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Join for freePosted: Thu 29th Oct 2026
Stop wasting time and money on marketing that doesn't deliver.
Watch this webinar to learn practical, low-cost ways to attract more local customers, build valuable partnerships and use community marketing, events and digital tools to grow your business.
Also, find out how to make your marketing work harder and turn visibility into consistent sales.
Why a social media-first approach does not work in today's market (and what to do instead)
How you can build a successful business without an enormous budget
How to grow a community of buyers, not simply an audience
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®.
Niki is passionate about helping online business owners leave behind amateur marketing and instead leverage a multi-channel marketing strategy that makes success inevitable.
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Lightly edited for clarity.
Beth: Hello everyone, and welcome to today’s Powering Local Businesses Lunch and Learn. I’m Beth, community manager at Enterprise Nation.
Powering Local Businesses is brought to you by EDF Small Business and Enterprise Nation, supported by Square, and it’s designed to help small businesses grow more sustainably, however you sell and wherever you’re based. Through the hub, you can access energy-saving guidance, expert workshops and a range of free business support resources. We’ll be dropping links in the chat throughout, so please do keep an eye out.
Today, we’re focusing on something every business owner thinks about, but many find frustrating – marketing that actually turns into sales. If you’ve been pouring time into social media and not seeing the results you hoped for, or you want to grow your customer base without a big budget, this session is going to be really useful for you.
We’re joined today by Niki Hutchison, ex-agency and multi-award-winning marketing strategist, founder of Enjoy Marketing and of Scotland’s only marketing conference, Adventures in Marketing. Niki is passionate about helping business owners move beyond amateur marketing and build a multichannel strategy that makes success inevitable, and she’s here today to share exactly how to do that.
In the session, Niki will explain why a social-media-first approach so often falls short, how to build a successful business without an enormous budget, and how to grow a community of buyers rather than just an audience. As always, please post any questions you have in the Q&A or in the chat as we go along, and we’ll do our best to answer them at the end of the session.
The session is being recorded, so you’ll receive the recording along with a few follow-up resources in an email later today. So over to you, Niki.
Niki: Thank you, Beth, and hi everybody. Thank you so much for joining today, and thanks for the intro. We’ll jump straight in.
I’ll probably weave quite a lot of stories into today’s session, because I always prefer to learn that way, using examples. But so that you know you’re in safe hands, I’ve had the word “strategy” in my job title for over 25 years. I’ve been a business owner myself since 2012 and a marketing agency owner since 2017, so everything that I’m talking about is rooted in my own experience and the things that have worked and are working for our clients.
First of all, I would love to know a little bit about your business, so please drop your name, your business name and the place you would love to connect into the chat, and I’ll go through these at the end. I would absolutely love to connect with you. As you can see, my name has slightly awkward spellings, but that’s me on all channels and platforms, and I’m most active on Instagram, LinkedIn and my personal Facebook profile.
So we’re going to talk about how to turn all of your marketing efforts into sales, and we’re going to talk about some really simple funnels. I’m passionate about not getting caught up in jargon – there’s a lot of it floating about in the advertising industry generally and in the digital space as well, isn’t there? I think it’s quite unnecessary, so we’re going to break that down.
What is a funnel? I’m going to share a really simple method that you can apply to make more sales, and how you can set that up. By all means, ask me absolutely anything in the chat, and I’ll try and work through those at the end – I’m sure Beth will be keeping an eye on that as well, to pull out the questions you want to ask me before we finish today.
So you’re here because you probably know that you need a method for more effective marketing. As Beth was saying, you’re maybe a bit frustrated – I hear this a lot from people at the moment. Reach seems to have dropped, engagement seems to have dropped, and social media isn’t delivering in the same way that it was.
That is absolutely true – social media is changing all the time. But if your marketing isn’t working, then it’s really going to create a big sales problem, isn’t it?
So first of all, let’s bust some jargon. How many of these marketing terms have you heard? We’ve got nine here: funnel, lead magnet, opt-in page, tripwire, evergreen webinar and so on.
I won’t go through them all, but these are a lot of the terms that are swirling around when you’re searching for support with marketing, and it can feel super overwhelming, especially when you’re trying to build a business online. So I want to try and simplify that for you today. Let’s forget the jargon and focus on what’s actually going to make the difference to your sales, and this could be from today.
A sales funnel is simply the path, often known as the customer journey – again, a little bit jargony. It’s the path from somebody who has never heard of you and is unaware of you, to buying from you. In fact, we can even extend that a step further to repeat customers.
