DIY Marketing Advice Every Small Business Needs - Teacher: Anna Bravington

Hello, and welcome to the Useful Content Podcast. And today we have a brand new teacher in the Useful Content Classroom. Anna Bravington. Hi, Anna. Hi, great to be here.  It's great to have you on, Anna. I, we, we know each other from LinkedIn and I was once able to grace the halls of your podcasts, crossing the content chasm, and that was a good time. And now you're here on my podcast, which I'm happy to have you on. It's so, so good to have you here. So glad to be here. So get to see how it's what it's done from the other side now because I had to be the host last time. Yeah, and a good host you were. Um, and today we, we have a lot to cover and talk about, cause we're going to be talking about do it yourself, um, marketing strategies for small business, and that's something that is very important for anyone who wants to build out their business, but before we get into the actual content, could you tell the people what you do and how you help your clients make useful? content. So I actually do two things now. So last time when we spoke, I was just doing the one thing which was owning my own business, which is marketing strategy for customers. And it's a variety of from SMEs to bigger companies. And it's helping them understand from all the way from What their business goals are, how to Translate that into marketing and then how to communicate to customers to reach those goals, really, Um, and since I last spoke to you, I'm also, um, innovation director at Oxford Innovation Space, which is Uh, we have 33 innovation centres across the UK, and what I do is I coach SMEs on how to do their own marketing, their own sales, so that they can do them themselves, which is brilliant. So I get to do the doing and the teaching at the same time. Oh, that's a big deal. Coaching SMEs on how to do their own marketing. What have you found to be like the common thread when it comes to SMEs? and and building out their marketing? That they start marketing before they have every, all the foundations in place. So, one of the big things is when people come to me, they say, right, I want to do some marketing, I want to blog, I want to do some social media, and we get, I say to them, okay, right, what are your business goals? What do we need to do, um, and, and get to in order to, for this to be a success? And they say, um, Make more sales. Yeah, that's that's their business goal. There's no smart business goals where they're, um, you know, they've got a time and they're, and they sort of a structure to them. So I find that's sort of the biggest thing that we have is that we'll, we'll try and I think it's sort of jumping ahead of In the sort of marketing space, we're actually knowing, you know, do you need more customers? What space do you want them in? You know, what type of customers? How many products do you want to sell? Because if you don't know any of those, marketing doesn't work. And I think that's the biggest issue that people have. and so I know that we're going to get deep inside of how to do some of those things, but, you know, there's a problem, like, for example, um, it's a cash 22 situation where you need one and you need the other one. So when you're starting off, you just. Kind of let's just suppose the business you're good at something and you start it and it starts to grow. Uh, you don't really have that in your mind, like, what am I trying to accomplish in your mind? You just want to make money and stay alive type of thing. And, um, and how in reality is that worked out in the mind of a business person in terms of starting to look at their critically and saying, I need to set these goals. How do you show people that? Yeah, I mean, it, it needs...