Easy Marketing: Make More of What You Already Have

Before opening another social account, open the last proposal you sent a customer. Read the email that went with it. Then look at the page you directed them to.

Does it make sense as one conversation? Or have you spent time getting somebody interested, then left them to work out what happens next?

That's where I'd start before adding another marketing channel.

“Free marketing” is an optimistic name for it. Your time is not free. But you can often improve these things without creating another advertising budget.

Start where the relationship already exists

For a physical business, the experience starts before the transaction. The sign, the entrance, the presentation and the welcome all say something. A beautifully printed promise of excellent service loses its charm when the customer feels inconvenient for walking in.

A professional service has its own shopfront. It might be a proposal opened on a phone or a link forwarded between colleagues. Read it as someone who has never met you. Is the offer clear? Is the next step obvious? Does the quality of the presentation match the quality you claim to deliver?

These are marketing decisions, even when no advertising platform is involved.

Give people something worth passing on

“Please share our website” is a request for a favour. An explanation that helps someone make a difficult decision is something they may have a reason to share.

Show how you approach the work. Answer a recurring question properly. Explain a trade-off customers struggle with. Make a short guide that is useful enough to survive outside your sales process.

For an engineering business, that could be a clear explanation of competing specifications. For a service company, it might be a guide to preparing for a project. The point is not to become a full-time content publisher. It is to make what you know easier to use.

Make email worth receiving

A newsletter is not valuable because it arrives every Thursday.

Send something because there is a good reason to send it. A useful observation. A finished project with a lesson in it. An answer to a question you keep hearing. A relevant invitation.

Give the reader a reason to stay interested beyond your need to sell this month. Write to people who have agreed to hear from you, respect their preferences, and stop making every message sound like the launch of a multinational corporation.

A useful subject might be “What to prepare before your first design meeting”, followed by a short explanation and a guide. That's a reason to open an email. “Exciting news from our amazing team” asks the reader to take rather more on trust.

An ordinary email from a person with something worth saying is enough. You can leave the corporate fanfare out of it.

Use social media for a job, not an obligation

Being present on six platforms is not an achievement if all six look abandoned.

Choose where you can contribute something useful and keep it going. Show the work or explain a decision, then be there for the conversation afterwards. Decide what success would mean: introductions, enquiries, distribution, recruitment or something else you actually need.

Choose a rhythm the team can sustain alongside the work it gets paid to do. You don't have to turn every Tuesday into a thought-leadership event.

Earn the recommendation, then make it easy

Good work is the beginning of a referral, not the entire referral process.

Make sure clients can explain what you helped them do. Ask for feedback while the work is fresh. Request an introduction when there is a sensible reason, not as a compulsory final step in every invoice email.

Give people a useful project link or a simple description they can forward. A client should be able to say what you helped with without having to translate your service names first. Do not make your happiest customer invent your positioning for you.

Choose one of those existing encounters this week and improve it: the proposal, follow-up or explanation you keep sending. You already have someone’s attention there. Make better use of it before giving yourself another account to feel guilty about neglecting.