Episode 123: How the Start, Stop, Keep Activity can help you find clarity as a Small Business Owner
For this quick tip episode, Fiona talks about the Start, Stop, Keep activity for your business’ marketing strategies. Find out which among your marketing activities you need to keep, what new strategies to start implementing and what needs to stop. The Start, Stop, Keep activity can also be applied in other areas of your business. Find your free Start, Stop, Keep activity here Need help with marketing? Check out Marketing for Your Small Business here.
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
Start, Stop, Keep
Conclusion
Get in touch with My Daily Business Coach
Links/Resources Mentioned in this episode:
Episode transcript:
Hello, and welcome to Episode 123 of the My Daily Business Coach podcast. If you're listening to this in real time, it is Tuesday, the 10th of August, one day before one of my best friend's birthday. So shout out to Vy Bhagwandas if you're listening for tomorrow.
But it's also the last day that you can enroll in the Marketing For Your Small Business Coaching and Course program. Now Marketing For Your Small Business is one of my signature courses. It's one of my signature workshops. And I've been running this for almost the whole time I've had this business. So a good five years. And continuously get so many people working through the course or coming to the workshops and kind of leaving going “Oh my god, I have completely flipped the script on what I think marketing can be, I'm actually excited about it, I can see how to strategically create a marketing plan rather than just, you know, keep trying whatever new thing is on the horizon today.”
Anyway, that Marketing For Your Small Business online course is always available, you can go to marketing for your small business.com and get it but a couple of times a year, we run a coaching program alongside it.
So not only do you get access to the course, and all the bonuses, you get to you know, work through the course as much as you want. But you can also then opt in to come to live coaching with myself and the other small business owners and go through each module in more detail and ask any questions that you have, run by any ideas, share your concepts, share your plans, and get feedback from myself and the other small business owners. And at the end of this program, you actually present your marketing plan or your marketing strategy or both to the rest of the group and myself, and you get feedback on that. So it's just so jam packed with a lot of value. And a lot of opportunity that I don't think a lot of small business owners get to validate their ideas, to test concepts to really ask a group for feedback and myself having had, you know, 20 years experience in marketing and content and brand for look at my plan. What do you think I should do differently? This is my audience. These are my different segments. Where do you think I could change the customer journey to better impact my goals.
So that is open today is the last day. So get on over to marketingforyoursmallbusiness.com. And you can enroll in it immediately. And yeah, I'm really excited. It's going to be a fun group of people. And yeah, I just can't wait to like, I just love seeing people's transformations. Honestly, like, I know that sounds kind of cheesy, but I love when people come in, and they're like, and you can just say you can just sense this overwhelm and like, oh, marketing, and then they leave and they're like, “Oh my god, I'm gonna tell everyone about this. I'm so excited. And I've completely switched up things, and I can see where I need to go.” And I can't stress it enough. I know it said all the time. But I really do think clarity equals confidence. And you can show up in so many other ways, when you're confident and you're clear on where you're actually going. Rather than “Oh my gosh, someone told me I should be on this platform. So now I am but now I have no idea how to use it. I'm not checking my analytics, you know, I'm just feeling overwhelmed and feeling like I'm a loser.” So if you're in that capital, if you're feeling like I wish I really understood marketing, more, then definitely jump on over. Like I said, marketingforyoursmallbusiness.com.
So today, it is a quick tip episode and before I get stuck in I just want to pay my respects and acknowledge the traditional owners on the land and which are record this podcast, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation, and I just acknowledge and pay my respects to any Elders past, present and emerging. And just, again, urge anyone to listen whether you're First Nations, non First Nations in Australia, not in Australia, to really think about, you know, what can I do today, this week, this month, next quarter, to really engage with and promote equality for all. All right. Let's get stuck into today's quick tip episode.
So today, I want to talk about a marketing tool. It's really a tool that you can use in business for anything, but when it comes to marketing in particular, this is a great tool to kind of assess where you're at. And I must give props to Natasha Ace from Private Practice Alliance, because she was the first person to introduce me to this tool six years ago. And it is basically called the Start, Stop, Keep, and it's a freebie you can get it on my website under mydailybusinesscoach.com forward slash free stuff. And you'll also be able to get it as a download in the show notes today as well.
But the Start, Stop, Keep is really a document where you will list out all the things in your business, or in this case, I'm talking about marketing, all the things that you're doing in marketing currently. So it could be, you know, you list out the different platforms, you could have TikTok, you could have Instagram, you could have Instagram reels, Instagram stories, Instagram grid, Instagram TV, you could have Instagram lives, all the other things that you could do on Instagram, you could have email newsletters, you could have broadcast emails, you could have status emails, you could have SMS, if you're doing SMS, in terms of, you know, sending out sales information through text, you could have Facebook Messenger, whatever it is, you just list them all out.
