The #1 Untapped Marketing Strategy You’re Not Using Enough

Why I want you to think about prioritizing offline marketing. And so it's easy for us to be a little lazy about it. We got really good at doing a lot of online things over the pandemic. And I love to see that there's a lot more opportunity for in person interaction right now, because I know a lot of us are craving it. But I have certainly been leaning into doing more of it again, recently, going to events where I think I can make some really good connections and making a goal out of what I want to do at those events.

This is The Entrepreneur School Podcast where we believe you can run a thriving business and still make your family a priority. This show is all about supporting you the emerging or early stage entrepreneur, on your journey from solopreneur. To CEO, while wearing all of the other hats in your life. My name is Kelly Sinclair and I'm a brand and marketing strategist who started a business with two kids under 3am, a corporate PR girl turned entrepreneur after I learned the hard way that life is too short to waste doing things that burn you out. On this show, you'll hear inspiring stories from other business owners on their journey, and learn strategies to help you grow a profitable business, while making it all fit into the life that you want. Welcome to Entrepreneur School.

So the idea of marketing your business can be overwhelming to say the least, I talk to a lot of business owners who just don't even know where to start. Because there are so many options of ways that you can promote yourself, get visible, you can do paid advertising, you can do online things. You can do physical advertising, and promotions. There's just such a list. If you actually Googled how many different ways you can promote your business, you would get lists of hundreds of ways. So how do you choose where to start? is usually the first question that I get. And I want to talk today about a very overlooked strategy that can be super effective for you in growing your business, especially at the beginning. But quite honestly, at any stage of your business, you should be integrating this strategy as part of your overall marketing plan. It should be something that you prioritize making sure that you're making some time for on a weekly and if not weekly, monthly basis. And that strategy is what I like to call offline marketing. So offline marketing is the opposite of online marketing. In a world where we are surrounded by technology, easily accessible to all kinds of different ways of getting your business up and out there on the internet. I'm talking about coming back to the roots of where you are and your actual community. And looking at that as an important market as part of growing your business. So I think that we can easily forget about doing offline marketing. Because the internet is so readily available to us, it's easy to set up a social media profile, it's pretty easy if you have some tech savvy to get a website up and out there. And it has this really amazing potential for global reach. And sometimes when our business is really not a brick and mortar, and it's not tied to any particular geographical location in terms of the way that we deliver our services. So if you're not like a hairdresser, or somebody who's actually needing to touch your client, or have somebody come into your store, then you have a lot of opportunity in this digital space. And that is great. But sometimes we lean into that too much. And we forget that that's actually a really big ocean that we're putting our business into which yes is necessary. Yes can pay off. Yes, we should be doing. But also, don't forget to look into your hometown, your community, the local space where you might be able to make some relationships and grow those relationships faster. And that is like the number one reason to focus on offline marketing and prioritize it is because it actually allows you to build trust faster. So you know that saying that people buy from people who they know like and trust well, when somebody integrate like interfaces with you. So that's the word I'm looking for. When somebody interacts with you on the internet, they're seeing like a little portion and they're probably also scrolling and they're in a different state of mind. So they're not getting the full picture. When you meet a human being you In real life, you get an opportunity to add all of the other factors to it, your energetic connection, your ability to like really understand whether you get somebody if this person is a good fit to continue having a conversation with who could be, whether that's a potential client, for you a potential referral partner, somebody you might want to collaborate with down the road, all of these things are really beneficial to be focusing on. So offline marketing builds that trust faster, because you get all of those other pieces at the same time as the introduction to you. So you can be like, yeah, I totally know what you're going through, you can relate to them, you can make that connection. And it's stronger and more powerful than a short and interrupted online presence interaction with a potential client, collaborator, or whomever it is.

