How To Show Up Consistently With Visual Marketing

If marketing feels like a never-ending list you’re failing to keep up with, you’re not alone and you’re not broken. We’re kicking off the Visual Marketing Podcast to make small business marketing feel doable again, with a practical focus on visual marketing, consistent visibility, and messaging that actually lands with the right people. Visual marketing isn’t just “nice photos” or another round of videos; it’s how your business shows up across your website, social media, emails, and every customer touchpoint, so people recognise you, trust you, and know what to do next.

I’m Liz, founder of C i Marketing in Christchurch, New Zealand, and I’m sharing the real story behind the agency, from losing my dream destination marketing job after the 2011 earthquakes to building a business before I had any idea what running a business really meant. You’ll hear how COVID wiped out our tourism client base overnight, why we chose to reinvent into service-based marketing, and what it took to earn trust in new spaces like healthcare marketing and construction marketing. I also share a personal turning point: taking over my dad’s lift components business after he passed, and how learning a completely new industry built the confidence to adapt again later.

We also tackle the question many owners are asking in a tight economy: should you pull back on marketing spend? I explain why going quiet can be the fastest way to disappear, and how a small, steady budget paired with consistency, clear customer journeys, and customer-first thinking can keep you top of mind. Expect coaching, tips, real stories, and lessons from what we’ve tested, failed at, and made work.

Subscribe, share this with a business mate, and leave a review so more people can find the show. What’s the one marketing thing you know you should do, but keep putting off?

