How to Grow a Creative Business

Whether you are in the early stages of starting a business or more established, there will be moments in your journey where you realise that things can’t quite continue as they are: maybe the tools you started with no longer meet your needs, your focus has shifted and you need to tweak your offering or business hasn’t grown in the way that you hoped and you need to review what’s really going on.

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Working on our business – reviewing and planning – instead of in our business (doing what can feel like everyday firefighting to get all the things done!) is often at the bottom of our list but is something that every business owner should be doing. It gives you time to reflect on what’s working, what needs improvement, easy wins (things that don’t take long to implement and help you maximise sales) and what you need to focus on.

Want to find out more? Read on!

Grow your Audience

Customers are the lifeblood of your business – without them you have no-one to buy your products, recommend you or cheer you on! And whatever stage of business you’re at – newly started or established for a few years – you should be prioritising growing and nurturing an audience.

To do this, you need to know who your Ideal Customer is – what are their struggles, aspirations and goals? If you’re not completely sure or want to find out more, speak to them! Ask questions, take notice of what people are asking and look at what content you make that is getting the most interactions.

Use their feedback to help you speak directly to your customers with content that is inspirational (you too could make this!), sympathetic (sharing your own struggles), educational (tips/tutorials) or personal (behind the scenes, funny). And remember that over time you and your customers can evolve so it’s always a good idea to review and tweak your messaging every now and then.

One of the trickiest things about your audience is that it’s likely spread across the internet: different social media channels, website readers and a newsletter. Some may follow you everywhere, others may subscribe to just one channel. It’s not about having the largest follower numbers, but a group of highly engaged customers who love being in your community.

The important thing is that you encourage any new follower that finds you to join your newsletter. An email list is not subject to changes in algorithms and is owned by you, not a social media platform. So if your IG account gets hacked, or Meta goes down, you can still email your customers, tell them what’s going on and what your latest news/offer is.

Newsletters give you a direct line to your customers and allows you to build a relationship with them, share behind the scenes insights and tips. Done correctly, an email list will more than pay for itself (although you can get started for free!) and when you have a new offer, you’re much more likely to make sales!

To grow your email list you need to make sure that customers;

• Have a reason to join your list: this could be with an enticing freebie (eg. ebook, mini-course, templates) and/or word of mouth recommendation that your emails are worth signing up for.
• Know you have an email list: adding links in all the right places (social media bios, website), promoting the freebie/content included.
• Have a reason to stay on your list: you’re providing useful/inspiration/insider info content that they find useful/enjoyable and look forward to reading.
• Are engaging with your content: you email regularly, respond to any questions, click through on links that you include

If you’re finding that your email list isn’t working well for you review the points above, have a look at your email stats, chat with subscribers and review your messaging. Quite often it only takes a few tweaks to turn things around.

And remember, this email malarky isn’t as scary as it maybe sounds! In the beginning, it will take time to get the foundations in place – eg. a freebie and welcome sequence of emails – but this can all be set-up to run automatically while you can concentrate on other parts of your business

Grow Sales

Selling our own products is not something that comes easily to many of us: it can feel icky, uncomfortable and not fun. But if we don’t sell, your (potential) customers have no idea what you offer, won’t buy and then you won’t have a business!

And the truth is that if the only time that you speak to your customers is when you are selling something to them then yes, it will probably feel a little comfortable and you are unlikely to get a great response. But if you’ve spent time adding value and building a relationship with your customers and creating a community they will look forward to hearing your offers as they want to find out ways they can work with you.

I’ve heard many creative entrepreneurs say that they don’t want to send too many posts/emails to customers because they’re worried about hassling them. Sadly though, it’s likely that a lot of people won’t even see your message! Social media algorithms mean that very few of your audience will be shown your post (just have a look at your insight numbers!). And even if they do see it, they might be busy at that precise moment and think “I’ll look at that later” and then may forget (or maybe that’s just me?!). This is why an email list is so important – the offer is landing straight in your customers inbox!

Selling doesn’t always have to be direct eg. buy this product now and save. It could be you sharing about the inspiration behind a new design, what features it has, skills or benefits that people will experience. And remember that we are all unique and absorb information in different ways so maximise your messaging to make sure that you are sharing all of these things in different ways eg. video, written, pictures.

