Marketing is often the most challenging thing for a new HR consultant, but the enormity of it can feel overwhelming. For someone who has spent most of their career in HR, being responsible for marketing for your own business can feel like a completely new job in itself. There are so many areas of marketing, and so many factors involved, and the stakes can feel really high.
As with many large-scale tasks, or anything that feels overwhelming, breaking it down into smaller chunks is enormously helpful. When it comes to objectives, what that means is setting really narrow targets. That reduces the enormity of the task overall and really focuses the mind on what you want to achieve.
Obviously you want to get more clients, but that’s a really vague objective. To see tangible results it helps to be really specific, to focus your mind and your efforts where they are most needed.
For example, one of your marketing tools might be a newsletter or other mailshots to a contact list. Clearly it’s a good idea to get more people on your list, so setting yourself a target to increase your contact list by, say, 50 people before a certain date means you’re more likely to achieve it that a target of just increasing your list. Setting a specific number and deadline means you will absolutely make sure you ask people whether they would like to go on your list, and if you have a link to join, and perhaps an incentive to do so, you’ll share that more.
When it comes to wanting more clients, you can still set this as a target, but try being much more specific. You could say you want five more clients in the leisure sector. You’ll then make sure your marketing activities are very targeted towards that sector, which is likely to see results. It could be you want three new retained clients by a certain date, and again that means you’ll focus really hard on talking about retained services.
If you challenge yourself to sell one ‘first employee package’ by the end of the week, you’ll talk about it lots at networking and on social media, and will describe the benefits it can bring to new employers, and will probably see the impact of that.
You can decide the appropriate targets for you, and you may have broader longer-term ones as well. But if you’re feeling overwhelmed by marketing, don’t know where to start, ignore the longer-term broader goals for a while, and set yourself some really narrow focused short term ones. You’ll see an impact, which is motivating in itself, and the overall task of business development will seem much more achievable.
If you’re interested in talking to us about becoming a partner with face2faceHR, with bags of support, do get in touch.