5 Marketing Tips for Introvert

Everyone knows how scary it can feel to have on your shoulders the responsibility for marketing, selling and growing that business.

Marketing can be particularly challenging if you're not a naturally confident, extrovert sort who goes out there and wins business easily.

Brand building and marketing are, at heart, all about building relationships.

In this article I'm going to share what I learned and what works for me, in the hope that it works for you too, even if you're not naturally confident or an extrovert. All you have to do is have faith in yourself, get in touch with your confidence in your skills and expertise, and find the people who need the product or service that you have to offer. Don't think of it as selling, think of it as helping to solve people's problems - that's your first step towards creating a marketing comfort zone for yourself.

Here are my top 5 tips for making marketing easy; doing it in a way that suits your nature and feels right for you.

1) Make things as easy as you can for yourself. In order to feel confident you need to prepare. Make sure you know your target audience; be clear on what are your marketing message (i.e. what you do, who you do it for and how it solves their problem or benefits them in some way) and the purpose of whatever it is you're doing.

Keep practicing until you're sure of what you're doing and feeling comfortable, and most important of all - be gentle with yourself. Don't beat yourself up for not being 'naturally' good at it. Very few of us are. You are who you are - be accepting of that and go with what feels right for you.

2) Work out what you're good at and leverage those skills so instead of giving yourself a hard time about the things you're not good at, you're playing to your strengths. Have a think about the things you do easily, with no effort - the stuff that to you is like falling off a log, but that others find difficult. Those natural skills and talents are the ones that we ourselves tend to undervalue (because we find them easy) but they are the key to your success.

So, if you're good at writing and feel quite happy doing it, then writing is the key to your marketing - write blogs, articles and e-books to get in touch with your target clients. If you're more of a technical sort then social media and digital marketing are likely to be more up your street. Or if you're not comfortable with either of those then hire someone to do your marketing for you - it's not a cop out, it's not 'failing', it's a very sensible approach to outsourcing to an expert, so you can focus on doing what you do best in your business.

3) Social media is one of the most powerful tools you can use. Always remember this; content is king these days and if you want people to find you and easily see what an expert in your field you are, then you're going to have to establish your presence online. There are plenty of online courses and resources out there that will teach you how to use things like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Pinterest to reach your customers, many of them free, or again you can hire someone to manage it for you. And you can use Facebook advertising or Google AdWords to drive traffic to your website.

4) Make your own video; it's not as scary as it looks, honestly. When I was first advised to do a short video and put it on YouTube I was terrified, but I had a go and quickly realized that actually, as an introvert, it's the ideal tool for me. I have complete control over it, I can prepare till I'm confident and re-do it if I mess up, and I can make it as long or short as I want. Given that we're trying to build relationships with our clients, video is a great way of giving your customers and clients the experience of meeting you and connecting with you, in a way that feel safe for you.

Even easier than that is the option of doing webinars and audio presentations, where you either literally send out an audio file of your content (rather than writing it, if you're not confident in your writing) or in a webinar you speak over the top of a PowerPoint-style presentation. Again, it's done in your own time and recorded so you have complete control over it and can do it again and again until you're happy with it and confident.

5) Finally, the easiest and best way of marketing is to ask for referrals and recommendations. Nothing is as effective at getting you business as a recommendation, because they come from someone you trust, and your prospective client can ask your satisfied client all sorts of questions to make sure you're the right fit for them. So ask your satisfied and loyal clients who they know who could also benefit from your services or product, and ask them to send a recommendation their way. How you thank them is up to you, but make sure you're appreciative!

So, among those 5 tips are hopefully some ways of marketing that make you think "yes, actually, I could do that, it wouldn't be all that scary... "If I can do anything at all to help you build your business it would be to urge you to give it a go, take a deep breath, screw up your courage and try. Make sure you do it in as safe a way as you can, and be gentle with yourself. Most important of all, make sure you give yourself plenty of time and space to recover from your efforts - introverts are sensitive souls and we need to give ourselves peace and quiet in which to ground ourselves again.