Out of the 30 million small business owners in the US, approximately 81% of them are solopreneurs. Being the only person in charge of your business has loads of benefits, but it also brings many challenges. One of these is marketing.
Good solopreneur marketing is essential if you want to attract new customers and grow your business. The problem is marketing requires a lot of time and effort, which is something solo entrepreneurs often can’t always find.
The good news is that there are plenty of highly effective digital marketing strategies that are perfectly suited for people running businesses alone. Follow our guide to the most essential marketing tips and tactics to help solopreneurs thrive.
1. What is a Solopreneur?
2. Solopreneur vs Entrepreneur: What’s the Difference?
3. 10 Solopreneur Marketing Tips
4. Solo Entrepreneur Marketing Done for You
5. Conclusion
What is a Solopreneur?
A solopreneur is someone who sets up and runs a business all by themselves. Loads of small businesses start out as solopreneurs. And even as they experience business growth, many entrepreneurs prefer to just do it alone and keep the business a one-person operation.
Being a solopreneur involves handling all elements of a business yourself. This includes accounting, marketing, product development, logistics, and everything in between.
In today’s online world, the possibilities for solopreneurs are promising. This is because so much can be done online, and there are lots of great digital tools that make running a business easier.
Using the right tools and having the freedom to do as you see fit might be part of the reason why founders sleep better than normal employees.
Solopreneur vs Entrepreneur: What’s the Difference?
All Solopreneurs are entrepreneurs, but not all entrepreneurs are solopreneurs. The main thing to note about solopreneurs is that they do all of the work themselves. They’re both the founders of the business, as well as all of the employees. An entrepreneur, however, starts a business but takes on more employees as the business grows.
Another big difference between a solopreneur and an entrepreneur is how they scale the business. While most entrepreneurs set up businesses with the plan to scale them over time, solopreneurs aim to keep their business at a size that suits a single person.
This means that solopreneurs need to have a very specific and clear marketing strategy in place. They need to be able to grow their business to a profitable level, but they can’t grow the business beyond the point where they need to bring on more people.
10 Solopreneur Marketing Tips
As a solopreneur, you’ve got a lot on your plate. Marketing is essential for any business, but it can be really hard to get it done properly when you’re operating alone. To help you, here are 10 of the best marketing strategies and tips for business owners that do it all themselves.
1. Use Automated Email Marketing
Email marketing offers some of the best return on investment possible. In fact, for every $1 spent on email marketing, $42 can be generated.
Email is an amazing way to build relationships with customers, attract new leads, and promote your services. With the right tools and tactics, email can also be an easy digital marketing strategy to handle alone.
Automated marketing allows you to put your emails on autopilot. You can set up workflows that send specific emails to specific people based on their actions. This means you always send the right content to the right person, without having to actually send out the emails yourself.
You’ll save loads of time, and can watch your small business grow as you focus on other tasks.
With a marketing automation tool like Wishpond, setting up automated email campaigns is incredibly easy. This allows business owners to achieve big results with minimal time or effort, which is perfect for busy solopreneurs.
Above: example of an automated email campaign
2. Choose Fully-Integrated Marketing Software
Any digital marketing strategy today relies on the use of marketing software. If you’re using lots of different software options, this can get time-consuming, confusing, and expensive real fast. As a solopreneur small business owner, you just don’t have the time or resources for this. This is why using a single marketing software solution for your small business is such a good idea.
With a fully integrated platform, businesses can take care of all their digital marketing needs from one space. You’ll save loads of time while staying on top of all your digital marketing tasks far more easily.
For example, a platform like Wishpond allows business owners to run email marketing campaigns, build landing pages, create social giveaways, accept online payments, set up various lead generation campaigns, and more all from one platform. With a single solution like this, running a solopreneur business becomes a lot more easy and efficient.
3. Have a High-Quality Website That Works for You
Your website can make or break your solopreneur business. This is where all of your potential customers will end up before reaching out to you, and so it needs to fill them with trust and confidence.
Use your website to introduce yourself, share your story, and reveal why new customers should choose you. Use high-quality images, and make the website simple to navigate.
A good strategy is to offer different landing pages for your different products or services. This is important for local marketing, as well as improving your SEO visibility. Having the right landing page builder will be a big help to solo entrepreneurs.
You should also make sure that it’s easy for your website visitors to get in touch with you, set up appointments, and subscribe to your newsletter. The more your customers can do on your website, the fewer time-consuming admin tasks you’ll have to do.
So if you set up things like an appointments calendar, an online form to request services, and a payments gateway, you can cut down your business admin in a big way.
4. Schedule Your Marketing Content in Advance
A major part of digital marketing is creating and publishing quality content. Content marketing covers blogging, email marketing, social media marketing, and more.
This is one of the most effective ways to increase brand awareness, attract your target audience, build trust, maintain customers, and promote your products or services. The downside is that creating marketing content is a time-consuming process that solo small business owners often struggle to find the time for.
A simple solution to this is to schedule your content in advance and continue with other work tasks while your content is published.