This is actually based on a very traditional marketing model that I learned about during my degree called AIDA: awareness, interest, desire, action. We’ve got to make people aware of you first of all, and ultimately we’ve got to get them to actually take action. Not everybody will, but we want to get as many of the people who are aware of us as possible to that point of purchase.
And that’s it – it’s literally as simple as that. There are lots of different methods that you can use, but the method that I teach and recommend is that you always start with sales. That might sound a bit counterintuitive.
My background is in creative advertising strategy – I’m a marketing strategist. However, I always say that marketing is completely useless and pointless unless, at some point, it turns into a sale, in the case of small businesses. It might be a donation in the case of charities, or an action in other cases.
But for the purposes of today, we’ve got to get you making sales, so we’ve got to start with sales. What is the thing that we want to sell?
Most sales and marketing advice will give you multiple steps and want you to buy software. I fell into that trap early on in the days of my agency and spent thousands on software that was like using a hammer to crack a nut. That advice also assumes that you’ve got a team behind you.
I do have a team now, but I did not when I started my first business, and I did not when I started this business, so this will work for you regardless of size. We work with multi-nine-figure businesses today, and we also work with people trying to get to their first 3k months. This stuff works because it has been built with a small business owner’s workload in mind, which most marketing advice has not been.
So we’re going to ignore all of this today. Here is the simple sales funnel that I want you to think about.
Step one is to get visible. This is about creating one piece of content. Depending on where you’re at in your business journey, you might have an email list already, so that might be a piece of content that you use to get visible in front of the subscribers on your email list.
I’m using that as an example because I don’t want you to automatically think about social media. Now, before I go any further, let me just clarify: I am a prolific user of social media. I show up every single day on multiple channels – that is my choice, but that is not what I rely on to make sales.
I use social media to connect, as well as to share what it is that I want to sell, which I call broadcasting. When we’re broadcasting, we’re just talking about what we want to talk about to the world. In that scenario, we’re not really thinking about what the people in the world – our ideal clients, whoever it may be – want to hear from us; all we’re thinking about is what we want to say to them.
So we need to use social media differently. Social media definitely plays a part, but you have other options.
So back to your newsletter. A way to get visible today, if you have an email list, would be to send that list an email. Hopefully, the majority of people will receive it in their inbox and not in spam, and we know that this is one of the highest-converting marketing channels when it comes to people actually spending money with you.
That’s just one example. If you don’t have an email list, then you might want to create a freebie, or you might want to create an event. I regularly host free masterclasses and free webinars like this one, like Enterprise Nation has done today.
They are getting visible in front of you, and that’s going to help grow their audience. This, what we are in right now, is one piece of content.
Step two: we need to invite the next step. I’m going to do that at the end of this session – in fact, I’m going to do it twice. Once because I would love to connect with you in my business, and once because I have an option for you to connect with Enterprise Nation as well, so I’m breaking my own rule here and sharing two links.
Step three is where what I was talking about – using social media to connect rather than simply broadcast – comes in, and that applies to every channel. Social media is just one example; the same goes for your emails, and the same goes if you’re sending out samples. We want to encourage having the conversation.
If you’re a product-based business, an example of this would be that I order the same skincare on subscription every single month. It’s from a small business – absolutely brilliant, highly recommend it – called Skin Genius. Julia, the founder, puts a handwritten note in every single order saying, “Enjoy the skincare. How are you?” and so on.
We’ve built up a relationship, Julia and I, and I had invited her to an event that I was hosting in London on 14 October. She couldn’t make it, but she remembered, and on the handwritten note with my order last week she put, “So gutted to miss your event. Hope it went really well. Keep me in the loop on any future events.”
How amazing is that? We’ve got a relationship because she puts these handwritten notes in – she’s having a conversation with me. I mean, the skincare is amazing, but this is partly what makes me determined to support that small business.
That’s just one example for the product-based business owners among us. For the service-based business owners – businesses like mine – it’s about having these conversations and asking people to take an action. If you’re sending out an email, and this would apply to products as well, ask them to hit reply and tell you something – one easy-to-answer, specific question to get that conversation going.
That does two things. It builds rapport between you and the reader, and it also helps with deliverability, because it signals to whatever email software you’re using that the people you’re sending emails to genuinely want to hear from you. That will help you be delivered to their inbox in future rather than spam.
