What We Learned About Doing Our Own Marketing
Implementing your own marketing is hard. It just is, and we’re saying this as professional marketers who do this all the time for other businesses.
Marketing for others can be fun, doing it for yourself, and making yourself do it, can be a chore. If there’s one thing we know about running a business, our own included, it’s that it’s hard to see the jar label from the inside.
Here are some things that we’ve learned and about which we have been reminded in the last year, through the marketing we’ve done for our clients and ourselves.
It’s all about the systems
If you don’t have a system, it won’t get done. If you don’t establish a strategy to do specific tasks at specific times, there’s a high likelihood you will forget and said tasks just won’t happen.
Even better, create a system and assign it to someone else who will get it done!
We were reminded of this this summer when Georgina realized she hadn’t reposted this Alkimie newsletter to LinkedIn or Google Business Profile since, well, June. Up until then she had posted it diligently every month. In June, she got sick, and then family members got sick, and then she went overseas, and well, there went the newsletter. We didn’t have a fail-safe system to make sure these tasks were completed, and so when life really happened, those pieces just fell apart.
Reposting a newsletter on social media is a small part of the marketing machine, but it matters because marketing is about consistency, and it’s the regular drumbeat of presence that keeps an audience engaged. Now, we have a system (written up as a Standard Operating Procedure), and that system has been handed off to another member of the team, who will make sure it happens!
It’s worth doing the planning
We all dread blank-page syndrome. Writer’s block is the worst. You have to create content, but you don’t know where to start or what to say. What does your audience want to know about anyway?
We have a big secret, revolutionary hack for this. Here it is: plan ahead. Rather than thinking every month “What do I want to write about this month?” if you plan ahead of time, the ideas will flow organically, and you will save yourself a ton of time and angst later on. And if you plan strategically, your ideas will be more even cohesive.
We recently met for our Q1 content planning session to work out what topics to discuss in our newsletter in 2026. We had Q1 mapped out month by month by marketing channel (eg. LinkedIn, newsletter, etc.), and the blank page was staring us in the face. So we returned to our strategy which refreshed us on what challenges our audience faces and the questions they ask most frequently. Then we charted their customer journey with us and what they wanted to know at each stage. And before we knew it, we had 10+ content ideas across the topic of customer journey – and that’s just ONE branding related subject we can talk about. Then we had only to choose the specific topics we wanted to focus on first. And now we have a backlog of concepts for Q2 and Q3, so rather than starting all over again, we can just build upon what we will have already shared in Q1.
Conc: We do great, strategic, intentional work for our clients and so often we neglect to apply the same lessons to our own businesses. So we’re trying to be more intentional and approach marketing our own business, like we do our clients’.
Let other people share their wisdom…and then take their advice
One way we HAVE been consistent with our marketing efforts is through the monthly newsletter itself. But given our generational perspectives (Gen X and Millenial), if we’re being candid with ourselves, we’ve been going about it the old fashioned way – by writing it.
In walks (or rather Zooms) a younger member of our team who wisely suggests that maybe it’s time for us to shift tactics and try a video format for our monthly blog and newsletter content, because, as he astutely observed “No one reads anything anymore.” Indeed. Noted.
The only constant is change, so don’t be afraid to change your strategy
So, thanks to our wise young team member, in 2026 you’ll be seeing from us a different approach to sharing content in a more conversational video format. We will share this in our newsletter, it will be posted to our blog page, AND, we’ll be ramping up our use of LinkedIn. So we hope you’ll tune in for our chit chat as we talk shop about the branding, design and marketing issues that we most commonly see amongst the small and micro business owners who work with us.
We hope you take some of our learnings (and reminders) to help you take inventory of your own marketing. What’s working well? What has fallen through the cracks? Where could you use a tune-up? Is it time to try something new: a new approach, a new marketing channel, or setting up a new system? As we often say, marketing is a team sport, and we’re here to help. If you have thoughts or questions that you’d like to run by us, set-up an introduction call, OR pop in to our monthly Brand Clinic to pick our brains on all things branding and marketing.