Best Practices: How to Market Your Small Business Consistently When You Have NO Time
by Sydni Craig-Hart, Smart Simple Marketing
You know you need to market consistently. You have the best intentions of doing so. But you find yourself constantly distracted by the phone ringing, email piling up, invoices to send, clients to help, voice mails to return and the paper that is growing out of your desk.
What’s a busy guy or gal to do?
Here are 5 ways you can market your business consistently when you have NO time:
1. Start your day with a marketing activity before anything else. Most folks I know start their day checking their email, which is a guaranteed productivity killer. Making the simple shift of giving attention to business development BEFORE you get sucked into meeting other people’s demands, allows you to start your day focused on growth. Whether it’s 15 minutes, 30 minutes or an hour, dedicate the first part of EVERY workday to a specific, goal-focused marketing activity and watch how new opportunities begin to unfold.
2. Use automated email messages. It’s been said that 9 out of 10 people who visit your website will never return. Unless that is, you give them a reason to! Providing a free Problem Solving Gift available on your website (in exchange for a visitor’s name and email address) allows you to build an interest list. Stay in touch with each subscriber, learn about their needs, build a trusted relationship, gather data, pre-qualify leads, sell products & services. You can write a series of 3-5 email messages and set them up to deliver over a specified period of time to EVERY person that opts-in for your free gift. Constant Contact, iContact and InfusionSoft are great tools for this.
3. Schedule one day each month to create your content & pre-schedule it to deliver to your audience. Plan your content in advance by choosing a theme for the month and then create ALL of your content around that theme. You can start with a few key ideas and then turn them into various formats (such as email newsletters, blog posts, social media posts, podcasts, etc.). If you don’t feel up to doing all of the writing yourself, hire a writer (we’ve worked with writers on Upwork for as little as $75 per article) or purchase a body of content and customize it to make it your own.