02 - Meet the 3 Essential Marketing Pillars with Abi Jacks

Join Abi Jacks, Director of Marketing and Growth at LoveAdmin, for a focused Mini Marketing episode.

Today, Abi outlines the three crucial pillars of marketing: getting known, attracting new customers, and keeping current customers engaged and happy. 

This episode provides clear, actionable strategies to help children’s activity organisations strengthen their marketing efforts without getting lost in the noise of new tech and trends. 

Discover practical tips to streamline your marketing strategy, focusing on essential actions that effectively boost visibility, attract new members, and enhance customer loyalty.

Stay tuned for more insightful episodes from Steps2Success, where we help you navigate the challenges of running a children's activity organisation with practical advice and expert insights.

Created with pride by LoveAdmin

Edited with finesse by Making Digital Real

Transcript

Abi Jacks: 0:03

Hi, everyone, I'm Abi Jacks, director of marketing and growth at LoveAdmin. And you're listening to the mini Marketing Podcast, where I'll be taking you through the world of marketing for your children's activity organisation. With no buzzword bingo has a promise. So today I'm going to cover the three most important reasons why we do marketing in the first place, and what you can be aiming to achieve with your marketing activity. I like to call them my pillars as they basically hold up the marketing efforts that I'm focusing on. Without them, it's easy to lose focus and get caught up spending time doing something that was the newest or the most shiny at the time. And in marketing, there's a lot of that noise with new tech and channels popping up like Jack in the boxes. And if you've not done marketing in the past, it can feel quite overwhelming if you try to take on ad hoc activity. So I like to keep my focus with three marketing pillars. Here they are, number one, getting known. Number two, attracting new customers. And number three, keeping current customers happy and engaged. Now that all seems pretty obvious, right? But with a little extra thought behind these, you've effectively got the basis of a plan. And when you stick to working on those three things, then your marketing will help your organisation be more successful. Now, I'm not trying to say tackle all three at once each of you will know which area is the most important, and in which order you want to start. And if you don't, then how about talking to a management team awesome questions from your customers. And you'll soon have a direction that you all agree on. And you definitely know you want to move forward with. I don't think I need to go into huge detail as to what each of these pillars mean. But I'll expand a little bit with some tips as I go. So firstly, when we want to get known, we're talking about building our brand here. And that can be done in many ways. But what's most important, is what you're getting known for. You can have a very well recognised name. But if people can't recall what you do, and more importantly, why you're right for them, then it doesn't matter. So really think about what do you want to be known for. I do cover branding as a whole episode later on in the series. For those of you that want to deep dive a bit more. When it comes to attracting new customers, it's just about knowing who they are, as well as getting in front of them. And I cover this in more detail. In next month's episode, I usually get asked about the best places to be seen, or which social channels are most effective. But to be honest, there's no magic button to press when it comes to attracting new customers. It's getting a message out there that resonates with people in a few different relevant places. And making sure it's hopefully at the right time. And a few different places helps to combat the right time. Because as we know, decisions on never made in a nice straightforward fashion that marketers would love. So we go for the softly softly catchy monkey approach with a drip feed of messages where we think our audience is most likely to be or influenced by, and then keeping your customers engaged and happy. Well, that's the key thing for most successful activity providers. But sometimes we can let that overly rule us to the detriment of our own success. Make sure that you test the boundaries of that every now and then to see what changes you can make. While they're still remaining loyal and engaged. Let me give you an example. If you want to amend a timetable, or increased prices slightly to help cover your cost and remain profitable. But you're worried about how your customers are going to react to that. Yes, you might get grumbles. And I'd like to say it's usually from the loudest not necessarily the masses that you hear from. But if you're ticking all the right boxes, and the children are happy that are attending your sessions, people will adjust, you just have to have that confidence to try it in the first place. So now you have your three pillars and you know which order you want to focus on. I love the next step starting to get thoughts onto paper. So my approach, stick on a playlist that helps you focus whatever works for you. I'm a big fan of tinkly pianos without words so that I don't start singing, grab pens and paper and just start mind mapping what you can do and what you need to think about for each of those three key areas. It doesn't need to be pretty or you'll be there for hours. I use whiteboard roll sheets from Amazon, that I can stick to walls, doors or windows and it just use a static it's like genius. And then I just add to it whenever a thought hits me. It's there all the time. It's looking at me whilst I'm doing my work and I just pop on and off it as I need to. In the end, I end up with three pillar bubbles and lots of ways that I can think of that I can make them happen. Some of them are easy and can be done with a bit of time and a laptop blog. Yep, I can do that. Although do I have somewhere to upload and host it. Some may need other people to contribute to it or I need to investigate them further like running an event with like minded other providers or setting up referral programmes so my customers can benefit when they spread the word. Don't feel like you have to solve everything right now you are just getting the thoughts out. And then give yourself some time to mull over what might need developing, you're bound to change your mind a few times at least. And you may even find it helpful to bring in family, friends or peers to give their opinions as well. We often look through our own lens, but stepping outside that can give us a fresh new perspective. At some point, you'll end up with your three essential marketing pillars, lots of great ideas, and hopefully an idea of what you want to focus on first. And that's a pretty big way to move your marketing forwards in a way that supports your goals. Now, some up what were those three again, number one, getting known. Number two, attracting new customers. And number three, keeping current customers happy and engaged. And that, in a nutshell, is why we do marketing. So tonight, go and find some paper, a big bar of dark chocolate a decent playlist and start throwing down what you could do. The hardest part is often to stop but when you do that mind map will always be there to go back to and chip away at one task at a time. So that's it for today. I hope you enjoyed your first mini marketing episode with me now haven't frazzled your brain. You will be able to get a transcript of this to refer back to if you need it. Subscribe to step to success channel and next month I'll take you through Who is it for know your target audience, which is pretty important for all of those three pillars to work. I'm just one of the experts dedicated to helping love admin customers achieve success. If you're looking for a software provider that gives you more we'll help you grow. Then visit LoveAdmin.com to book a consultation call with one of our experts. I look forward to seeing you next month. Bye