When my husband, Jono, and I moved to Canada on a whim in 2012, it was meant to be for one year. Little did we know this spontaneous move would change our lives.

ONE YEAR! It’s been exactly 365 days since my first post on The Strategy Studio’s Instagram account. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine the fulfillment these first 12 months in business could bring. To celebrate, here are 10 first-year moments I want to remember. 

“How can I clearly but respectfully decline the endless requests to go on coffee dates, without burning bridges?” In this post I’ve outlined some quick tips, along with two email templates, you can try using to politely say “No”.

Have you ever fallen in love with a new colour and then suddenly started seeing it everywhere? Or learnt a new word and then kept hearing it frequently? It’s not that these occurrences have become any more frequent… It’s just your superpower RAS at work. Let me explain.

So often we think about marketing as a contest; a battle to beat our competitors to that ideal client or customer we seek. Thinking from such a combative perspective is exhausting; like everything is a challenge. It also frames our marketing in terms of our competitors, INSTEAD of our clients, and that’s a big problem.  Here’s a better approach.

As an entrepreneur our head is always filled with new ideas but we often get overwhelmed and don’t know where to start. Tahnée takes those ideas and the overwhelm and creates manageable, practical marketing projects to implement. She is a dream to work with.

Stacey Morgan, PMPA, Morgan Media, Port Macquarie, Australia

Growing your Instagram is about commitment to INPUT. You don’t acquire growth due to any time period, such as years in business or length of time on the platform. Growth is a result of your efforts. It’s the output (the return) from your input (the investment in great content). So how can you improve your input to ultimately grow your following?

Up to 85 per cent of buyers use referrals as a method of locating service providers. A type of referral that is often overlooked is the referral from Industry Vendors or Contacts. This is what we call your Circle of Influence. It’s the network of people who are directly connected to your target market. So how can you grow this circle to reach more clients?

It doesn’t matter how direct and to the point a client’s request sounds, or how qualified you are to deliver on it; if you jump straight to the sales pitch, you’ll lose everytime. At the end of the day, no matter how objective we like to think we are, we’re first and foremost influenced by our emotions, so that’s where we need to start with our marketing.

Did you know there’s 5000 results to a search for “laundry detergent” on Amazon? How in the world are there that many viable products for the simple act of washing clothes?!  The reason is because they’re all a viable product for the corner of the market they’re seeking to serve.