You could spend some time coming up with a monthly content calendar, and then use apps to schedule your content for specific dates. This way, you’ll still be able to publish a consistent flow of content throughout the month, without having to dedicate each day to your digital marketing.
5. Get Started With Video Marketing
Speaking of content marketing, video is one of the most powerful forms of content out there. It’s the best way to really engage your audience, grab their attention, and introduce your brand. And as a solo entrepreneur, it’s really important that your customers know who you are.
Today, creating a video marketing strategy is easy, and it can help you to achieve great results for your business. You can use videos on social media, add videos to your landing pages introducing your products and services, utilize video testimonials, create longer-form YouTube video content about your business, and more.
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6. Set Clear Marketing Goals
Marketing a business alone can be a daunting task, especially when you’ve got many other things to do at the same time. The best way forward is to have a clear plan of action each day, and a set of actionable goals that you’re aiming for.
This allows you to focus and refine your marketing efforts without wasting time experimenting with different channels and blindly posting on social media. Having clear goals in place also means you’ll be creating a marketing strategy to fit the needs and scale of your business. This is important for solopreneurs.
Starting with goals helps you actually meet the marketing targets for your small business. Try to make these goals highly specific and measurable. This allows you to review your marketing efforts and continually refine your strategy.
7. Focus On Evergreen Marketing Content
Evergreen content is the type of content that stays relevant for a long period of time. A good example of this would be an SEO-optimized blog post that continually ranks at the top spot of a search engine for years. Sure, evergreen content is great for any business, but it’s particularly useful for solo entrepreneurs.
This is because of two things. Firstly, solopreneurs don’t have a lot of time to spend creating new content. Instead of creating new videos and writing new blog posts every day, they can continually send traffic to their website from a single piece of content.
Secondly, solo entrepreneurs have a limit to how much they can scale their business. With a few pieces of consistent content (compared to a consistent string of new content), it becomes easier to manage your traffic and business growth.
So, how do you create evergreen content? Whatever form of content it is, always make it relevant for an indefinite period of time. Don’t just focus on trends and timely topics, but think about content that your audience will still be searching for years from now.
Great evergreen content that does well with SEO should also offer a lot of information. Creating ‘ultimate guides’ is probably more effective than publishing many shorter guides in this case. For evergreen content, you should also spend time regularly updating the content to make sure that it’s never outdated.
Evergreen content like this could be in the form of a blog post, an eBook, a YouTube video, a podcast, or anything else. It will be able to drive consistent traffic to your site, generate a steady flow of leads, and help your company to stay visible to the right customers.
Above: an example of evergreen blog content
8. Show Your Personality and Expertise With Live Events
If you run a small business alone, then you are essentially the business yourself. A big part of solo entrepreneur marketing is making your personal brand a part of your business. And a great way to achieve this is through live events.
Not only do virtual events allow you to show your personality and expertise, but they also allow you to address a large audience at once. You can answer all of your customers’ questions and address common pain points without having to reach out to customers individually. This will save a lot of time, and act as a helpful resource for future marketing efforts if you record it.
You can do live social media events or host webinars on platforms like Zoom. This is a great way to increase brand awareness, generate new leads, and reveal the person behind the business.
9. Share Your Solopreneur Journey
Everyone loves a success story.
As a solopreneur, plenty of people will be interested in how you built your company and what your journey looks like. Instead of waiting until you’ve reached your end goal, start to share your business journey now. This will help to bring across your personality while getting more people interested in your business.
You can release videos about your business journey, write blog posts, and share your experience on social media. You could start to build an engaged community by doing an Ask Me Anything post on Reddit or even start a podcast. This may sound silly to new small businesses, but it can do wonders for enhancing your authority and building an audience.
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10. Spend Time Engaging With Your Customers
As a one-person business, your customer base expects you to be fully engaged with them. Unlike big companies, solopreneur customers want a more personalized experience. They’re not just dealing with a business, they’re dealing with an individual.
Make sure that you pay extra attention to customer service and engagement. Try to spend some time each day responding to any comments, questions, or reviews on social media. Reach out to customers asking for feedback, and include a level of personalization in your daily business operations. This will go a long way in building up a base of happy, loyal customers that trust your business.
Solo Entrepreneur Marketing Done for You
As a small business owner doing it all yourself, you probably don’t have the time to manage all of your marketing campaigns while servicing your customers. We get it, digital marketing requires a lot of effort and expertise.
Instead of hiring an expensive marketing agency, or taking on new hires, Wishpond offers the ideal solution for solopreneurs. With Wishpond, you can access all of the tools you need in a single platform, alongside a team of experts to create campaigns for you. You’ll save loads of time, while your marketing is in expert hands.
Book a demo today to see how Wishpond can help you grow and manage your business.
Conclusion
Whatever kind of products or services you sell, having a good marketing strategy in place is vital. With the right strategies and tools, anyone can create high-impact marketing campaigns while still having plenty of time to manage the daily operations of their business.
Follow the tactics listed above, and marketing your solopreneur enterprise will become a whole lot easier.
Are you a solopreneur? Let us know your thoughts and experiences of marketing in the comments below!
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