So this is why I want you to think about prioritizing offline marketing. And so it's easy for us to feel a little lazy about it, we got really good at doing a lot of online things over the pandemic. And I love to see that there's a lot more opportunity for in person interaction right now, because I know a lot of us are craving it. But I have certainly been leaning into doing more of it again, recently, going to events where I think I can make some really good connections and making a goal out of what I want to do at those events. So it can be overwhelming to be like, oh, yeah, sure, I could go to every single business networking event that there is. And I could be out having coffee dates, and one on one conversations multiple times a day. And you don't want to do that. Because it is time consuming. So you want to be very strategic and intentional about what you select to do to invest in to pay for what kind of groups you want to go and participate in. And you want to spread them out. So that you're not just stacking yourself full of those, because that's going to take up a lot of your time. And it is a good, valid reason to hesitate about the whole offline marketing plan. So that's kind of where I'm seeing this trend. Now moving back towards that. And it's a great reminder, because at the beginning of my business, that is exactly how I started going from. Nobody knew who I was, I didn't have a business, I went out and I met my first two clients at networking events, at different types of networking events, not necessarily like a formal one. But a guy in town was starting a co working space. And he was bringing together entrepreneurs who just wanted to like work in the same space. And he was doing that in coffee shops. And then he ended up being my first client, he mark. And then from there, I met my second client who ended up being a very long term, like five year client of mine. So that is a very effective way of getting started getting clients like and creating a reputation for yourself and your brand within your community. So within a very short period of time. And that would be like just over three years. For me, Iwent from being unknown, to being the President of the Chamber of Commerce, and essentially having very strong connections in the business community and Cochran where I live, and being able to have built the reputation as like the go to person in marketing and branding. Because one, we have a small community.

So as sometimes you think a small community would mean unlimited opportunities, but it also gives you the opportunity to leverage yourself as the go to person and really build that strong brand within that space. So don't overlook your physical area, your geographic area, whatever's closest for you to create relationships with real people, because I'm even finding now, although I've been doing lots of global things for the last five plus years, a lot of my clients and people in my audience are still from this local area, which is super cool, because that means I can think about doing in person events, hosting things, and bringing people together, which I'm considering. So if that's up your alley, send me a message and I will, I'll see about doing it if I if I have some interest.

So I want to leave you with five types of offline marketing for you have to consider. So these are things like don't go out and do all of these things at the same time. Because we can't be everywhere all the time. A lot of the time when I tell people what I do, the first thing they ask is Where should I market myself. And of course, I will always tell you that there's a lot of things to consider there. The main one being who is your audience, who are you actually trying to reach and so you may go to an event. So the first type of offline marketing is the obvious one which is networking. And you may choose to go to an event with the intention of trying to find clients, you may also choose to go to an event with the intention of trying to find partners or collaborators, or to reconnect with somebody who you haven't seen in a long time. Or like my most recent event, it was to meet the keynote speaker and invite her to be in my podcast. Spoiler alert, she is going to be on my podcast in a couple of weeks. And I'm super excited about that. So all of these things is what is your idea? What's your opportunity and intention when you go and make sure you take action, you can't go to a networking event, just like sit at your one table, meet two people, hand out your business cards, and then never follow up. So go with the plan, take the responsibility of knowing that it is a little more legwork, and it does take the time, you might end up at a full day event, you might have to drive somewhere, you might have to fly somewhere, or you might have to invest in, in attending for ticket price, or whatever it is. But so be very particular and strategic about what kind of event it is. And if you think there's going to be a good pool of people there, who are the kind of audience that you are looking at meeting. So that is networking for you, I challenge you to put one networking event in person in your calendar every month for the rest of this year. And if you do that, send me a note on Instagram and let me know you did that I might have a prize for you.

So the second type of offline marketing to consider is volunteering and sponsorships. So these are ways that you can contribute to your community and or to organizations that align with your business values and your brand. So for me, this was volunteering as a board director, and then the President of the Chamber of Commerce, because that was an opportunity for me to meet more people in the business community, to make relationships and to make an impact and support the local businesses that word meaningful to me and to my brand. That's what my brand is all about. It's all about helping small businesses grow being part of a chamber made absolute sense. So I contributed a lot, a lot, a lot of hours, because especially doing that over COVID, it was a very busy season for trying to, you know, support the local economy as we went through all of those challenges, and all the businesses that were really hit hard by it, but it was meaningful to me. So that's what you want to consider is volunteering for something that makes sense. And it has a connection. And even if it's not like directly, like I support small businesses, so I want to support an organization that supports small businesses, maybe you have a charitable component to your business. And you want to give back to that type of a charity, which could be through your own profit sharing, or just donating time and talking about that, why you love like, whether that's a local animal shelter, or a mission like that, that's meaningful to you. So thinking about that, having that alignment, and as a result, you get some exposure within that community, and you get to feel good. That's that's one of the main things. So community events, where you might sponsor for sign recognition, that kind of thing. That's, that's what you want to consider there.

