Setting up a Wellbeing Business? Here’s my tools and tech starter for ten.
Running a successful business in 2023 requires more skills than ever before.
Obvious right? But as each year progresses in many ways I think it becomes even more difficult.
To succeed in business today, how good you are as a yoga teacher, a massage therapist, a sound practitioner... This isn't the measure of how you're able to grow your business. If people can’t find you, or engage with you, your business will struggle to thrive. You need to be able to navigate technology systems, understand channel marketing and how to build a marketable customer database.
Yes of course, you can outsource it all, but the small businesses I know are mindful of costs, and how do you know what you need and which information to trust?
Goodness, this sounds a bit doom and gloom doesn't it? I promise we’ll get to the uplifting part!
It's also a fantastic time to be a small business owner, there are more ways than ever to connect with your customers, and there are many free or low cost tools to help you.
In this blog I'll share some of the early recommendations I have if you're starting a business or considering it.
Start with the basics: Customer and Brand
Your customer.
Who do you want to attract?
It doesn’t matter whether you’re a huge yoga studio with gazillions of classes, or running one yoga class a week in your local community space — you need to think about what type of people would come to your classes.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking you need to be everything to everyone, because you want to maximise success with mass appeal — but this is a mistake. You’ll never appeal to everyone, and that’s okay! I absolutely love pizza, and I can’t imagine who doesn’t love pizza but there are pizza haters out there! Not everyone wants pizza.
So now we’re starting to think about you as a brand. Who are you? What do you stand for? What language and style would appeal to your potential customers? In marketing, we call these ‘Buyer Personas’ — fun, semi-fictional mock-ups of your ideal customer. They’re a great way to hone in on your target audience before you invest time or money in building your brand.
Make a list of the types of words you'd like people to say about you.
What kind of mood do you want to evoke? Let me give you an example, when I was building Santosha Marketing, I wanted to create a calming mood, I love the beautiful colours of nature and how soothing it can be. I like to use analogies around nature to help people relate to technical marketing speak. So for me, the mood of my website reflects that.
To bring this part of your business to life, I would get started with Canva. They have a free version and a paid version. If you can afford it, the paid version gives you access to some very handy functionality and it's well worth the access to the brand kit where you can store your brand colours and logos. Breakdown of the Canva pricing here
Canva is essentially an easy way to create many of the design assets you need to run a business. You can quickly create social media posts and stories, email headers, flyers and much more using their thousands of premade templates. There's a bit of an art to identifying good templates for yourself and adapting them to suit what you need. I would start with about five templates for yourself so you have consistency across what you're posting, and this will also save you time in the long term.
Next step, think about a website
Building a website can be a scary thing! I totally understand. Let's break down some of the steps you'll need.
Domain registration. This is the Web address for your website eg santoshamarketing.co.uk
If you have a business name that's similar to others it may require you to get creative. You can always check the availability of a domain name here. If you want to protect your brand, you do have the option to purchase domain names similar to your own but use only one of them.
Next you need a website platform. The ones I would recommend for a small business would be Wix or Squarespace. They have easy to use templates, the interface makes it simple to make changes yourself, and they also usually include the domain registration in the bundle cost. I would never advise having a website where you aren’t able to make small edits to it yourself ie you are relying on a web agency.
Think carefully about your keywords. What would people be searching to find you? If you offer a location based service this is very important. More on this in this blog. Make a list of the key terms you want to get across on your website.
Create a map of what pages you want. If you offer for example yoga and pilates, be sure to make these be separate pages so you can really focus on your keywords. As a minimum I'd say you need a homepage, about you, what you offer, contact and perhaps faq or helpful advice page. You don’t need to go wild. You can start small.
How will you capture interest?
Next area I would explore is creating some email communications for yourself. Whether people sign up on your website, or whether you’re emailing customers who have bought services from you… being able to email them is a very effective way to disseminate information.
It doesn’t need to be scary.
There are two common platforms I see small businesses gravitate towards: Mailchimp and Mailerlite. Given the choice I would opt for Mailerlite every time, I find it a superior mailing platform for a more reasonable price. It can be free, or the lower package is $9 per month. I’m not on commission with Mailerlite, I just prefer it!
There are two email templates I would create:
For when people sign up on your website, set a basic automation that emails them helpful information, this could be links to your favourite blogs, frequently asked questions, stories about your brand, information about what you offer… the kind of information new potential customers would like to read.
The second email I’d do is a monthly newsletter that updates on what’s going on, if monthly is too much, opt for less but this is a great way to share your news and get sales.
Brand Tools. Website. Email. Those are three areas that I would absolutely be setting up as a small business. “But we haven't mentioned social media!” I hear you say. That’s a blog for another time! Stay tuned.
If this is helpful… you can sign up to my newsletter!!
Or you can book a session with me for training on any of the above, I’m very patient and happy to help.
