Online marketing can be very time consuming. Who has the time to write multiple articles a week, engage with customers on social media, write ads and still actually operate the business?
Some will say that marketing is an integral part of your business, which is very true. But, I’ll argue marketing is your business, because without it, you may not be in business for long. So even though there are other things you need to do that are important, let’s talk about a few things you can do to stay in front of your customers when you really don’t have the time.
Repurpose Content
Revamping your own content can be a beneficial move for both the audience and your schedule. You likely already have content in the form of video, blog post, PDF’s. Reuse and repurpose that content instead of creating something entirely new from scratch.
Repurposing will provide value in several ways:
Reaches several platforms: By converting your PDFs into infographics or slides, webinars into videos, and similar processes, it’ll increase the likelihood of circulating that content throughout many other channels.
Reinforces the message: When you broadcast the same message throughout various formats and media, it’s increasing the odds that people remember the message and associate you with it.
SEO benefits: Having variations of the same content and distributing it appropriately gives the search engines different types of content to rank and you more opportunity to rank for different pieces of content.
The following can all be purposed into other kinds of media with ease:
- Podcasts
- Newsletters
- Webinars
- Memes
- Lists
- Infographics
- Newsletters
- Whitepapers
- Case studies
Eliminate What is Not Working
As a business owner or marketer, you’re likely emailed from various marketers giving you advice about the best way to market your business. It almost always seems to focus on having “more” marketing and more tactics. Always “more.”
In the end, the more you do, the more time it will consume. Sometimes it pays to go “deep” with your marketing and not “wide”. Instead of trying to do more, look at all of the things you are doing that are not working, and start eliminating them one by one. This will be a big time saver and give you more time to focus on what is working.
Focus on What Works
Speaking of more time to focus.
Focus is a very important part of productivity. But you have to make sure you are focusing on the correct things. This may include tactics, results and or specific goals. The secret is to focus on being effective, not busy. Busy takes a lot of time, busy is doing a lot of things. Effective is doing what works in the most efficient manner.
Use Automation
Systems that support automation aren’t the magic solution to marketing, but they still offer a substantial benefit to all companies. This benefit is time. An email auto-responder, will allow you to stay in front up potential customers or current customers automatically. Similar to a good ad, you create it once and let it do its job over and over again. Of course, you need to tweak and change things in your email campaign, but it’s faster than starting from scratch and crafting something new every time.
Hire Help
Sometimes, you really just don’t have the time. And that’s okay. You can hire someone to work internally or a hire a digital marketing agency to help with you online campaigns.
What you don’t want to do is completely hand over your marketing to another company and have zero involvement. A great agency will work with you and communicate frequently. This may be via bi-weekly or monthly meetings, reports and other meetings.
You may think. Doesn’t this take up time?
Yes, it does, but considerably less than trying to do all the work yourself.
