business; Beachside Physiotherapy, you can find him here:

Website: https://www.beachside-physio.com.au/

Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/beachsidephysiocronulla

About Jane Hillsdon

I'm a passionate award-winning marketer dedicated to helping small business owners make good decisions about their marketing.

I am the founder and Managing Director of a marketing agency called Dragonfly Marketing and the author of How To Do Marketing – A Comprehensive Guide For Small Business.  It's my mission to ensure that marketing is on the agenda for every regionally based small business in Australia. Why? Because I know that when marketing is done properly, it can help your business grow.

I believe small businesses are the backbone of our nation. When your business grows, it benefits not only you, and your family, it benefits your whole community. Small businesses create a vibrant and connected economy. We employ local people, we donate to local charities and we work together to build resilient and thriving regional communities.

On the marketing front, I am a Certified Practicing Marketer (CPM), a member of the Australian Marketing Institute (AMI) NSW Committee and a head judge for the AMI Awards for Excellence. I was awarded the Small Budget Marketing Award at the AMI Awards for Marketing Excellence in 2017, 2018 and 2019.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Customer testimonials are an incredibly powerful piece of content that can often be underestimated by small business owners.

They help to build trust by providing a third-party perspective about your business. You can rave on about how wonderful your business is until you are blue in the face, but if other people can rave about your business for you, it's infinitely more powerful!

So how do you manage to get a really powerful testimonial from your customers? And once you have them, where do you display them?

Find out in this episode of #snacktime.

About Jane Hillsdon

I'm a passionate award-winning marketer dedicated to helping small business owners make good decisions about their marketing.

I am the founder and Managing Director of a marketing agency called Dragonfly Marketing and the author of How To Do Marketing – A Comprehensive Guide For Small Business.  It's my mission to ensure that marketing is on the agenda for every regionally based small business in Australia. Why? Because I know that when marketing is done properly, it can help your business grow.

I believe small businesses are the backbone of our nation. When your business grows, it benefits not only you, and your family, it benefits your whole community. Small businesses create a vibrant and connected economy. We employ local people, we donate to local charities and we work together to build resilient and thriving regional communities.

On the marketing front, I am a Certified Practicing Marketer (CPM), a member of the Australian Marketing Institute (AMI) NSW Committee and a head judge for the AMI Awards for Excellence. I was awarded the Small Budget Marketing Award at the AMI Awards for Marketing Excellence in 2017, 2018 and 2019.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Last year, COVID managed to wipe out the revenue streams for businesses whose products and services relied upon face to face delivery.

Leonie Cutts, a professional facilitator and coach, and co-founder of a business called CCS Corporation was one of these businesses.

One of the products that she has co-developed is the Compatibility Communication System (CCS), a communication tool that helps create open and honest communication, and has been used by thousands of trainers, coaches and learning experts around the world. 

However the use of this tool was primarily restricted to being used in face to face sessions with groups of business people.

So with this blow to her businesses revenue stream, Leonie new that she had to do something differently. 

She had always had marketing in the back of her mind as she was working on her business, but there had never really been a catalyst or a compelling reason to invest in it. She wasn’t really sure what it involved and she really didn’t want to waste any time or money in something that wasn’t going to directly impact her bottom line.

Fast-forward to today and Leonie has a fantastic content marketing system in place that truly leverages her strengths and her passions. 

As a result, she is increasing her visibility, growing her connections and her community and through all of this, demonstrating her expertise and how people can use her products to facilitate honest and open communication.

 

In this episode, you’ll hear from Leonie about her transition from being really hesitant to invest in marketing, to now embracing the opportunity, having fun with it and having complete clarity about how what she is doing in this space, will ultimately affect her businesses bottom line.

 

If you would like to get in touch with Leonie, you can find her here:

Website: https://ccs.cards/

LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/leonie-cutts-15772840/

 

 

About Jane Hillsdon

I'm a passionate award-winning marketer dedicated to helping small business owners make good decisions about their marketing.

I am the founder and Managing Director of a marketing agency called Dragonfly Marketing and the author of How To Do Marketing – A Comprehensive Guide For Small Business.  It's my mission to ensure that marketing is on the agenda for every regionally based small business in Australia. Why? Because I know that when marketing is done properly, it can help your business grow.

