One Way for Nurse Entrepreneurs to Overcome Marketing Overwhelm

[Elizabeth Hanes, BSN, RN]

As a nurse entrepreneur, do you ever survey the marketing landscape and wonder where you should even begin to put your energies? Should you…

• Focus on your business blog?
• Try to become a LinkedIn thought leader?
• Set up a Facebook business page?
• Create a robust Twitter presence?
• Develop an Instagram channel?
• Start a podcast?
• Attend trade shows and conferences?
• Become the first in your industry to dominate TikTok?

Unless you purchased a franchise business (which usually includes a highly detailed marketing plan) or bought an established company with an existing marketing plan in place, you may feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of marketing opportunities available to your new business. Where should you begin?

Start with Your Business Objective

As an experienced marketer myself, I would say you should first start by creating a comprehensive marketing plan for your business. You can find an excellent template at Hubspot.

But writing a marketing plan can, itself, feel overwhelming, and I promised you a way to overcome that overwhelm.

So let me get even more granular and suggest you begin your marketing journey with a single step: writing a business objective.

Simply put, your business objective states the primary goal for your business over a defined period of time (usually one year). It’s not enough to say your business goal is “to be successful.” In order to actually be successful in your business, you need to spend a little time thinking about what you want to accomplish, in very specific terms.

By writing down a business objective, you create a guideline by which to measure every potential marketing opportunity or initiative. If a potential marketing initiative won’t serve your business objective, then you can confidently pass it by in favor of an effort that makes more sense for your specific goals.

How to Write a Great Business Objective

I’m a huge fan of SMART goals. You’ve probably heard of them. These goals are:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Time-Constrained

I recommend you structure your business objective in this format because then it’s very easy to use the goal as a yardstick for measuring potential marketing initiatives. Let me give you some examples.

A nurse setting up a new, non-franchise senior care business might write a business objective like:

“Our goal is to obtain 100 new clients in Q1 2020 while grossing $100,000 in revenue over the same period.”

A nurse operating as an established geriatric care manager who wants to take her business to the next level might write a business objective like:

“My goal is to double my client base by year-end 2020.”

A nurse freelance writer like me might have a non-revenue based business goal for 2020, such as:

“I will finish my book proposal by the end of Q1, acquire an agent by summer, and sign a publishing contract by year-end.”

Your business objective must be unique to your business, because only you know what you want to achieve. Just make sure your objective encompasses all of the SMART characteristics.

How to Use the Business Objective to Evaluate Marketing Opportunities

Once you’ve written down your objective for the year (or whatever time frame you chose), then it becomes easy to evaluate whether or not a particular marketing opportunity might help you achieve that goal.

For instance, if your goal is to acquire 100 new senior care clients, does it make sense to start a podcast? How will that help you reach your target audience with your marketing message? Perhaps it makes more sense, in this case, to have a booth at local health fairs. Or to invest in direct mailing postcards to your target audience.

If your goal as a geriatric care manager is to double your client base, then perhaps you will want to pursue opportunities that allow you to reach referral partners and achieve better name recognition with them.

If your business goal is to publish a book, then perhaps cultivating a robust Twitter presence would be valuable, since author agents tend to look for writers with a large ‘platform’ (fan base).

Figuring out where to get started with your marketing efforts as a nurse entrepreneur can be overwhelming, but if you take the one simple step to write down a SMART business objective, you’ll be able to overcome that overwhelm in no time.