✏️ If I was your marketing strategist
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“Never start from scratch.”
It’s one of my favorite mantras in my business. I say it all the time.
Because starting with nothing is daunting.
It’s frustrating.
And it’s so dang time-consuming! 😫
But so many of us do it. We scramble to put together a LinkedIn post and it takes us an hour. Because there’s no process.
We go to create our website, and instead of buying that nicer template to make it easier on ourselves, we build it page by page from scratch. (And it winds up costing us four months and five gray hairs.)
We tell ourselves we need to create a proper content plan. But the blank page makes us procrastinate.
This admittedly used to be me. Until I realized how much time I was costing myself.
So here's what I've learned to do instead:
1. Hoard inspiration and ideas
I love that classic Steve Jobs quote, “Good artists steal.” 🎨
Because it reminds me that the best ideas always come from what we see and experience elsewhere.
- They come from that email campaign that we see someone else send. Or that ad that causes us to stop our scroll on Insta.
- Sometimes they even come from that trip to the art museum. Or that walk we took outside. 🌻
RARELY do they come from what we’re able to eek out at our desks after we’ve been drinking a cold cup of coffee and staring at a blank Canva doc for 45 minutes.
Every design project I kick off begins on Pinterest.
I hoard fliers we get in the mail and scan Wayfair and Serena & Lily catalogs for copy inspo. (I’ve got a whole stack in my office.)
The point is keep your eyes open and you’ll see tons of marketing ideas everywhere you look. You don’t have to come up with them all by yourself.
2. Use what someone else has already created
Not in a plagiarizing kind of way. That’s not cool. 🙅♀️
But go on the internet these days and you can find a pre-built solution for just about *anything* your small biz heart desires.
- Canva has an entire library of free templates that are yours for the taking.
- Most email service providers come with pre-built automated workflows.
- You can find swipe copy for emails and pre-built website themes and sales pages.
You could spend three hours trying to design something yourself...
Or you can start with something that’s already 85% of the way there, get it done in 20 minutes and start seeing results 5X faster.
3. Templatize everything
America might run on Dunkin. ☕🍩 But my business runs on templates.
Not just Canva templates, though those are helpful too.
I’m talking templatized processes, playbooks, and step-by-step SOPs that literally cut my work time on a project in half.
I used to sit down to start a project and be so overwhelmed by the enormity of it that I’d procrastinate. (You too?)
Instead of getting to work, I’d suddenly get this urge to clean my desk. Or scroll the latest Sezane drops for twenty minutes.👚👡
When you have a system and a process mapped out, there’s no need to procrastinate.
You know exactly what to do and when.
If it’s something you do more than once (planning your content for the month, writing email campaigns, setting up landing pages) document it. Turn it into a template. Find ways to automate parts of it.
And as an added bonus, when you eventually pass off work that work to an assistant, there will be zero back and forth on what needs to be done. It’s all right there.
