Does marketing feel overwhelming to you and it leaves you feeling stuck? Here are some creative ways to market your business authentically.
Are you concerned about marketing and what marketing looks like? Do you wonder how to execute it, lay it out and have marketing plans? Katrina Aronson is a marketing genius with a mission to help women entrepreneurs make more money while doing what they love. In this post we’re going to cover all it entails to market your business authentically, lay out marketing campaigns, as well as your marketing plans.
About Katrina Aronson
Katrina worked in corporate finance before starting two six-figure businesses and now uses the experience she has in her small business marketing. And also, Katrina helps women exceed their monthly income goals while doing what they love, and her goal is to help you leave that hustle mode and mentality behind and enjoy the life that you’ve built and enjoy the business you’ve run.
Katrina is a marketing lead business coach. Marketing is her favorite thing. And part of the reason she’s obsessed with it is that she feels like, yes, we think of marketing as selling the thing that you do, but actually, there’s a lot of psychology behind it.
She comes from corporate finance or a super structured world. Then she became an entrepreneur because she’s more creative than structured. Being an entrepreneur, she gets to guide people to have successful businesses in a way that they feel good, and not like push, push, push. She also grew two businesses to multi-six figures.
Service-based entrepreneurs
Katrina works primarily with service-based entrepreneurs and photographers. These people are in her world, so she shares about how you scale that for yourself. And how do you do that in a way that is also feeling good?
Looking through the lens of scaling or marketing, how do you spend less time on your marketing but attract the most amount of leads to you? It will help if you don’t spend hours and hours a day on Instagram. People have been conditioned in the last five years to spend hours checking social media platforms daily.
Although Facebook has done an incredible job of teaching you that this is where you need to be and this is where you need to be spending all of your time. But there are so many other elements of your marketing that can be way more fun. Like getting on to something, maybe it is a podcast, or it will scale your time so that more people actually hear from you and maybe even see your work because what you do is so visual.
So what’s a stage that you can get yourself onto so that 1000 people see you instead of the seven people that are going to see your Instagram post? And that’s what it means to scale your time and do it from a place that feels good.
Katrina happens to love podcasts. That’s why she gets on them and also has her own. That’s her joy. She doesn’t find a lot of joy in writing blog posts, and for a while, that was what she had to do, and she would push herself to do it. But at the end of the day, now she outsources that stuff.
So understand that these are the things you can do to get in front of more people and make more impact in the same amount of time. Also, think about that in business terms, think about that in a marketing way. And you will blow your business out of the water.
Social media noise
In the beginning, when you’re trying to figure out who you are in your business and maybe you’re at the beginning of your journey. It’s normal to consume content from others. But it’s powerful if you can say okay, here are the three people that I’m going to follow because I love what they are doing. And I’m going to silence everyone else. So you don’t get confused from hearing from over 12 experts.
There’s something Katrina has taken to for two years now and has gotten good at it to keep the noise away. She doesn’t even follow anyone else in her industry. Zero people! She only has her coaches; otherwise, it’s all through books, or she listens to a podcast to get inspired about something, but she does not follow anyone in her industry.
That has helped her to be clear on what she likes and what she’s good at. She’s been her own guide and had to get quiet with herself and her thoughts.
Marketing while feeling overwhelmed
Find one thing that you do every single week. One thing for Katrina was jumping into her stories every single week and showing up for two minutes every single Wednesday, which she would add a ton of value. So there was the research she would put into it, like a mini-podcast before her podcast. And people knew to expect it.
People learned that this is what she did. She also found her voice doing this. And what you do from there is once you have that, you get to repurpose what you’ve created throughout the rest of the week.
Now the goal is that you will be able to hand off your repurposing. You may not be able to do that today because it costs money. But in the end, you’ll only have to focus on that one thing. So in terms of showing up in terms of engaging, you can only engage the people who respond to this, and someone else will take on everything else.
Showing your face
Showing your face to the cam helps; Instagram is all about reels now, so if a podcast isn’t your world, show up on reels once a week. And repurpose that into your stories so that you’re nurturing the people that begin to follow you. As a photographer, you must show your work; you can do that in your reels.
Just commit to where you’re going to show up once a week with power and put time and effort into that one piece, and now that can be 90 seconds. So that it is solid and you are showing up. Are people responding to that? Are you getting questions? That is where you have to lean into.
One of the most impactful things is sending that to your email list. So you can take that reel, copy it into your phone, and use that as something that you’re sending out to people. You don’t have to create another piece of content; you can reuse that piece of content and send it out to your email list.
So all that to say, if you’re overwhelmed, it’s just about picking one place and not getting distracted. When you get excellent, then you figure out the next piece, which is far and away. You’re going to get known; people are going to go, oh my gosh, I love that thing you’re doing. And that’s how you know you’re doing a good job because people notice.
Entrepreneurship and running a business are all just trial and error. If you aren’t failing, you’re not putting yourself out there.
Fearing judgment and rejection
99% of Katrina’s clients have a fear of judgment and rejection that is normal with being human. So accept that now that you’re not weird. This is precisely what you’re worried about if you think it’s a fun process to get to but let’s go from a psychological perspective. Like why are people afraid of showing up? The reason that we are afraid of showing up is that we are coming from the place of “I don’t want to not be accepted.”