Transcript

Who Visual Marketing Helps

Liz 0:00

If you're a business owner and you're really passionate about what you do and you know you should be doing some more marketing, but you just don't have the time or the resources or you don't know how. When I talk about visual marketing, I'm not just talking about photography and video. I'm talking about showing up consistently and in the right places for your target audience. It's about being visible across all of the touch points and all of the communications in your business. A lot of businesses either don't do any marketing at all, or they try a few different things and don't quite understand why it doesn't work. They might spend money in the wrong places, they might set up a few different social media channels but not be able to reach anybody. They might not have a clear customer journey to take people through their website so that they're clicking in the right places and getting the information that they need. And the other big thing we notice is people not having imagery that really matches their offer. And some people think that their content has to be so perfect that they never post anything at all. This podcast is going to help you with all of those issues and even more. I'm going to be joined by some amazing guests from around the world and from within our office here at C i Marketing. We're going to have some great chats about real life experiences. We're even going to have some tips and tricks. We're going to have coaching in here as well. There are so many amazing episodes ready to come. Please stay tuned. I can't wait to take you on this journey. Welcome to the Visual Marketing Podcast brought to you by C i Marketing, where we explore how to show up consistently, be more visible, and connect with the right people through your marketing. My name's Liz and I'm going to be your host. Back in 2011, when Christchurch in New Zealand, where I'm based, had a devastating earthquake, I was working in the tourism industry and I absolutely loved my job. I was in destination marketing and it was really a dream job for me. But unfortunately, due to the earthquake, Christchurch in Canterbury lost a lot of our tourism industry, and alongside that, my job went with it as well. After the earthquake, I wasn't quite sure what I was going to do for a job. I was sitting there with no job and thinking, what's next for me? I just got into my dream job and I just didn't know which direction to go. But I heard about a potential contracted role at a local council in Canterbury, where I live, and I thought, yeah, I'll I'll give it a go. I reckon I can do that. Um but they did need someone who had a registered business. So uh being the only child that I am, I knocked on my dad's door and I said, Hey Dad, can I please borrow your completely un-tourism un-marketing related business for the purpose of tax essentially and paperwork? And naturally he had to say yes. So about three months after starting the business and being the tourism advisor, doing destination marketing, I thought actually maybe I can make this a little bit bigger and do this elsewhere as well. So uh I wanted to roll it out to a few other businesses or other places that we could market, specifically in the tourism space. Um, but I also realized I needed some help. So um I gave Emily a call. She uh has been with me since almost the very beginning and is still here today. We previously worked together at a different role for a couple of weeks actually before the earthquake hit, so we were pretty new colleagues, but I knew instantly she was my people, and obviously that's the case because we are still right beside each other today, so I'm incredibly grateful that she's still around alongside the rest of our amazing team as well. I was in my mid-20s when I started C i Marketing, and I had absolutely no idea how to start a business or what that even meant or what it involved. I was incredibly lucky I had my dad around to really guide me through that process, so I'm really grateful for that. After gaining our first few clients, we realized this was exactly where we wanted to be. We wanted to niche into tourism-specific marketing. And then in 2020, COVID happened. And in New Zealand, we shut our borders. So essentially, New Zealand is known for a couple of industries. One is agriculture and one is tourism traditionally, and we suddenly had no tourism, which meant all of the tourism businesses here in New Zealand had no income, which meant they had no money to spend on marketing. So overnight our entire customer base was completely gone, which was quite a shock to the system. I really had a massive goal, um, which was to not lose any of our staff. I I really think that having good people and keeping good people is incredibly important. Um, getting good people back is incredibly difficult, which I know a lot of industries went through during that time. So it was my goal to do whatever I could to keep these guys with me and be able to keep this business going. And thankfully we have, which I'm I'm incredibly grateful for. So after COVID hit, and we realized tourism marketing is not something we could do for a little while, who knows how long, we needed to reinvent ourselves and put ourselves out there into the big wide world and prove to other industries that we were capable of marketing other things outside of tourism. And as any good marketer knows, you need examples, you need case studies, you need proof of what you can achieve to be able to get reasonable contracts. So that was a pretty big challenge for us. We did decide to continue with service-based businesses, which was our area of expertise. Service marketing and product marketing are two very different things. And service is what we had always done, so we stuck with that. Um, and we ended up getting quite a few customers in the area of health care and construction. So that became a space that we played in quite a lot. And you'll hear more about that in other episodes and where we're at now as well. During 2018, my dad got quite sick, and towards the end of the year, he passed away. His business is completely different, a completely different concept to the marketing and the tourism area that I knew. Uh, his business, Cirrus International Limited, uh imports third-party lift or elevator components into New Zealand from around the world and sells those components throughout New Zealand and into the Pacific Islands as well. And whilst I had shared an office with him, it was certainly an industry I didn't know a lot about. I had helped him, you know, pack a few orders here and there when he got busy or was on the phone, you know, take some stuff to the courier, take messages if he couldn't answer the call. But that was about it. That was about the most I knew about it. And when he passed away, it was quite sudden, and I had to make a decision whether that business would shut down or whether it would keep going. Bear in mind that business was him. There was nobody else involved at all. Nobody else worked in it, it was just him. Um so I did make the challenging decision to continue to run the business. So I took it over and I had to learn another entire industry. I think that's probably what gave me the confidence going into 2020 when COVID happened and we had to reinvent C i Marketing into new industries as well, outside of tourism. I think that's probably what made me think, yeah, I'm gonna be okay. I can do this. Fast forward to 2026 and this current very challenging economy. One of the things that we're seeing with marketing trends, probably worldwide, is people actually pulling back their marketing spend. And I understand why. I understand that they think that is the right thing to do because they just don't have the cash flow that they used to have, because they don't have as many customers as they had before. But actually the opposite is true. When you're in an economy like this, if you don't spend your marketing money now and and really invest and keep going with your foot to the floor on your marketing, you're going to disappear completely. So if there is any way you can find some money, find some budget, even a little bit. You can pull it back a little, but even a little bit just to keep top of mind for customers, I highly, highly recommend doing that in this economy. What actually makes marketing work is not that complicated. It's about being consistent, it's about having clear messaging, it's about being visible, and it's about showing up to the right audience. If I could give one piece of advice with marketing, it would be to start thinking like your customer, not like yourself. The visual marketing podcast is going to be a mix of different types of episodes, including coaching. We're going to go through marketing tips and also imagery tips as well. There's going to be real stories from real people. We're going to share those from C i Marketing staff and also my international guests as well. It's not going to be intimidating and it's certainly not going to be over-corporate. It will be educational, conversational, and story-driven. Everything that we talk about is going to be from real life experiences that we have had, things we have tested, we've tried, things that we failed in, and things that we've succeeded in. I want you to feel more confident in your marketing, more motivated to show up, more excited to try the things that you've been putting off, and less overwhelmed by all the things you think you should have been doing. If this sounds like something you think you need, I would love for you to follow along. Thanks so much for joining the Visual Marketing Podcast brought to you by C i Marketing. I'm your host Liz, and I can't wait to share more episodes with you.