I believe small businesses are the backbone of our nation. When your business grows, it benefits not only you, and your family, it benefits your whole community. Small businesses create a vibrant and connected economy. We employ local people, we donate to local charities and we work together to build resilient and thriving regional communities.

On the marketing front, I am a Certified Practicing Marketer (CPM), a member of the Australian Marketing Institute (AMI) NSW Committee and a head judge for the AMI Awards for Excellence. I was awarded the Small Budget Marketing Award at the AMI Awards for Marketing Excellence in 2017, 2018 and 2019.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

One of the single biggest challenges that I see small business owners facing when it comes to publishing thought-leadership content is fear.

Fear of saying the wrong thing
Fear of being judged by your contemporaries
Fear of seeming to be unprofessional
Fear of looking like a shameless self-promoter
Fear of ‘annoying’ people by showing up in people’s feed too often
Fear of creating too much work for yourself by positioning yourself as the key person in your business
Fear of no-one responding to your content

I see you and I get it. However, there are things that we can do to ensure that your greatest fears about getting yourself out there on the public stage that is social media, are not realised.

In this episode, I address all of the above fears and how you can overcome these with a switch of mindset, a reality check or actions that will ensure your content marketing only helps to position your business and your personal brand in a positive light.

About Jane Hillsdon

I'm a passionate award-winning marketer dedicated to helping small business owners make good decisions about their marketing.

I am the founder and Managing Director of a marketing agency called Dragonfly Marketing and the author of How To Do Marketing – A Comprehensive Guide For Small Business.  It's my mission to ensure that marketing is on the agenda for every regionally based small business in Australia. Why? Because I know that when marketing is done properly, it can help your business grow.

I believe small businesses are the backbone of our nation. When your business grows, it benefits not only you, and your family, it benefits your whole community. Small businesses create a vibrant and connected economy. We employ local people, we donate to local charities and we work together to build resilient and thriving regional communities.

On the marketing front, I am a Certified Practicing Marketer (CPM), a member of the Australian Marketing Institute (AMI) NSW Committee and a head judge for the AMI Awards for Excellence. I was awarded the Small Budget Marketing Award at the AMI Awards for Marketing Excellence in 2017, 2018 and 2019.

 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hilary O’Dwyer is a Virtual CFO. She is a numbers ninja and is founder of Titian Consulting and in mid 2020, Hilary realised that if she wanted to grow her business and her brand to extend beyond her natural network, she was going to need to do some marketing.

At this point, Hilary had already secured some great client retainer work and was receiving some word-of-mouth referrals from this work as well as her existing business network. However, Hilary’s plans for her business were to increase the work she was getting so that she could perhaps look at employing one or two more team members.

The problem was, when it came to marketing, she just didn’t know where to start. When she started to think about the idea of getting herself out there using social media, she became quite overwhelmed at the thought.

Fortunately for us both, Hilary attended the Marketing Masterclass that I presented to the Business Chicks network and within a week, she had signed up to my How to do Marketing Academy.

So for the past 9 months, Hilary has been planning and implementing the marketing for her business, and listeners, she is absolutely rocking it!

With a small budget and limited time to spend on her marketing, Hilary has been focusing on the marketing activity that will help her to become more visible online, including some killer content marketing which she is publishing out via LinkedIn…

If you would like to get in touch with Hilary, you can find her here:

Website: https://titian.consulting/

LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/hilary-o-dwyer-85b35913/

 

About Jane Hillsdon

I'm a passionate award-winning marketer dedicated to helping small business owners make good decisions about their marketing.

I am the founder and Managing Director of a marketing agency called Dragonfly Marketing and the author of How To Do Marketing – A Comprehensive Guide For Small Business.  It's my mission to ensure that marketing is on the agenda for every regionally based small business in Australia. Why? Because I know that when marketing is done properly, it can help your business grow.

I believe small businesses are the backbone of our nation. When your business grows, it benefits not only you, and your family, it benefits your whole community. Small businesses create a vibrant and connected economy. We employ local people, we donate to local charities and we work together to build resilient and thriving regional communities.

On the marketing front, I am a Certified Practicing Marketer (CPM), a member of the Australian Marketing Institute (AMI) NSW Committee and a head judge for the AMI Awards for Excellence. I was awarded the Small Budget Marketing Award at the AMI Awards for Marketing Excellence in 2017, 2018 and 2019.

