Four Ways To Work Smarter Not Harder On Your Small Business Marketing
As a small business owner time management is likely to be a daily struggle for you, particularly when tackling your ever-growing marketing to-do list. From posting on social media, to writing blogs, to staying on track with your email campaigns, sending out newsletters and updating your website, it can feel a never-ending job to keep the marketing wheel churning and stay front of mind with your customers and prospects.
So how can you gain more control of your marketing agenda and be more time efficient?
Here are four ways you can save time by streamlining and focusing your marketing efforts:
1. Get organised with your marketing strategy
Tasks and activities should flow from strategy and direction so being organised and spending the time in advance to set your goals, vision and objectives is time well spent. Having a good marketing strategy and plan in place will mean you’ll only let tasks on your to do list if they will further your marketing goals and not sway you off course. That’s not to say that new opportunities won’t come along you want to take advantage of or new challenges will appear that will switch you from proactive to reactive but you’ll still have your blueprint of where you’re headed to keep you focused and moving forwards.
2. Prioritise your marketing activities
So, with your marketing strategy determining where your focus should be (remembering you don’t need to be on every platform doing everything for everyone!) time can then be spent working through your focused tasks. If you’re faced with a long and daunting looking list take a deep breath and remember not all tasks are created equally. Some people swear by a matrix method by assigning tasks based on urgency and importance, others ‘chunk’ tasks by categories and others look for the quick wins first to get in the productivity mood and then move on to the meatier jobs from there. Whatever your method, work out a way that suits you and gets results. Don’t forget to schedule time each day to keep your finger on the pulse for some social listening and engagement activity. Whilst keeping your head down working away can feel productive, looking up and around from time to time means you’ll also be able to spot and take advantage of strategic opportunities and not operate in a vacuum. Work ON the business as well as IN it!
3. Outsource your marketing to the professionals
It can be tempting for small business owners to take on all the marketing activity themselves whether in a bid to save costs, to maintain control of all aspects of the business or for lack of dedicated support within the business. Keeping all the plates spinning yourself can be exhausting and sometimes letting in an expert can reap the benefits. If you can generate more sales, the investment might even pay for itself! From outsourcing all of your marketing strategy and activity or just various aspects of it such as social media management, email marketing, SEO, website work, content creation or design, there are a wealth of options.
4. Take advantage of marketing software and technology
Technology is a huge time enabler in the marketing arena with a wide range of software solutions ready to help you plan, schedule, execute and analyse things quicker and easier than ever. At the top end of the scale automation technology can mean some seriously clever marketing seamlessly integrating CRM, email, web and social to deliver timely, targeted campaigns all the way through the customer lifecycle to generate and convert leads and cross-sell and up-sell to customers. If that all sounds a far-off dream then getting to grips with trigger-based email marketing, using project management and workflow tools, and implementing social media scheduling are all excellent first steps to letting technology help make your time on marketing more efficient.
If you’d like to spend some time on improving your marketing strategy then give us a call or check out our consultancy packages, we’d love to help!
