This month I gave a workshop for Wandsworth Enterprise Week about marketing on a tight budget.
Little cheeky tweet of #WEW16 brochure
Stand out in a crowd…Have Impact!
Hee hee! My observation is that the art of making the best use of limited resources is to concentrate on the impact of your marketing materials and strategy. Sending a 1000 eNewsletters to businesses you don’t know may work against you and is also illegal. Many start-ups expect instant results, you need to spend more time and effort developing relationships with potential clients and customers. Better to focus on 50 target businesses or individuals with a quality approach than a quick mass spam attack.
Some of my key tips are, develop relationships with other businesses or people in your industry and build your networks. Consider your own sense of presence, stand out and be remembered, be creative in the way you promote yourself. Get the design of your branding and design format right, hire professional photographers, look for discount offers from printers, most have discount offers every month.
Understanding how to draft a timeline for a media/marketing campaign is crucial, when to do what. We cover this in my self-promotion courses at Central Saint Martins. Photograph by Toni Marshall
Spend time really developing relationships with businesses or people in your industry. Word-of-mouth recommendation either face-to-face or a friendly shout out on social media is the best type of promotion money can’t buy.
Also timing, many self-employed artists, designers, photographers or creative businesses often fail to realise how much time you have to allow to implement a media campaign, often even weekly publications need to you approach them 10 weeks in advance. Online portals and bloggers can move and react quickly to approaches, but often publishers with a large numbers of subscribers will time the posting of online content with the in print editions of newspapers, magazines or periodicals.
If you would like to learn more about business start-up, self-promotion and entrepreneurship I run a number of online and college based courses for Central Saint Martins. If you would like to have a one-to-one Skype session please contact me
Summer Schools at Central Saint Martins, Granary Square, London
Business Start-up for Creatives, Self- Promotion for Creatives and Entrepreneurship for Creatives
Live and Online
Business Start-up for Creatives, Self-Promotion for Creatives and Entrepreneurship for Creatives
Thank you to Toni and the Wandsworth Enterprise Team. Photography by Toni Marshall © 2016 Illustrations by Tim Bradford © 2016
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