The reason your brain thinks like that is because in the old days, 1000s of years ago, if you got rejected from your tribe, it was certain death. Okay, so this is something that we have not evolved from. We are still so fearful of rejection because our brain believes it is certain death. Your brain’s job, your ego’s job, is to keep you safe and ensure you don’t die. So it’s doing its job. That’s a good thing.
Moving past rejections
It is your job as your inner being to figure out how to move past rejections. Suppose you want to grow this business in this day and age. That’s unavoidable. You’re going to have to show your face; this is a wonderful thing for you to move past, teach your subconscious that you’re safe to move past your fears.
So how do you do that? What does that look like when you’re showing up on Instagram? For example, if you’re getting on videos, the reel is a great example. Like, show your face for five seconds. And then let the rest of the video be a song or whatever, where you don’t have to show up. So test it; that’s one rung on the ladder.
The next rung on the ladder is maybe you doing some lip-syncing. It also depends on who you are as a person, but that’s usually what people will say. So use that next step. Then once you do that, and you feel okay, I didn’t die. Do the next thing.
What’s the next thing? It’s maybe just saying a quick thing in your stories, for example, or if you’re ready to do reels and say something that might be a little intimidating, experiment and see what feels good too.
Treat this one step at a time. It will take a few times to get there, and your heart will still be slightly scared. But once you do it 234 times and your subconscious believes that you won’t die. That is going to be the thing that releases it.
You could also write up a script and then read from it and do what you must do.
New marketing strategies
Fear holds many people back but remember the first time you did it. Many things in this era differ; things are relatively new within the last five years. That is how that is the trajectory. When reels and TikTok started coming out, many people didn’t want to do it. But you want your business to be successful. So you have to do what you need to do to be able to get there.
Embrace the change. Love when new things happen. We’re constantly growing and think new things are coming all the time. It’s all about adapting to new marketing strategies and ways and having fun with them. Because in the next five years, it will be completely different. So lean into it and learn about it.
Other Marketing strategies to use
One of the strategies people have done and maybe ventured into, but it’s still affordable, is getting into Facebook ads. There are now reels as an option; it’s made creating video ads pretty simple, and so that’s fun. If you can create a reel right now, you can’t use their editing tools in terms of filters.
If you have photos, for example, that you want to show, that is an excellent thing because you don’t need any of their filters. So you’ll be able to turn that reel into an ad and get in front of your audience easily, so you don’t have to do all the other things. So leveraging on ads for someone visual, and then keeping up with your organic content, that one or two things that you’re showing up every single week. That is incredibly impactful. And it takes you out of having to do absolutely everything.
So run ads consistently and probably spend maybe $5 a day on ads, and you can always get one to three leads every week. It’s not something that happens right away. It’s something that takes a bit of time tweaking and getting good at, but if you’re consistent with two things, your organic content and your ads, you’re going to see more leads coming into your business.
Please keep it simple because of the time that we have right now. Scaling your business doesn’t mean getting on a stage and talking about what you do or getting onto a podcast. It can be just running ads and sticking to your organic strategy so that you can do what you do, which is photography and going to weddings or whatever it is which takes up most of your time.
Customer experience
You should aim for the wow factor with your clients. Katrina has a program that when people onboard with them, they send them a gift. It’s a small gift of about $30. It’s so small, but those kinds of things, you’re getting it in the mail, you can touch it, you can taste it, it’s going to make you feel something.
And I love this quote from Maya Angelou, which is, people may not remember what you said or what you did, but they’ll always remember how you made them feel.
So how can you apply that to your business? If it’s not a gift what can be your wow factor for that onboarding process for that client experience? So they go gosh, I don’t remember her last name, but I remember how she made me feel.
Client retention is way easier than getting new clients. Now, as a photographer, you might be like, well, they’re not going to get married all the time. They’re going to tell their friends or they’re going to have a baby. They’re going to get maybe, divorced and get married again.
You are doing yourself a significant service by saying whatever it takes, I’m gonna keep this as my forever client, and it will pay you back tenfold. It’s also vital for you to recognize that it’s a lot cheaper for you to keep clients, then it is for you to get clients. So you have to put out energy, time, and money if you’re running ads to get new clients. So keeping a client is essential. And getting a new client is going to cost you money. So just looking at it from that perspective.
Final advice
There are so many things to marketing, but find your own way. And please remember that it’s, at its core, just about human beings connecting. So how can you connect with your ideal client so that it becomes a no-brainer to at least reach out to you?
That might be through the words you say, through actual feedback and telling them that you listen to them and change something about what you do. All of this is marketing, and it’s not about selling what you have; that is sales, and marketing is about connecting with another human being.
Katrina Aronson is always on her Instagram, which is @katrinaaronson_consulting. And if you want to grab an organic guide that is all about the lazy marketer because you can be lazy in your marketing and still be effective, it’s free! And it’s just going to help you to develop the roadmap that makes sense for you, so you can create amazing content for your ideal client. You can sign up for her Free Lazy [& Brilliant] Organic Marketing Guide.
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