If you came along to any of my Marketing Mondays calls in 2020, you may have experienced the international flavour brought to some of the calls by CJ the Bubble Girl. She’s a brilliant party entertainer, who is becoming a bit of an international star in the area of bubbles. Yes, you can make a business out of blowing bubbles. And yes, you can become famous for doing it! CJ has travelled the world performing her art and was even part of a Guinness World Record a couple of years ago. CJ is also my sister – real name Caroline!

Caroline has been running her business in Singapore very successfully for over 20 years. Like many others in the entertainment industry, 2020 was a really tough year for her. Singapore went into a very strict lockdown and as I write this, in March 2021, they are still extremely restricted as to what they can and can’t do. This means that CJ hasn’t been able to perform as she usually would, at big parties and corporate events, in shopping malls, or busking in the park. Which means she’s not been able to earn as much as she would normally.

The Idea Factory

Thanks to free technology, Caroline and I chat on a video call nearly every weekend – usually just girlie stuff. But earlier this year I was delighted when she asked her little sister for some marketing advice. We booked a couple of hours and met up on Zoom, to talk about all her options. She has lots of options and lots of ideas, so we started by talking through all of them. Maybe it runs in the family; my head is usually of ideas about what I could do next. Easily distracted? Me? Oh yes!

Our first task was to just list all Caroline’s ideas and opportunities. No rights and no wrongs; no good or bad ideas. No judgement – just a collection of sticky notes, one for each option. Get them out of your head and onto paper – sticky notes, a mind map, a flip chart – anything that allows you to see them all in one place. Only when they’re out of your head and in front of you can you start to put them into some sort of order.

Sticky Note Strategy

How do you prioritise and order your ideas?

When I’m working with clients, I use the same process for helping them get their options into some sort of order. Regardless of the exact service they provide – coaching, consulting, training, party fun and games – the principles are the same. If you try to market everything you do – all the opportunities – to everyone who might be a possible client, your marketing will become very complicated, very expensive and very ineffective. I like to split the marketing into four distinct strategies and Caroline and I filled out a template I use. She printed it out, put it on her office wall and added all the sticky notes, in the right places. Everything in one place and easy to see!

I always start by looking at how you can promote your existing services to your existing clients and contacts. It can be very tempting, when you really need to bring in more business, to look for new clients, or to launch a new service to grab the world’s attention. However, I urge you to first look close to home.

For Caroline, this is about contacting the clients who have booked her in the past for one of their children’s birthday parties. Birthdays come around every year, without fail, so her first priority was to contact any families with birthdays happening in the next couple of months. Birthday girls and boys often have siblings, so a reminder about the great party last year for one child can encourage a booking for another one this year. Caroline put time into sending individual, personalised emails to her clients who she knew had birthdays coming up. The result – a flurry of new bookings!

Staying Close to Home

The second strategy to work on also keeps you close to home. It’s about promoting new services to your existing clients. For Caroline, this means telling her clients about new themes and party packs (including DIY bubble kits!) that they can buy. She has also created some great online bubble workshops, as a result of being locked down. Keep focusing on the clients who have already bought from you. Ask them how else you can help or what problems they’re struggling with. They are much more likely to buy from you, as they already know and trust you. All you need to do is keep in touch with them on a regular basis.

Once you’ve spent lots and lots of time keeping in touch with your clients, encouraging them to book more parties and buy more bubble kits, then you can venture into the third strategy. This one is about promoting your existing services to new clients. The easiest way to do this is by encouraging referrals and recommendations from your happy clients. Ask them to tell their friends and they’ll help do your marketing for you. Caroline has also come up with some really creative ways of reaching new contacts, by producing short videos of her creating bubbles in surprising parts of Singapore that people don’t usually get to see. Fun, creative and intriguing.

Staying on Track

If you look at Caroline’s wall-based Marketing Strategy, you’ll see that the majority of her activity is based around the first strategy of selling more of her services to her current clients – more sticky notes here than anywhere else. There are a couple of new services to be promoted to her existing clients and a handful of activities to help her find new clients. So when she gets distracted by a shiny new idea, all she has to do is look at the wall and it will help her to get back on track!

Not sure where you should be going with your marketing this year? If you’d like a Sticky Note Strategy, get in touch to find out how I can help you create one. And a more successful business. Click here to email me or call me on 07773 252 744 for a chat.