How to turn your marketing into money

The only way to judge whether your marketing's working is to set objectives and then measure your results. But lots of business owners don't do either!

In this session, Niki Hutchison will share her super-simple system for running your marketing like a well-oiled machine. You'll know what's working best and what you no longer need to waste time on.

Topics covered in this session

• How to connect their marketing activity to actual revenue

• The key foundations required to turn visibility into leads and leads into paying clients

• How to simplify their marketing and focus on the actions that will generate results fastest

About the speaker

Ex-agency and multi-award winning marketing strategist Niki Hutchison is the founder of Enjoy Marketing® and Scotland's only (in)credible marketing conference, Adventures in Marketing®.

She's passionate about helping online business owners leave behind amateur marketing and instead, adopt a multi-channel marketing strategy to market their business like a pro.

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Transcript

Lightly edited for clarity.

Beth: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's Lunch and Learn. My name is Beth, and I'll be your host today.

For those of you attending a Lunch and Learn for the first time, Enterprise Nation is a vibrant community platform for startups and small businesses.

I'm really pleased to introduce Niki Hutchison, who is the founder of Enjoy Marketing. In this session, Niki will share her simple system for running your marketing like a well-oiled machine.

If you have any questions throughout the webinar, please post them in the chat and we'll do our best to answer them at the end of the session. Today's webinar will be recorded, and we'll send a follow-up email with the recording and further resources later today.

Over to you, Niki.

Niki: Hello, and good afternoon. I was going to say lovely to see you, but I can't actually see you, so please do say hi in the chat.

My name is Niki Hutchison, and I'm a marketing strategist, agency owner, podcast host and event host. I love marketing, but I always say there is absolutely no point in marketing unless, at some stage, it turns into money. That's what we're going to cover today.

I'm going to give you some examples of client campaigns. I like to share these for inspiration, so hopefully you can take away some ideas. Then we'll dig into how you can turn your marketing into money.

Do let me know in the chat what type of business you have and where you are based. I'm just outside Edinburgh in Scotland, but I travel the country and work with clients all over the UK and beyond.

I'm also going to give you an opportunity at the end to learn from me for free in more depth, so make sure you stick around for that.

Let's turn your marketing into money. I'm going to share some of the exact strategies we use, and have used, to 10x our clients' results.

I'll share examples of how you can go from selling 10 spots to 100, or how to make £50,000 this month instead of £5,000. These are all things we have helped clients achieve.

First, I'm going to share how we supported one of our clients, who hosts a marketing event, to go from selling 500 tickets to over 1,300 tickets during one launch.

Most people are taking a digital-only approach to marketing. If you only take one thing away from today, please let it be this: think beyond social media.

This is going to sound jargony and grand, but I want you to think about a multichannel marketing strategy. All that means is not trying to reach people in one place only.

I'll share some examples of how you might do that and why you might want to. Today's marketing channels, especially social media, were not designed to help your business. They were designed to make their own money, and it's becoming harder to stand out on social media for that reason.

Other digital channels can be expensive too. There are many traditional marketing methods that are hugely effective.

Most people are using AI to create content. I don't want to shame anybody, and in our agency we're on a mission to use AI to be more effective across every part of the business. But the majority of AI content you see today is boring. We can spot it a mile off, and some people say that doesn't matter. It does matter. People can lose respect for you. You can lose credibility.

If you want to be known for original content and original thinking, so you stand out online, you cannot rely on AI. It does not convert on its own.

We also cannot allow the algorithm to dictate our success. I've never been an algorithm chaser. I've never relied on trends to generate revenue into my business. The algorithm is not going to find new clients for you.

I have so many examples of people who have gone viral, but haven't turned that virality into revenue. So we're not going to allow the algorithm to dictate success. We're going to take an original approach that suits our unique business.

Another key thing I'd love you to take away from today is consistency. You've heard this before. I don't simply mean showing up every day on social media, but it is important that when you're marketing your business, whichever channels you're using, email, flyers through doors, social media or anything else, you don't show up in fits and starts.

If you do, you're forgettable. We are here for the long term. We want quick results, yes, but we also want to be strategic and smart.

Right now, you might be thinking, this is useful, but it can feel very overwhelming. You have probably heard these terms being banded around online. You're probably scrolling past them most days and stressing yourself out.

It is overwhelming and noisy online, so let's take a deep breath and remove ourselves from that noisy space, because it is not working for most people.

