Why we launched Small Business Clarity Days

As lots of you know, twice a year we take a step back from our regular programme of free small business workshops, and paid training sessions. There are a couple of very good reasons for this. Firstly during August many of the businesses we work with are either tied up with the summer season, taking their own summer holidays, wrestling with childcare, or a combination of the above. In December the same thing applies, with many businesses taking a break after the busy festive period. 

This gives us the opportunity to step back, and get our own ducks in a row. This summer that has meant launching our new website (this one!), and refurbishing our dedicated space for small businesses in the Barn @ Letheringsett Watermill. More on both of those in future blogs. 

It has also given us time to work on where we are as a business after almost three years of fairly rapid growth. 

Why clarity matters

Since we launched Coastal Media, we’ve worked with literally hundreds of small Norfolk businesses both through our own workshops and as advisors on Norfolk County Council’s Go Digital Programme. 

All of these businesses are unique in their own way but there are common themes. One of the most frequent is feeling unsure about where to turn when it comes to marketing. 

The businesses we work with range in size, but very few of them have any dedicated marketing resource. This means a constant battle to try and fit marketing into the schedule alongside all the challenges that come with running a small business. Not to mention juggling all the challenges the rest of your life can throw at you. 

The result is that the most common word we hear from people we work with is “overwhelmed”. It doesn’t matter if you are just starting out, growing your business, or if you have been established for many years. There is just so much advice out there it can feel impossible to filter out what you could be doing, and focussing on what you can actually do to move the needle for your business in the limited time you have available. Even businesses that are pretty confident in their marketing skills tell us they often need a sounding board to sense-check what they are doing. 

Solving the right problems

We’ve found that often the challenge is that people often naturally focus on a specific solution. Some of the most common requests we get are for support with SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), or social media. Now, we could offer training on both of those things, but we aren’t convinced that is the most valuable way of helping small businesses. 

SEO is a good example. There are lots of very good reasons you should make sure your website is well optimised for SEO. 

But that’s only part of the story. For example, Coastal Media comes top of most searches (both traditional and AI) for terms around small business marketing training in Norfolk (yay!). The problem is that very few people are actually using those search terms (boo). 

This means investing loads of time and energy in SEO wouldn’t necessarily help us. Knowing this means that we can take a strategic decision to make sure our SEO approach is good enough, while focussing the majority of our marketing efforts elsewhere. 

We also encounter lots of businesses who are keen to learn about SEO but when we look at the data we see their websites are already getting a decent amount of traffic. Here it probably pays to look at the functionality of the website, their messaging, and even areas such as pricing and proposition, before they invest any time or money in climbing the Google rankings. 

That’s why we developed training that teaches you how things like SEO can have a positive impact on your business, but also gives you a framework to understand why you might not use them - and focus your energy elsewhere.

How does this affect the training Coastal Media offers?

Our One-day Small Business Marketing Bootcamp was always really popular. What interested us was that while people loved learning about understanding their audience, developing their proposition and messaging, and the best channels to use to do that, the thing people really valued was a day to step back and get a sense of the bigger picture. In a nutshell, people loved the marketing training, but what they valued most was reducing that feeling of overwhelm, stepping back and getting a clear picture on what to do next. So over August, Clarity Days were born. 

So, is the Clarity Day marketing training?

Yes, absolutely. We’ve taken all the things people loved from our One-Day bootcamp and condensed them down into a shorter day (we’ll explain why in a moment). We’ll also be dialling up the strategic side of things. That means that not only will you learn how marketing works, we’re increasing the emphasis on creating an approach to marketing that is realistic for you to deliver after you leave the session. 

Throughout the day we’ll work through a marketing plan for a fictitious business. That includes the importance of understanding your target audience, developing the right proposition and messaging, and how to use different marketing channels effectively. We’ll then look at how the marketing fundamentals we’ve learned can be applied specifically to your business, and how you can adapt them as your business grows. 

To make sure everyone gets the attention they need, there are a maximum of 10 places at every Clarity Day. 

Like the old Marketing Bootcamp, the Clarity Days will stay at the Cliftonville Hotel in Cromer. Because the day is shorter, we have reduced the price to £95. That includes lunch, teas, and coffees and a Clarity Book which you’ll start during the day and keep developing with the skills you’ll learn on the day.

We want to keep these days as accessible as possible and the new reduced price reflects that the day is shorter. We found that some people struggled to find time to take a full day out of their business. Others found it tricky to work the 9:00-5:00 around things like travel and school drop off and pick up. That means, the day will now run 10:00-3:00 with plenty of breaks throughout the day. 

If you are interested in finding out more head over to the Clarity Day page on our website, or get in touch through our Contact Form. 

We’ll be talking much more about how we can offer ongoing support through our Focus Sessions and brand new Inspiration Sessions in future blogs. For now though, rest assured that while ongoing or additional support is available, there’s no obligation to do so. The Clarity Day is designed so that you can start building a plan and run with it if that’s what works for you.