Adviser of the Month: Emma Meheux

Congratulations to our Adviser of the Month for October, Emma Meheux, founder of Brand Planning Ltd.

Emma is a digital specialist and has been working with small businesses specifically for the last eight years. She emphasises the importance of a sales-focused strategy for small businesses, often overlooked amidst digital marketing trends. She says:

“People spend too much time on social media in a non-strategic way. Small business owners get carried away with a lot of the latest trends and overlook the fundamental elements that are required for sales.

"I want to give small businesses more of a sales focus, for them to understand that it's not just about marketing and getting on social media, you have to actually understand what your proposition is and what clients you're trying to get."

What got you interested in this line of work?

I have been working with small businesses for eight years now. In 2016, I started at an SEO agency and my role there was predominantly on the sales side, doing a lot of networking.

I have also been involved in digital marketing for many years, including website planning, SEO and all the inbound marketing side. Then social media came along.

Of the eight years, I started my very small, limited company, Brand Planning, a few months before the lockdown in January 2020. Working with local small businesses, I have seen how confusing it can be for them.

I want to give small businesses more of a sales focus, for them to understand that it's not just about marketing and getting on social media, you have to actually understand what your proposition is and what clients you're trying to get.

The other reason is that I wanted to write more. I only ever worked for the SEO agency part-time so that I could write.

Over the last eight years, I've written six picture books for children, an approximately 200-page middle-grade children’s book, a poetry book and a sales and marketing one, but they aren't published yet. My sales and marketing book will be published first next year.

I want to do more of this in the future and running my own small business gives me a bit more flexibility. My business is twofold, it was about keeping the business small, having a sales focus and giving myself more time to write.

How can you support small businesses? 

I help small businesses with strategic planning, but across sales, marketing, digital and traditional media. I help them get the right strategies and understand how to develop their business from a sales perspective.

Small businesses can get so confused with the multitude of digital opportunities that they often overlook the sales side. So, I mix it up and help them gain new business, whichever way they want to do it.

I am quite sector-specific. I tend to work with other media, marketing, digital and PR businesses, anything that falls under the creative umbrella. The reason for this is because I understand these industries so well.

I also work with clients that are service-based businesses that I can really understand to give them the best insight from a strategic standpoint.

With any client that's working with me, the first thing I do is a two or three-hour in-person, face-to-face meeting. We run through questions to try and understand where they are at that moment. Unless you know where someone is now, then how can you get them to where they want to go?

What is the biggest misconception about sales and marketing? 

People spend too much time on social media in a non-strategic way. Small business owners get carried away with a lot of the latest trends and overlook the fundamental elements that are required for sales.

Sales and marketing have got too mixed up and people find it hard to differentiate the two. When clients come to me, one of the biggest things is that they've got these opportunities in front of them, but don't really know which way to go. They're doing little here and there and spreading themselves too thinly.

Because they've got no strategic approach and no sales focus, they don’t gain very much from anything they're doing. I help them with strategy and give them a better focus so that they start to see the path and understand what they need to do to do sales.

Joining Enterprise Nation 

I joined Enterprise Nation at the beginning of lockdown and have been to a couple of StartUp Shows. I love them and the platform is great for any small business.

There is an impressive wealth of information on the site and I tell small businesses about Enterprise Nation as well. Because that is what they need, they need to be pointed in the right direction to places where there is good, informative information and away from social media that isn’t necessarily always helpful.

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