The people it is working for online are often spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on ads. I recommend an organic approach first, before you spend money on ads, because otherwise you can burn through your cash. We need to work out what is going to engage people and how we can attract their attention before putting budget behind it.

Let's change things today.

I'll briefly introduce myself, because this might be the first time we've met. My name is Niki Hutchison, spelled the Scottish way. Do follow me on Instagram. I'm very active there, and I'm active on LinkedIn too. Just watch out for the spelling of my name so you can find me.

I have two sides to my business. On one side, I teach people. I have a membership, mastermind, courses and programmes, and I teach business owners how to use marketing more effectively to get results.

We also have an agency called Enjoy Marketing, specifically because hardly anybody enjoys marketing, but we do. That's where we manage campaigns for clients.

I've worked with a range of clients and won several awards. I've been in marketing my entire career. I did my first work experience in a well-known agency when I was 14, totally fell in love with it, worked in advertising strategy, studied it up to postgraduate level and have worked in it for almost my whole career before starting my own business in 2012.

I'm not new to this. The logo you probably won't recognise is from my own first business, which I set up when my children were young. It's not as random as you might think for someone with a marketing background. If you want to ask me questions about that, jump on to Instagram and I'll be happy to answer.

Now let's focus on you and your business, because that's why you're here today. You want to turn your marketing into money. You want to 10x your results.

You may recognise Andrew and Pete, who are very well known in the online marketing space. They run the UK's biggest marketing conference, Atomicon, which takes place in Newcastle in June and now attracts 1,600 business owners every year.

We worked with them in 2023 and created what was, at the time, their most successful launch. We helped them more than double their ticket sales.

How did we do that? We put together a multichannel marketing campaign.

We leveraged all of their social media platforms. We worked with them. They created videos, booked speakers and all the rest of it. But we also leveraged other channels.

For example, they took out a package with Freelancer Magazine, which was perfectly aligned with their target audience. They wrapped the whole front cover and ran a full feature about Atomicon.

We also made it very easy for people to share. A huge part of Atomicon is community. Lots of people go there to meet business owner friends once a year, and they have a community meetup the day before, where they invite community hosts.

That has worked because they've made it very community focused and easy for the hosts, and other attendees, to become affiliates. For example, I'm an affiliate, so I can make money if I share my link and somebody buys a ticket through it.

The key learning here is to make it easy for people to promote your business. It doesn't matter if you run a completely different type of business. You can still apply the same approach.

We created a pack before contacting anybody. Inside that pack, we included copy for emails, direct messages and videos, plus graphics and other promotional assets. The email said: "We're so excited you're going to help spread the word. Here is everything you need inside this folder."

It was not a case of approaching someone, asking them to promote the business and then scrambling to get everything together if they said yes. And it wasn't just giving them a landing page and saying, "You crack on." They won't do it. You have to make it really easy for people, which means doing the hard work first.

This is a recurring theme: make it easy for people.

In 2022, we worked with the UK Space Agency. They were running two business accelerators, one for beginner businesses and one for more advanced businesses, and they wanted us to help fill them. The accelerators were for businesses related to space. I still don't really understand what a lot of those businesses did, but our job was to fill the accelerators.

Again, we took a multichannel marketing campaign approach. We created assets for social media, with different headlines and straplines. These were all tested. We created on-brand graphics and videos. We built email templates, and we made it easy for people to help.

This was back in 2022, when people were still using Twitter, now X. We supplied tweets for people. We crafted emails saying: "We're reaching out to ask for your help with details of this new opportunity from the UK Space Agency."

We also created lists of editorial contacts. The example on screen is the Scotland list, but we had multiple lists, so we could leverage PR as part of the campaign.

Hopefully, you can see we were not just showing up on social media and hoping for the best. Even with lovely graphics and videos, that still wouldn't have worked.

The vast majority of people who joined both accelerators came from personal outreach. They came from having all the assets ready, sharing them and asking the right connected people for help. I really encourage you to take this approach too.

Another example is Lauren Currie, who runs a programme called Upfront. We worked with Lauren a few years ago because I'd booked her to deliver a session inside one of my programmes. After the session, she said: "I'm doing pretty well, but I'd love to take things to the next level. Can you help me?"

We worked together to help her increase sales of Upfront. We also looked at her business model, which is important when you're thinking about turning marketing into money.

That theme of making it easy for people to promote and engage with your business applies here too. We need to make it easy for people to know what to buy from you, and to physically buy it.

When we started working together, Lauren had the Upfront programme, which was doing pretty well, and a membership that didn't have many members. She was thinking of retiring it because it was about £20 a month and not really making much money.

