#27 Marketing For Small Businesses with Mara Roberts

Mara is a business and marketing expert with 10 years of international experience. She lives her passion by delivering done-for-you services for business owners as well contributing to causes she believes in through strategic consulting. Her ability to draw out the best in the people and identify opportunities means that her community thrives beyond the ‘bottom line’.

Tell Your Story

Mara moved to Australia 8 years ago from South Africa. Growing up in a household with an entrepreneur mum, it’s always been her dream to own a business. Marketing, however, was not really intended, she knew she liked business but wanted to steer as far as possible from accounting so she picked Marketing. Moving to Australia, she did Marketing work for clients on the side while still holding a main career. Then she realized two things: 1. it was not making as big an impact as her main career and 2. the reason these smaller campaigns was not working was because she didn’t push back as much as she should and give her clients options to improve their marketing.

This was when she decided to do consulting full-time and really grow in her confidence to realize that the skills and gifts that she had – yes, she studied – but more importantly, that they were gifts from the Lord and realize that she can have the confidence to say what God was putting in her heart for businesses and helping them draw out the best for their business.

Her business took off just as the right moment, she had a baby and it gave her the necessary motivation to really start her own business and work from home. Now her husband is also working from home and it can’t have been more perfect for their family. There’s just so much benefit for a child, so many life lessons they learn from both parents staying at home.

Your tops 5 tips on small business marketing:

1. Start with the end in mind – Look at your end goal and then decide what marketing will be bet suited to get you there.
2. Don’t be stingy with your efforts – Go all out with all the marketing you do and don’t be afraid to put yourself out there.
3. Be diligent with what you have – remarketing to leads you’ve already paid for, see how you can re-sell to your customers. Don’t waste a good lead.
4. Own your own marketing platform – Don’t rely on a Facebook page or a third party provider like Wix to build your business on. Build your own so then you never loose anything,
5. Data is everything – Don’t guess what marketing is or isn’t working, instead spend sometime each month to go through what’s working in your marketing and focus on that.

Your bible verse for this season and why.

Mara is quite sentimental when it comes to her Bible verses because the Lord has spoken to her in so many of them. God’s been right alongside her in pretty rough seasons in her life and to Mara, this verse is all about letting God who is Mighty In Battle into our hearts so he can win the victory for us.

⁷ Lift up your heads, you gates; be lifted up, you ancient doors,
that the King of glory may come in.
⁸ Who is He, this King of glory? The Lord strong and mighty,
the Lord mighty in battle.
⁹ Lift up your heads, you gates; lift them up, you ancient doors,
that the King of glory may come in.
¹⁰ Who is He, this King of glory? The Lord Almighty—
he is the King of glory.

– Psalm 24: 7-10

Whenever I read this verse, it shifts my focus from myself onto the Lord and The King of Glory, The Lord Mighty in Battle and it’s just about dropping my woes and my burdens and just making sure that my heart is open and allowing myself to take a deep breath and let The Lord come in and direct my life from that place.