So the third idea for offline marketing that I have for you is actually local media. So we can get intimidated by media relations and pitching and trying to get coverage. But in reality, small publications, small media outlets that are serving your small local community, their mandate is to share local news. And if you are a local person doing something meaningful, that is local news. So I used to work for a big PR firm, we did Media Relations all the time. And knowing that the idea of of pitching is to support the journalists in creating the content that they have to create. So sending them notes and letting them know that you are the subject matter expert on X thing. You have won an award you have contributed to this big campaign you have what have you done, you've launched a podcast that supports other business owners and tele tell them radio station about it, tell the local paper about it, whatever you have, and look at that as an opportunity to get some additional exposure, again within your local area, which is really, really powerful.

Another type of offline marketing for you is local print advertising. So this is where a lot of small towns Have, and just local areas that have your own like city publication like a quarterly business magazine, or your local economic development organization may do something like ours does that Christmas time around gifting that you have an opportunity to participate in whether that's free or paid. So looking for those types of things where you could get some exposure as a local small business, in the community, again, where you are primarily based. And so that would look be looking at like business magazines, publications, some of these that they print, and I've recently decided to join one, which is an Alberta based publication called woman ition. And it is a full size magazine that comes out just annually. And it features different women in business. So you pay to have your profile in there. But you also get a few other bonuses as a result, like speaking opportunities, and the exposure to those people and the events that they hold and photo shoot. And if you've watched my Instagram lately, you've seen that and video that comes along with it. So there's a lot of extra benefits of doing something like that sometimes, or you could simply just place like a business card sized Ad into something like that. But this is something where you definitely want to test it out. And see if you get any value as you're starting your business. Or initially like coming into thinking about coming into the local market, even if you've been online for a while. It's a It's something to experiment with. And see if you can measure any contact that comes to you from it. Find out like obviously, when you talk to new potential clients, ask them where they found you see if they saw you in that thing, and helps you to decide whether that's an effective marketing strategy. And you should be doing that with any type of marketing that you do, which is why we don't do the shotgun approach of like, Let's do 50 different things. Because you won't really have a good sense of what's working until you test it, try it and use it for a longer period of time.

So that was actually four types of offline marketing, I don't have five, because I, I've lumped the sponsorship and the volunteering together, you could look at them differently if you want to, but ultimately contributing your time to something. And local networking events, I suppose you could also add as a bonus one, trade shows or something like that, where there's a specific event where you are going just to represent your business, you could pay for a booth at a trade show, or often as part of another kind of networking event, they often have a vendor section where you could pay extra to have that additional exposure to the group. So you get to participate in that in the conference, or whatever it is, a couple of the recent ones I've been to have had this opportunity as well. And then you get like the additional exposure of people walking around the room during the breaks and the networking times to meet you and see you and learn more about your business. So there you go, there was five in the end.

So I hope you enjoyed this episode, I want to remind you, offline marketing is an important part of your well rounded marketing strategy. And I'm challenging you to add one offline marketing activity per month for the remainder of the year. So you can go you can research some events. Now you can look up on meetup, you can look at your local community, Facebook groups, entrepreneur groups, business groups, you can look to your local economic development organization, which is often part of the municipal government. And they may have lists of events, they may have emails that you can subscribe to, to get like to get this information about where you should be going. So I want to hear what kind of offline marketing you're doing. So make sure you're reaching out to me on Instagram. I know that's an online thing. But if you do live in the Calgary area, and you want to meet up with me, reach out, I just had coffee this morning with somebody who did that, because I think it's super awesome to meet people in person. And we are talking about like, we're doing a podcast swap. We're building referral relationships. These are all important parts of growing your business that are more effective, I have to say, than some of the digital things like trying to run ads, or worrying about your SEO or your Google ads, like word search or your Google, whatever profile these things. Those are things for people who are going to find you and these are things for people who are going to help you find the right people to connect with you. Because they're humans thinking about You when they go out and do their own networking, or when they have a client who has a problem that they now know that you solve. So, take it for me. offline marketing has been a huge part of building my business, to over six figures, to creating reputation for myself within the community here, and then being able to take that and leverage it into an online presence. So it is a huge crossover. It is an absolute missed opportunity if you're not doing it. So get on board. Get out there, meet some people taking some pancake breakfast, the stampede and do some offline marketing.