Another key part of your selling strategy should be reviewing performance: this isn’t just looking at you sold more than last month/year but going deeper and looking at your whole product range: how are individual products performing, are there any gaps in what you offer (or what your customers are asking for), are you utilising your whole back-catalog of products by doing things such as;

• Sharing your back-catalogue of products: this could be via a promotional discount, mention in your content plan
• Bundle similar/complementary patterns together with a discount as a permanent listing
• Offer an upsell eg. if someone buys Pattern A, offer them Pattern B at a 50% discount (this can be set-up in some e-shops)

Remember, by sharing your offers repeatedly, you increase your chance of a sale: the average conversion rate for an online sale is around 3%. This means you need around 100 people to see your offer to get 3 sales! If you’ve got an engaged audience this will most likely be higher, but the more you share your offer across all the platforms you use*, the more people will see it and the more sales you are likely to get.

*Yes, there’s a chance that you will see an increase in your unsubscribes. This most likely means that they weren’t your Ideal Customer, so try not to get too hung up on the numbers.

Grow your content

So, you know who your Ideal Customer is and you’ve got a range of products that you know they’ll love……so how are you going to reach them?

And let’s be honest at this point, as a small business owner, it’s very easy to feel like you’re on a content treadmill! With an audience that is often spread across different channels (all of which prefer slightly different content types!) it can be challenging to keep coming up with content that you can share on a regular basis (daily/weekly/monthly as best suits you) to keep front of mind with your audience.

Creating video content of creative makes for social media can be especially time consuming – stopping to take videos/pictures of each step can add a lot of extra time to what can already be quite a lengthy task. You can make you life easier though by;

• Repurpose content: use a blog post as the basis for a few different social media posts, tell your newsletter subscribers a story and then direct them to your website for more information; take one video and turn it into two or three shorter videos for different pieces of content.
• Reshare old content: if you have been in business for a while, chances are that you have a lot of content available to you and that newer subscribers will not be aware of it all. If there are any that are relevant to the time of year (seasonal themes), your current offering or are just plain useful, highlight them to all of your customers.

Remember to work smarter not harder!

The other thing to remember is that not all content is created equal! Posts that are added to social media often have a much shorter life span (anything from just a few minutes to a couple of days) in comparison to long-form content such as blogs, YouTube, Podcasts which if optimised properly can last for years. Ideally, you should be focusing on one short-form (IG/TikTok) and one long-form channel in your content plans.

Periodically review which channels give you the best return for the time that you spend on them, and make sure that you prioritise these.

Grow Profitability

Although making sure that your products are priced correctly is one way of making sure that you are profitable, another way that is often over-looked is how efficient the operational side of your business is. I get it, this isn’t what you signed up for and part of the whole reason you started a creative business was to move away from a corporate mentality! But by not looking at these things you can be losing money that you really don’t need to.

Starting a business from scratch will often lead to growing pains at some point: in the early stages your requirements were probably different (you didn’t know what you didn’t know!) and you might not have had the funds to invest in the all-singing, all-dancing solution in the beginning. It’s common to start with free/cheaper solutions (eg. email provider) before ‘upgrading’ to paid tools. Sometimes these work well by themselves, other times you might be using two different platforms (eg. a website and a course platform) and connect them using a tool like Zapier.

As your business grows though, it’s a good idea to look at whether or not the tools that you are using are really fit for purpose: do they really do what you need them to do? Are you utilising all the features? Are there better options out there eg. you might be paying for two different platforms when you could pay for one that includes both of these and some additional features?

Moving platforms is not always the most fun task – or something you want to be doing too regularly! – but staying on a platform because moving to a better one is too much hassle is a false economy! If you are connecting different systems together and there’s one solution available, look at what you would need to do to move: streamlining will probably save you money, save you time (if you use different tools it’s guaranteed that at some point they will stop talking to each other causing admin hassle for you!) and most importantly give your customer a better experience.

As a creative business owner, one of your biggest assets is time: make a date to periodically review where you’re spending most of your time and identify if there are any any ways in which you could streamline the process. Common examples can be;

• Create a sustainable filing system: in an online business, files can easily get out of hand, especially if you are taking videos and pictures, creating content on Canva. A few years after starting my business, I realised I was regularly losing 5-10mins at a time trying to find the one file I needed. Spending a couple of days going through everything was tedious at the time but has paid for itself ten-fold
• Create templates and processes: If you do something more than once eg. promotions/events/product launch reuse and improve it each year! Keep a document of all the key information that you need for example dates, email/website/social media copy, Canva images. Update as you go and make any notes at the end of the event of things that you want to change next time
• Batching tasks: things like scheduling posts, content creation.
• Noting key dates: this can be for everything from renewal dates for services that you use (if you can save in advance there is often a discount of 1-2months by paying up front!) to making time to plan out the coming month, quarter or year.

Action Steps

1. How well do you know your ideal customer? Reach out to them, ask questions and find out what they want to know from you
2. Are you making the most of your whole product library?
3. Are you sharing a mix of content and maximising how you use it?
4. Are you being as efficient as you can in the day-to-day running of your business?