Gone are the days, in my opinion, when the dream was that you would have six months of content beautifully scheduled in your content creation tool, all ready to go, churning out day after day after day. There’s no connection in that; things are changing so much, and people want to have conversations. So the goal now is to create one piece of content at a time rather than an entire month’s worth.
So if I wanted to start a conversation, I might say something like: “I’m looking for five business owners who know they need a sales funnel but keep putting it off. Comment ‘funnel ’, and I’ll send you the simple version.”
I could literally do that after this session, and that brings me to a point about content repurposing. Although we’re talking about one piece of content here, I want you to think about how many different ways, at different times and on different channels, you could use that same piece of content.
For example, I’ve been podcasting for six years, but we rebranded this year, so we launched our new podcast last week. I’m repurposing the topic of that podcast throughout all of my social channels, every single one. I’m also resharing clips from that podcast episode with a slightly different caption and a slightly different approach on each channel, because I know that people use these channels differently.
I also hosted a podcast launch party last Thursday in Edinburgh. It was free, and I invited special guests from my community, my membership and my mastermind, and that was a way of creating massive visibility – I call that a moment of excitement. People were sharing and resharing, and I had reels.
We’re going to publish the live podcast on YouTube next week, and I’m going to talk about that all over my social media. I also send a Friday email to remind people to listen to the podcast, because it comes out every Friday. So one topic, or one piece of content, can be repurposed in multiple ways.
Now, if you’re listening to this and thinking, “It’s okay for you, Niki – you come from a marketing background, and you have a team. This is not realistic for me,” I totally get it. It’s taken me since 2017 to get to this point in my business. You can start today by creating what I call one piece of hand-raiser content.
If you’re thinking you don’t have enough people on your social media channels to create this piece of hand-raiser content, or you don’t have anybody on your email list to send this to, you could just insert, “Hit reply with ‘funnel’ and I’ll send you the simple version,” if you were emailing. Then it’s about thinking not “What can I tell the limited number of people who are following me or subscribed to my list?” but “What can I give them?” What can I give them that’s going to start a conversation and be valuable to them?
Like my podcast party – that cost me quite a lot of money to put on, but I came from a place of wanting to provide value, wanting to strengthen my community and wanting to create that huge moment of visibility. You can do that on a smaller scale as well. Just think: what do my people need right now?
I recommend that you try and speak to one specific person. We could do a whole separate session on ideal client avatars – another nice bit of jargon there – which are basically descriptions of who it is that you want to sell to. But I do recommend that you have a very clear idea.
Maybe it’s a previous or current client or buyer who you want to sell more to, because they’re no trouble, they’re very appreciative, and they rave about your products or services everywhere. Have a think about who that is, and then use your content to speak to that person.
Name one specific problem. I have a phrase that I use called “go detective mode”, which just means arm yourself with knowledge and find out the golden nuggets. You can do this in lots of different ways to find out what your person’s problem is.
You could be looking in competitor comments – I’ve got a friend who calls this “comment creeping”. If we take that Skin Genius example, for a number of years I had a really bad issue with my skin that I needed to solve. So I was probably on her competitors’ social media channels asking specific questions like, “Is this going to solve my problem?”
What she could have done is go into detective mode, look through those comments and then reach out to me and say, “I’ve got something that I know is going to help.” You can do this too.
And then ask them to take one clear action. I’ve done that here: “Comment ‘funnel ’, and I’ll send you the simple version.”
So we’re arming ourselves with information about the problem, and then we’re talking about that in our content. We’re being very clear about who we’re speaking to, because then it’s going to resonate and they’re going to start thinking, “They’re talking exactly to me – they’re in my head, they’re reading my mind.” Then we’re going to ask them to take one clear action.
That might be to sign up to my email list. It might be to comment, drop an emoji, or let me know if you’ve ever experienced this – we’re trying to start conversations.
We also want to make sure that your website is optimised for SEO and GEO. Taking all of that action – going detective mode and finding out the language that your people are using when they’re trying to solve the problem that you solve – is exactly how you can make sure you get found. If you want to connect with me on Instagram, I will happily send you some resources and recommendations for doing this.
We don’t have time to go into a lot of detail today, but what I will say is that I’m seeing this work more and more, both for our business and for our clients. I’ve got one current enquiry who found me on Google, who I’m hoping is going to convert to a sale today, and last month we sold a £16,000 strategy project to an organisation that found us on ChatGPT. So it’s working.
I mentioned creating a freebie already as a really fantastic way to grow your email list, and I’m going to show you a specific example of mine at the end. I would encourage you to scan it and sign up – you’ll see the email nurture sequence that I send out, so you can learn from that and replicate it.
