Can you market your brand without a marketing department?

At StartUp Show 2023, award-winning PR adviser, Meta Lead Trainer and business mentor Rhea Freeman will be addressing the very title of this blog, but to whet your appetite and help you feel inspired and motivated for 2023, we caught up with her to find out more about the subject.

Promoting your business can feel like a herculean task, can’t it? You look at everything you could possibly do, feel horribly overwhelmed and then worry you don’t have the skill, knowledge, finances or manpower to pull it off. Am I right?

The thing is, you don’t need a marketing department to market your brand effectively.

In this blog, we’re going to look at one angle, social media, and five ways that you can effectively market your brand as the year begins, to put you in a strong position to move forward.

Show up

Woody Allen once said 80% of success is showing up, and this works for social media, too.

Yes, you might not be perfect and you might be a little rough around the edges, but by showing up you’re trying, you’re learning, and you’re giving your audience, customers and potential customers the chance to get to know you. How good is that?

Be you

As the founder of the business, you have superpowers that you might not appreciate just now, but your brand/business/passion and journey to this point runs through your veins.

People are drawn to those who are true to themselves, share their passions and are authentic. Be warned, you will repel people by being 100% you, but they were never ‘your people’, and by being you, you’ll draw the ones to you who really get you.

Learn

There are a lot of ways to learn online, and a lot of this learning is free, so dive in and become a student. My advice would be to find a trusted source or trusted sources and learn all you can from them and their content.

You can also learn at in-person events, through reading and taking courses. Learning is important, even if you employ a marketing department in the future, this step will help you make better hires, be more realistic, and lots more besides.

Use tools

There are lots of tools available that can help take your content to the next level, even if you’re not a graphic designer or copywriting superstar.

One great free tool that’s just been launched by Adobe is the Adobe Express platform. This allows anyone - even those with absolutely no graphic design experience - to customise templates and create highly professional graphics that can be used on social media and beyond.

Embrace it

You might feel on the back foot with social media, or how various changes impact you, but there’s something rather magical about being a beginner and being at the start of your journey.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions to help you along your way. Everyone who ever did anything great started exactly where you are!

Rhea will be speaking on the Adobe stage at StartUp Show 2023 – tickets are available here.