 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Publishing regular blog posts is a marketing tactic that can help you to achieve quite a few marketing objectives. Blog posts can position you as a thought-leader, they can build trust from prospective customers, they can help to demonstrate your expertise in a topic. 

And on a more functional side, when posted to your website, they can increase the chances of your business being found online when someone is searching for a solution that you offer!

So if this is a marketing tactic that you think might fit into your content marketing plans, then I’d suggest listening to this episode of The How to do Marketing Show, featuring Remi Audette.

Remi Audette is an SEO Copywriter and Content Marketer who loves breaking down the mystery behind SEO, and helps small businesses take control of their content so they can grow online.

In this conversation we talk about the benefits of blog writing for small business. We cover off:

• Why is it important for small business owners to consider blogging as part of their marketing activity
• Should every business blog? 
• What a best-practice blog post looks like. E.g. word count, structure, SEO considerations etc.
• Where businesses typically go wrong with their blog writing or their website copy
• How to write a blog post that will help build trust with a prospective customer
• The link between search engine optimisation (SEO) and a business’s online website copy
• Explanation of some of the technical terms relating to website copy 
• What questions you ask a potential SEO provider if you are looking to outsource your SEO work

If you would like to get in touch with Remi, you can find her here:

Website: https://www.remiaudettecopywriter.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/remiaudettecopywriter/

About Jane Hillsdon

I'm a passionate award-winning marketer dedicated to helping small business owners make good decisions about their marketing.

I am the founder and Managing Director of a marketing agency called Dragonfly Marketing and the author of How To Do Marketing – A Comprehensive Guide For Small Business.  It's my mission to ensure that marketing is on the agenda for every regionally based small business in Australia. Why? Because I know that when marketing is done properly, it can help your business grow.

I believe small businesses are the backbone of our nation. When your business grows, it benefits not only you, and your family, it benefits your whole community. Small businesses create a vibrant and connected economy. We employ local people, we donate to local charities and we work together to build resilient and thriving regional communities.

On the marketing front, I am a Certified Practicing Marketer (CPM), a member of the Australian Marketing Institute (AMI) NSW Committee and a head judge for the AMI Awards for Excellence. I was awarded the Small Budget Marketing Award at the AMI Awards for Marketing Excellence in 2017, 2018 and 2019.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

My personal brand is synonymous with my business. I am the principal consultant, the founder and director of my business. While I have a team of fabulous experts who work with me to deliver projects, a lot of the time, my clients are buying me and my expertise.

I will be the one who works closely with them to define their marketing strategy. To do this well, they need to trust my judgement and know that my years of training and experience lead to creative and strategic thinking that will benefit their business.

To have the confidence to engage my consulting services, clients need to not only get to know, like and trust my brand; Dragonfly Marketing, they also need to get to know, like and trust me. 

So in this episode of the How to do Marketing Show, I share four hacks that I have honed over the years to help me create a personal brand that allows people to understand what I’m all about. 

Would you like to work directly with me to learn the marketing framework that I use for all of my clients? The How to do Marketing Academy is a 6-month program that shows you how to plan, implement and measure your marketing to create consistent results for your business. So if you are sick of wondering what content you should be posting, or what marketing channels you should be investing in and whether any of the marketing you are doing is actually working, come and join us in the Academy. You’ll never have to worry about that again. Applications for the How to do Marketing Academy close Friday 5 March 2021. Apply today.

About Jane Hillsdon

I'm a passionate award-winning marketer dedicated to helping small business owners make good decisions about their marketing.

I am the founder and Managing Director of Dragonfly Marketing and the author of How To Do Marketing – A Comprehensive Guide For Small Business.  It's my mission to ensure that marketing is on the agenda for every regionally based small business in Australia. Why? Because I know that when marketing is done properly, it can help your business grow.

I believe small businesses are the backbone of our nation. When your business grows, it benefits not only you, and your family, it benefits your whole community. Small businesses create a vibrant and connected economy. We employ local people, we donate to local charities and we work together to build resilient and thriving regional communities.

On the marketing front, I am a Certified Practicing Marketer (CPM), a member of the Australian Marketing Institute (AMI) NSW Committee and a head judge for the AMI Awards for Excellence. I was awarded the Small Budget Marketing Award at the AMI Awards for Marketing Excellence in 2017, 2018 and 2019.

 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.