We reviewed her business model and updated her offer suite. Upfront remained front and centre as the key offer she wanted to sell. But I recommended changing the membership so it became more exclusive. Instead of being open to anyone, it became available only to people who had been through Upfront.

That made the membership the next logical step for people after finishing the programme.

By doing that, we increased membership sales from 20 to over 200. We 10x'd her cohort sales from about 60 people to over 600, and expanded her offer suite.

How did we do all of this? We introduced multichannel marketing. We used email marketing much more effectively than she had been. We segmented the audience and thought carefully about their problems. We considered how we could make it easy for them to learn about Lauren before asking them to buy from her.

We introduced live masterclasses, in a similar format to this. In those masterclasses, Lauren delivered value and then sold at the end.

We also created sales decks for corporate clients. She now has cohorts for corporates as part of the expanded offer suite. We updated her sales pages and calls to action too, because there are often quick wins on sales pages as well as more detailed improvements.

If you're wondering what the quick wins are, one is to have a button above the fold. That means when someone lands on the page, they can buy from the first section they see.

Here are a couple of fun ones too. If you make your "buy now" buttons green, more people will click them. If you have a photograph of someone on the sales page and that person is looking at the "buy now" button, more people will click because their eye is naturally drawn there.

Your existing marketing needs to be levelled up, and you need multichannel marketing if you want to 10x your results and turn marketing into money.

Lauren came to us desperate to get to £10,000. She has now gone far beyond that. I love it when clients sing our praises online, and I also love it when they send us champagne, which was very much appreciated.

Her message said: "Thank you for helping me smash my goal and then some." That is what happens when you really focus on your marketing. You smash your goals and then some.

You might be thinking these examples all had fairly big audiences. Yes, they did, because those are the types of clients we work with on the agency side. They have the budget for us to do this work for them.

But I also work with smaller clients. One VIP day client wanted to launch. A launch is simply a focused marketing campaign for a set period of time, selling one specific thing.

I encourage you to run campaigns throughout the year. Even if you sell the same thing all year, it's important to create moments of excitement and urgency so people hit the green sales button and buy now.

This client, Abigail, came to me because she wanted help with a launch. We had a VIP day together, and within a matter of weeks, she generated a 176% ROI, with more revenue since then.

Another one-to-one client, Lydia, generated a 255% ROI within a matter of weeks.

Whoever you work with to help you with your marketing, please make sure they are focused on ROI. Marketing should not be seen as a cost. Marketing should be an investment that generates a return.

If you work with someone who appreciates that and is as focused on it as you are, you cannot go wrong. I judge myself by the ROI of my clients. You are investing to get a return, not spraying and praying or sending money out into the world with nothing coming back.

Hopefully, you are ready to create your own multichannel marketing strategy and turn your marketing into money.

I'm going to share a simple three-step framework. First, choose your traditional methods.

When I started working in advertising, social media did not exist. I come at this from a very old-school approach, but what we're seeing now is that the world has almost come full circle. People are fed up with spending so much time online and not getting the same response or results.

When I talk about multichannel marketing, I want you to think beyond social media, Google search and AI. Think about what you could do as part of your marketing campaign to surprise and delight people.

What could you send somebody through the post? Someone asked me recently how they could reach a specific person. They had a clear idea of who they wanted to reach. I said that back when I worked in agencies, we would have sent direct mail. I suggested they send something designed to land on that person's desk, but it needed to be carefully thought through, appealing and relevant.

Imagine how much that would stand out compared with a reel on Instagram.

So think about traditional methods: TV, radio, billboards, print, direct mail and events. TV, radio and billboards may be out of reach for most small businesses, but print can still work well.

With my dance company, we advertised in print every month. I don't mean the broadsheets, although we did get PR coverage there. We paid to advertise in specific publications, and we still often do that for clients now. It can be very effective if you find the right publication for your target audience.

The same principle applies to any marketing. Get really clear on who you want to sell to. Then ask yourself: where can I find them? Where can I grab their attention? When might they be in a moment of downtime where their mind is relaxed enough to notice my thing?

Direct mail can work. Events are also having a real comeback. I host two events, one in Edinburgh and one in London, both around marketing. I also sponsor events, attend events with an expo stand and speak at events. I get business from them, otherwise I wouldn't do it.

Online events like this are also a great way to grow your audience. Work out where your ideal customers are and where they are hanging out.

I was saying to my husband, who is also my business partner, that everything is a subscription these days. Even if you have a product-based business, your customers are probably inside a membership or paying for a subscription somewhere.

