Everyone looks for an easy button. It’s the way you think you can hack digital marketing for small business. You’ve got too little time to focus on what seems like a massive and ever-expanding world, so you try to find a way to leap frog the work to get to success.
The truth is there’s no short way around being successful with digital marketing for small business. Yes, there are tips, tricks and ideas — which I try to share here frequently — but at the end of the day, you have to put in the work.
However, while reading my friend Barry Feldman‘s new book (co-authored with Seth Price) entitled Road to Recognition: The A-to-Z Guide to Personal Branding for Accelerating Your Professional Success in the Age of Digital Media (and perhaps the longest subtitle ever), I realized there’s at least one way to get to the good stuff of building a digital marketing — even overall marketing — presence for your small business: Treat it like a personal brand.
Road to Recognition is a fast-forward primer on how to build a personal brand. But the tenets of personal branding easily transfer to advice to build a good small business brand, too. From the chapter on A, which focuses on authenticity, to Z, which is about zeal — the passion to throw into what you do — the book is an easy-to-read breakdown of great advice.
While there are some chapters you may find not really applicable to your small business (not every small business needs S for speaking, as in being a conference speaker/talking head type), none of them are bad to understand and consider. The entries are broken down into byte-size chunks with a heavy dose of tactical usefulness with a sprinkling of strategic reasoning thrown in as well.
Road to Recognition is well worth the price for any small business owner or individual focusing on their personal brand. But the hack you might be looking for is to take that great personal branding advice and apply it to your digital marketing for small business.