Are you too busy to address your company’s marketing?

For Business Owners time can be extremely hard to come by. You have orders to fill, products to manufacture, employees to manage, and emails to answer. For your business to grow, however, you cannot get away from the fact that you need to effectively market yourself to your target market. You will find an abundance of marketing strategy tips and advice on the Internet, but business owners often find it impossible to find the time to try even one of those tips as they are having to balance marketing with practically running the business.

The following marketing shortcuts can get your marketing done more quickly and efficiently than you ever thought possible:

90 Day Planning
Over the past few years and much more so during the COVID-19 lockdown, online social networking has been the predominant promoter of many businesses. Blogging, vlogging, Twitter, Facebook and etc. is time-consuming. Most marketing strategy tips tell entrepreneurs that they should be visible on social media every day. Here are some marketing shortcuts to help you achieve this:

Organise your post topics in advance: This allows you to concentrate mostly on running your operations during the workweek. Then, when it comes time to post, you will spend less time figuring out what to write about.

Pre-posting: Literally create your posts or blogs in their entirety in one sitting, and then release it one at a time during the week.

Content Scheduling: Use social media scheduling tools such as Hootsuite, Buffer, Sprout Social, ContentStudio to create your Facebook/LinkedIn/Pinterest/Reddit/Twitter/Instagram/YouTube posts and assign a day and time to automatically post to cut back on the need for daily visits to these profiles.
Should you make use of on-line publications by sending content packages to different on-line magazines, it is best to make each package specifically addressed to that editor. This takes time, but you can use marketing shortcuts for this too through the creation of spreadsheets or checklists. On the rows, list all the possible magazines and retail outlets. On the columns, list each of your press package elements. Check off which elements best fit each editor and put together a package once a week to keep a steady flow when building a healthy online presence.

Consistency
Setting a fixed time to create videos, social network and assemble content packages will keep your days consistent and organised. Your marketing must be just as consistent as your production and general operations if you want to see exponential growth. You can schedule this once a day, twice a day, or once a week depending on your marketing strategies. Create a default diary to schedule this.

Prioritise Your Time
Some marketing strategies require less time than others. Make sure you are allocating the correct amount of time needed for each. For example, a LinkedIn or Facebook post takes significantly less time than making a how-to-do video. Like everything else in your business, consistency is of utmost importance. Think about how frequently you need to make a video and how long it takes to make it. Then reserve time in your workweek specifically for video production.

Creating a business is tough but maintaining its steady growth can prove to be even harder. Planning your days with a large wall calendar can help you visualise your upcoming week. Production and marketing are two completely different worlds but balancing these two jobs, and using marketing shortcuts wherever you can, will give your business a long, prosperous life.

Andre Van Rooyen, ActionCOACH Business Coach
andrevanrooyen.actioncoach.com  | andrevanrooyen@actioncoach.com

Photo by Brad Neathery on Unsplash