Go your own way

Hi Reader

Since Honey Pot Digital was just the spark of an idea, my mission was to help small business owners better understand and take action in their marketing. The idea was sparked when I saw a client I was working with get swindled by their ad agency. Specifically, they got a photo done for a campaign they were doing with the business I worked for. The photo was curated to their brand, kinda, but it was missing one key element. The PRODUCT. Not only did they charge them, they didn’t redo the shoot, they photoshopped the product in, and not very well. They paid way too much for a glorified stock image. This client was a small part of a large business, so they could kinda afford it, but still! I just knew a small business couldn’t afford that, and that they’d probably be told it was their error that caused it, putting them off the whole space.

I wasn’t in a position where I could change that particular situation, since my role was at a whole other business, but I started reviewing the space and finding where I could fit in to better help people. I saw more clients who might not necessarily be getting held over a barrel but who didn’t have awareness around certain aspects, and could easily make a bad hire with the best intentions if someone took advantage of their naivety. These clients were super knowledgable in their own areas and taught me so much, but they had this blind spot. I knew there was a knowledge gap that was getting exploited. Initially, Honey Pot Digital started out being an alternative for them to work with and a way of me working for myself so I could move out of the big smoke and back to my hometown with very few, if not zero marketing jobs.

A lot has changed since I had that idea in 2017. I’ve grown as a person, the industry and tech available to small businesses has shifted, the expectation around video has grown, and that’s all led to a shift in my contribution to my clients. The overarching mission didn’t change but my role within it has evolved. I’ve grown a better understanding of what I want to do with my time, the size of business I want to build, and how I can find more work/life fulfilment.

I previously worked to take things off my client’s plate, running their ads for them, creating content for them, working on their website and SEO, but not totally teaching them along the way. I wrote reports, had meetings and explained what work I was doing, but they weren’t learning the nitty gritty themselves in the way they would if they were more involved in the action taking. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, after all that is what they hired me for, but I saw a new opportunity that allows me to spend more time strategising and teaching (aka coaching).

I now work to help my clients find what works for them. What is profitable, productive, sustainable, and enjoyable for them. My past experience gives me the skills to guide them through working on these things themselves, but there genuinely is an interest (and major benefit) when business owners understand their marketing and how it’s evolving.

I also work with my clients to help them navigate their marketing, confirm their strategy, explore new territory and curate their own marketing roadmap.

Specifically, when I work with a coaching client, it goes something like this: we evaluate the business and create an initial marketing strategy for them and make an action plan, then they execute it while meeting with me every month to recalibrate, investigate things, and work through hurdles they have. It’s part curated training, part strategy, part accountability. They gain more knowledge around marketing as a whole so they can make more educated decisions, and remove most of the overwhelm that keeps them feeling stuck. Our goal is for them to graduate from working with me with the confidence to keep making adjustments as their business grows, and the world evolves around them.

Looking back, one of my earliest clients was one who hired me to run workshops for their wedding vendor directory and I LOVED it. If parallel universes exist, there’s a version of me out there that kept focusing on that service model.

We see so much marketing every day, even if you’re not totally trying to because you see brands, content and advertising everywhere. You also can get ideas of what you could do from shows, podcasts, and so called “gurus” in the space. We then naturally fill in the gaps. We see people talk about revenue and assume a profit from that. They talk about their output but skip over how big their team is. These small assumptions can add up to overwhelm, where we feel stuck in what we should do when we don’t have the time, budget or knowledge to get things moving.

We can sometimes assume if we just do a list of 20 things, we’ll be great. There’s so much nuance to what any business can decide to action in marketing, how they do it and how it’s received. Many of my clients have this block, where they think they should be doing something. but don’t really want to. Like they hate social media for business, but enjoy seeing what others are doing, so we figure out a way they can either minimise social and focus on other platforms, or a new way they can approach social media content. Every client walks away with a different action plan, but the block has been removed.

My belief is that nothing is compulsory until you say you will do it, and then it’s only compulsory up until the time you are next evaluating whether it’s working. It is temporarily required. And only because you said you’d do it.

Let’s normalise ditching things when you know they’re not working, but taking a moment to figure out why. Let’s ditch tactics that don’t work for you to give you time to find something that does. There’s just less room for creativity when you’re surrounded by a fog of shoulds and supposed-tos. Your business model doesn’t have to evolve like mine did, but the way you approach marketing can, if you want it to.

If there’s something in your marketing that you’re feeling stuck on, hit reply and I’ll see if and how I can help, even if that’s just with an email or pointing you to a blog post or podcast.