What I’m going to share is a private podcast feed. I know that my audience is time-poor and prefers to listen to things when they’re out walking the dog or driving their car, so that’s why I chose the format of a podcast. I also know that my audience, like you because you’re here today, wants to know how to make more sales with more ease, so that is the topic of the podcast – and I know that because I went into detective mode.
Okay, so we want to invite the next step, and I’ve covered this already. You might ask them to send you a DM with a keyword – that keyword being “funnel” in the example I used – or you might want them just to comment, and then you can reply. You can either have it automated or, if you’re starting out and you’ve got the time and capacity and don’t want to pay for the software, you can do it manually.
You do not need to have a sales page – my clients ask me this all the time. Whatever it is that you’re selling, I highly recommend having one place for somebody to come, like one holding space, but that could be a Google file. I successfully sold out the beta round of my mastermind many years ago, in 2021, using a Google Doc, because it was a beta and I wanted to test it before I invested in building a sales page.
If you have a sales page, brilliant. But the key point to take away here is that there’s one thing for them to click, and there’s nothing else on that page. We’re not distracting them by saying, “Buy this thing, but if you don’t want that, you could try this.”
One thing, super focused – I call it “all roads lead to”, because all roads lead to the thing that you’re trying to sell. So we’re starting with one offer; we’re asking them to do one thing – one click, one comment, one DM – and we’ve got one holding space, such as one page, where we’re inviting them to take that next step.
And I want you to start having conversations. I want you to start thinking about marketing as a two-way conversation, because this is how you’re going to start making sales.
So, for example, when people reply to you, I want you to reply to them personally. I do this in my business – we’re a sizeable business now, and I still do this. When I send out an email with a link to click through to my holding space, which will be a sales page when I do it today, I will then reply to everybody who clicks that link and invite them to have a conversation in some way.
That’s crucially important now, in the days of AI, more so than ever. Try and work out what they need the answer to, and you can do this by going into detective mode.
If they don’t reply, or if they say something like, “Oh, I’m not sure this is for me,” then have up your sleeve all that detective work that you’ve done. You can say something like, “Oh, a few other people have mentioned that they were wondering about this,” if that’s a concern for them, and then you can answer their concern.
What I really want you to take away from today is that you probably need to do more follow-up. I’m about to share some stats that will blow your mind. Making sales is all about persistence.
I love this stat: 80% of sales require at least five follow-up contacts before people will actually buy from you. Yet 44% of salespeople – that’s you and me, as business owners – give up after just one follow-up attempt. So look at all that lost opportunity between follow-up attempt one and follow-up attempt five.
By the fourth attempt, 92% of people have given up completely, and yet 60% of people say no four times before saying yes. Hopefully, this shows you how much opportunity is out there.
I always talk about permission-based selling. If somebody on follow-up one says, “Absolutely not. This is not for me. I’m never going to buy it,” you are not following up four more times – that’s not what I’m recommending. But you do keep gently following up until the person says no.
Okay, so this is your super simple funnel that you can produce on repeat: one post to help you get visible, which might be an email or an event, and one click to get them to take that next step, which might be a comment, a DM, a suggestion or a conversation starter. Then we do the follow-up – this is where the selling starts, with those conversations – and all of this combined is going to lead to your sale.
Your only piece of homework from today is to write the hand-raiser post that I mentioned. What similar question could you ask on one of your profiles today to try and elicit a response from the people who need what it is that you’re trying to sell? One simple funnel like this absolutely beats overthinking and overcomplicating marketing and sales processes that you never get around to launching.
And stay consistent, because that is what will lead to you making the sales – I promise you. We just started a sales sprint inside my mastermind this week, on Tuesday, and yesterday the first two sales came in. We’ve got multiple more sales in the pipeline from all of the participants today.
They’re going to stay focused and consistent for the next 10 days and beyond. It’s a super-focused sprint, because consistency and practice matter – I call it getting the reps in.
I used to be a ski racer when I was younger, and every time I lost a race, my coach would say, “It’s just ski miles.” You’re just getting the miles under your skis so that you can get better, and we’ve got to apply that approach to our sales and marketing as well.
So if you’re not sure where to start, I want you to think about where you’ve stopped right now. Which of these three steps feels the hardest, what stopped you or is still stopping you right now, and what would you like my eyes on today? We can quickly jump into the chat, because I know we’ve got a couple of minutes left.