That company probably has an email list. Maybe you could partner with them so they send an email out. There are so many ways to reach your clients, but you need to choose the best ones for you.

Please don't take "multichannel" to mean you need to do everything. You do not need to do everything. But you do need to do more than social media if you want results.

With my dance company, we used several physical marketing assets. In my current business, I use hard assets too.

For example, when I deliver a session in person about creating a multichannel marketing strategy, I give people a handout. On the back, it has an advert for my membership.

I also have an image saved on my phone for my London event in October. I never want to be caught short when someone asks me to tell them more about the event. I hand out bookmarks with QR codes leading to my podcast.

When I had my dance company, we used expo stands and tried to make a big noise. If you've ever done an expo stand, you'll know it's busy and noisy, so you need to attract attention.

I once commissioned a big foam dice. I went to a local foam shop, got a large block of foam, then found someone to embroider our branding on one side and different dance moves on the other sides.

We would stand at the front of the stand and roll the dice out into the crowd. It would usually hit someone below the knees or a small child, but it was very soft. They'd look at it, then look around to match the branding to a stand. Then they'd come and talk to us about our classes. It worked really well.

I also used to drive a branded car around town. You can imagine how my children felt about that. But I can't tell you how many sign-ups we got from it. The phone number was not only on the back of the car, it was also on the roof, so people signed up when they were on the bus.

I give out biscuits, tissues, prizes and all sorts of things to get my brand into people's hands. That's the goal: get it into their hands so you can get it into their minds.

Then you need digital methods too. I'm definitely not saying don't use digital. Today, we have search engine optimisation, GEO, AI search, email, content, paid ads, webinars, influencers and more.

I'm a global ambassador for Adobe Express, which is where I create and schedule all my content. That might be what you think of when you think about influencers or ambassadors, but you can take control of this yourself.

When I had the dance company, we set up our own event. We researched local mum bloggers in the area where we were launching a new dance class and invited them and their children to come and take part.

We gave them goodie bags with balloons, sunglasses and cards saying "I'm a Step It Up dance star". We gave them a little fruit picnic and made sure they had a great time.

That room was full of influencers. We were not doing the digital work ourselves. They did the hard work for us afterwards. They left the event, shared pictures of their children with the sunglasses and cards, and said what a great time they had. That class sold out from the first week, including some of the mum bloggers who enjoyed it so much that they enrolled for the term.

A little bit of thinking outside the box can pay dividends and turn your marketing into money much more quickly than relying on the usual tactics.

So let's pull it all together. Choose your traditional methods. Choose your digital methods. Then activate what I call conversational commerce.

This is really important, and I mentioned it in the UK Space Agency example. It's where you reach out to people, and this is the bit nobody wants to do, but it's where your sales are hiding.

I want you to message people and start conversations with zero expectations, but with delusional optimism. I'm doing this all the time.

Then we have Google search. If I type my name into Google, it will show the basics, reviews, my address, basic details, social media platforms and other information.

If I ask ChatGPT who Niki Hutchison is, it will show similar information, but in more detail. The key part is that it says: "If you like, I can dig up her latest projects, clients or reviews to see how effective her marketing services are. Do you want me to do that?"

That is why it's important for you to show up in AI results. Google has also updated this week so that sources are now being named in Google AI too. There's nowhere to hide anymore.

If your clients ask AI to show them reviews or find out how effective your services are, and you're not featuring in AI results, they're going to find someone else who is.

That was a whistle-stop tour, and I hope it has inspired you.

I also want to tell you about the free opportunity I mentioned. I'm running a free challenge to help you find the hidden revenue inside your business. You can scan the QR code or go to nikihutchison.com/revenue. I'd love to see you there. We'll be able to have much longer, more in-depth conversations and get you taking action.

Beth: Great. Thank you, Niki. We did have a few questions in the chat, but unfortunately, I don't think we have time for them.

I've popped your contact details in the chat, so if you had a question, please feel free to reach out to Niki and ask her directly.

Thank you so much for attending today, and thank you, Niki, for that brilliant presentation. Just to recap, we'll send the recording and further resources later today.

Niki: Can I quickly pick up on one question from the chat? Someone asked whether my classes are affordable. The most affordable way to get my brain on your specific business is in my membership, which is nikihutchison.com/membership. It's £39 a month until next month, when it goes up significantly, so come on in. Great to see you.

Beth: There we go. We'll end it there. Thank you, Niki.

Niki: Thank you. Bye, everyone.

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