10] Self Promotion
As small business owners, we need to juggle a lot of elements and everything we do is to let potential customers know who we are and what we do. This activity takes a lot of self promotion - holding events, posting online and engaging with customers face-to-face at networking events and directly through email campaigns. It can sometimes be very difficult to come up with promotion ideas but there are loads of tools out there to help prompt you.
In order to be relevant as a business and align yourself with special celebration days that show potential customers the causes you believe in and allow them in on an emotional level. Here are a few websites to help populate your calendar and plan your content in advance – it can be used for social media content, blog posts and even promotions. There are the usual holidays like Christmas and Valentines Day but now there are a ton of awareness days, created mainly by charities, that help you to come up with ideas:
www.timeanddate.com/holidays/uk/ start with the main holidays that the rest of the country celebrates
www.awarenessdays.com this is a really good website for strange random days to hitch your wagon to in an abstract way that help you get attention – there is a yearly subscription to get the list of dates for the whole year but it will let you browse for free for a limited amount of click throughs to start off with
www.projectbritain.com/specialdays/november.htm not the prettiest website design but it appears to be a free resource with links to the charity page who generated the celebration day
The main idea behind populating your calendar with celebration days is so that you can preplan promotions, events and online content that gives you credibility and relevance about a top that's being mentioned at the same time.
CAUTION – a rule of thumb when planning ahead of time for content to post about is that, when using scheduling tools, is to keep an eye on posts regularly so that you know exactly what it going out and what is happening in the world on any given day. It can be seen as callous when posting about something trivial when there is some crisis that is all over the news. It makes you look ill-informed or, even worse, that you just don't care. So, even though these are great resources for planning your self promotion in advance, don't plan so well that you're too far apart from the message to keep a close eye on it otherwise it has the potential to damage your brand.
There's so much more to know about your business, feel free to send specific questions for me to help you with or join my Facebook Group East Anglia Small Business Branding where we can all help each other to succeed. I'd also love to hear from you about anything to do with questions and you can find me at 07525 246 734 or caroline@mysteryhare.com