I promised you an invitation to enjoy my sales podcast. You can scan the QR code in the top right, or it’s on my website at www.nikihutchison.com/podcast. Remember, watch that spelling!
Take a screenshot if you would like. I’m just about to move on to the next slide, which is the Enterprise Nation one, with another QR code for you to scan for information to benefit your business. Okay, we got there – I’m going to have a quick look at the chat.
Beth: Thanks, Niki, that was brilliant. There was so much to cover in that session – that’s fantastic, thank you. Someone just said “amazing 30 minutes”, so thank you.
So, Niki, I know we’ve only got a minute left, but maybe we can do one or two questions. Is there still a type of business where social media does make sense?
Niki: Oh, absolutely – social media makes sense for all businesses. I’m not saying don’t use social media; what I’m saying is don’t rely on social media. It’s the automatic place where business owners go: “How am I going to make more sales? I’m going to try social media first.”
That is not what’s working today. We need multichannel marketing – we need to give people multiple touchpoints and multiple opportunities. Get in the room with people, because that is one of the most powerful things you can do for your business today.
If you can get in front of people and build those relationships, that will really shorten the customer journey that we talked about – that funnel. When my clients talk about trying to sell things, they’ll say, “Oh yeah, I’ve sent this person an email, but they haven’t replied.”
I’ll say, “Okay, great. Now head on to LinkedIn and connect with them. Let’s see if we can get a reply there.” So we try lots of different things.
Beth: Sure, thank you. I’ve just seen one in the Q&A from Caroline, who says that no matter how many times they ask a question at the end of a piece of content on socials or over email, it very rarely gets a reply. They feel that they don’t have much free content to offer – do you have any advice for Caroline here?
Niki: It’s difficult without knowing exactly what the business is, but...
Beth: Sorry – the business is corporate team-building events on sheep farms. Very niche, Caroline!
Niki: Oh, wow, okay. What an incredible source of content you have – amazing.
Take a very critical look at your own content, because if you’re not eliciting a response, it’s probably because it needs to be a bit more exciting. I feel like you’ve got all the main characters there – all those lovely sheep who can support you – and that would be so fun. Sorry, what was the second part of the question?
Beth: Caroline feels like they ask questions a lot at the end of their content via socials and emails, and they don’t really get a reply. So just any tips around that.
Niki: Yeah, then I think you need to go back and do that detective work – go detective mode and find out. Maybe the questions are too complicated, or maybe they’re too broad. I want you to really hone in and ask one tiny thing that is really easy for somebody to answer.
They’re scrolling, aren’t they? We just want them to go, “Yep, that was me,” or “Oh no, I don’t think that” – it’s got to be really straightforward.
Also, you might be asking questions that they’re not interested in. So I would go detective mode, try and find out where your ideal clients are asking more questions, and then analyse why they’re asking questions on that account and not on yours. You’ll learn loads too.
Beth: That’s great. I hope that answers your question, Caroline – thank you.
Let’s do one more. How do you prioritise where to spend time and money when the budget is tight?
Niki: I still have to prioritise where to spend time and money today, even though the budget is slightly less tight. I will start with the thing that I think is going to grow my email list the most, because that is a valuable asset, whereas my Instagram, for example, could disappear tomorrow. So I recommend email first – email list first.
Beth: Brilliant, thank you. Niki, would you mind popping the QR code back on the screen very quickly? Someone’s just asked for it in the chat, if that’s okay – if not, we can send it around afterwards.
Niki: No worries. Is it this one – the Enterprise Nation one?
Beth: Yes, that’s right. Thank you.
Niki: There we go, there it is. I’ve just put my sales edit in the chat as well, and I’ve put my Instagram in the chat too.
Beth: Oh, perfect, thank you.
Niki: Connect with everybody.
Beth: Yes, I was going to say – I know we’re out of time, but there’s been a lot of activity in the chat. So please do continue that conversation with Niki – her LinkedIn links are in the chat, so please do follow up with her afterwards.
Thank you so much to everyone for joining us today for the Powering Local Businesses Lunch and Learn. We’ll be sharing the recording and further resources in a follow-up email this afternoon for those who have asked.
A huge thank you, Niki, for such a practical and energising session – that was fantastic. I hope everyone’s leaving with some clear actions to make your marketing work a lot harder for you.
Have a lovely rest of your day, and we’ll see you in the next one. Thanks, Niki, and thanks, everyone.
Niki: Thanks, Beth. Thanks, everyone. Bye!
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