And then you're going to think about start, stop, keep in terms of each of those. So you might think, Oh, my God, that's too much work. But it actually isn't when you sit down and do it. And also what it can do is really one - make you go and have a look at the data to see, okay, I don't think we should do this anymore. But let's see if it's actually having any impact on our goals.
But the second thing that it will kind of bring up is just the lack of interest that you might have in a platform that you used to have an interest in. And that can sort of ask certain questions of yourself or the person doing the marketing, What's changed?
Is it that we now feel so full on that we're actually just don't have the time. And this is always like rushed. Is it that a certain person used to do the content planning, and now they don't. And you know, it's sort of lost that lackluster because maybe it's gone to somebody else in the business who's not that interested in it.
And kind of going through the Start, Stop, Keep, the first thing you want to do is look at, you know, what do you want to stop. And some of those might be really obvious, you're like, Oh, we've been sending this email forever. The open rate is crap, in which case, you could you know, test, but you might also go it's not gonna work, let's reshuffle things, let's rethink things. So you'd stop, then you've got things that are start. So you might go, you know what we should be doing this thing on Instagram. And we're not because we know that Instagram is a key channel for us. It really, you know, guides people from that platform over to our website or over to our store. So we should be investing more time into that to put stuff up.
And then you've got things and this is really where I'm talking about with the maybe we've lost interest, maybe we just don't care anymore. And that's really in the Keep. So the start and stop can often be the easiest things to work out. The keep stuff might be, we'd like it or we know it's working. It's just a lot of work. And that might be okay, let's outsource it to an agency. Let's outsource it to a freelancer, let's outsource to a copywriter. It could be we love doing it. But we really think we could uplevel in X,Y,Z to do it better. Okay, so what does that look like? It could be a course it could be a freelancer again, it could be investing some time to to sit down and really think about it working with a business coach. But the keep pile can often be the hardest one, because you've got to sort of figure out, “Okay, do we really want to keep it? Are we keeping it just because we think we should be on this platform, or we think we should be doing this particular mapping initiative.” But we actually don't like it, it doesn't have an impact on our business or some other reason. So the Start, Stop, Keep, like I said, you could use it for anything in business when it comes to marketing. It could be such an a fantastic tool to assess where you're at, assess which channels are really working for you assess which channels may still be working for you, but you just lost the love. And it's like how do we get that back?
And then figure out what are we going to stop? What are we going to start doing that perhaps we're not doing? And then if we are going to start doing something, setting a deadline for yourself to actually start it. And then you know, once you've set the deadline and thinking about “Okay, what needs to happen in the weeks leading up to that so that we can actually hit that deadline.” And then you've got the keep. And like I said, those can be a difficult thing to look at. You don't want to keep pile to just be Oh yeah, we're just gonna keep everything you really want to think about. It's like clothes or decluttering. You want to think about, okay, if we feel that our marketing could be better, let's cull some stuff and work more on a few key channels and connection points, rather than trying to do it all. Or it could be we're going to keep it because I love doing that. Or we're going to keep it because the data tells us this is absolutely imperative to our business. And we need to figure out how to bring the love back.
So I hope that makes sense. Like I said before the start, stop, keep document activity can be used in any part of your business. It can be used for changing staff, it can be used for business structure and systems. And then what I'm talking about is the marketing. So, as I said, you can grab a copy of the Start, Stop, Keep activity over at mydailybusinesscoach.com/freestuff.
And if you are interested in marketing and in uncovering this sort of stuff, working through framework so that you get stronger and more strategic with your marketing you feel more confident, then definitely check out the Marketing For Your Small Business Course and Coaching Program that will be running shortly and finishes today. Today for enrollment. And you can find all the information over at marketingforyoursmallbusiness.com. So that is it for Episode 123 of the my daily business coach podcast, you can find the shownotes including a breakdown of what I've just talked about, and a link to that activity sheet which is completely free. over at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/123 is this is Episode 123.
If you go to marketingforyoursmallbusiness.com and you have any questions at all, please don't hesitate to reach out to us. Either. You can direct message me on Instagram, I'm just at @mydailybusinesscoach or email our team hello@mydailybusinesscoach.com. That's it for now. I hope you found this useful. I would also love to know what you're struggling with and what kind of tip episodes you'd love to hear from me. So again, just send me a DM and we can have a chat. All right, I'll see you next time. Bye.
Thanks for listening to the My Daily Business Coach podcast. If you want to get in touch, you can do that at mydailybusinesscoach.com or hit me up on Instagram at @mydailybusinesscoach.
