I get it. We’re not all marketers and we don’t have all the time in the world to promote our businesses. So what do you do if you have limited time to promote your business yet you still need big results and leads flowing in your door?
If you only have one hour a week to dedicate to marketing your business, what are the activities you should put at the top of your list?
There’s a misconception that you have to spend hours marketing, and you totally can spend hours marketing, but it’s really more about busy work sometimes, then true marketing. So I want to break down the four things you should be doing in your one hour a week, if you only had an hour with maybe a couple of extra bonuses because I think you’re going to find you have a couple pockets of time in your week that throw some of this stuff in.
First, let’s break down marketing into a couple of categories. When I think about marketing tasks, they usually flow around some of the big Ws. Okay, remember guys, I was a former journalist, but you know, the five W’s right, like the who, what, when, where, why, when how all those things that was pretty much the core of how we had to write stories and how we interviewed people was we had to get these basic facts. It’s called the lede in journalism and it requires you to know what you’re leading with in an article.
It’s the same thing with marketing and your business, you need to figure out the W’s for your business and how to promote it. The most important questions I’m going to help you answer are the where, the who, and the what of your business.
So if you have an hour a week and have to cram it in, these are the things I want you to make sure you’re tackling every single week or you really don’t have a business, right? It’s really hard unless you have a crazy referral system to have people coming into your business if don’t got visibility, baby. So the first step is you’ve got to be visible.
Make sure every single week you are doing something to get visible in your business.
That’s everything from, if we’re talking about local marketing, face to face if you’re going out or if you’re in your community, region or area. For social media, this could include posting or sharing a blog, going live, meeting up with someone face to face. Figure out how are you going to be visible during your one hour a week.
Figure out is how to build a community.
A lot of people don’t consider this to be part of marketing. But if you think about it, where do a lot of your leads come from? They often come from people or from your circles of people who know you, right? And so if you don’t know anybody, it’s going to be hard for you to grow those circles of people, and have them interact with you in a way that’s going to compel them to either work with you, or buy from you. So back to our W questions, for this one you’re answering the Where. Where do you need to be to build community and what does that community look like for you?
So if you’re an online business this could be a Facebook community or a LinkedIn community. It could be a physical community, it could be a support group. There are so many different things you could be creating community around, but you need to figure out what does that look like for your business? Because if you’re not furthering the community around you in some way shape or form, then it’s going to be really hard for you to grow a business. Communities are great marketing for you because when you build a community, you get a built in group of cheerleaders.
Who does not want somebody to go up before them and be your cheerleaders? By investing a little bit of time in someone and when I say community also, I don’t mean you have to like go to like a, like a group, a group thing every week, but you do need to pour into somebody who’s in your community, because basically, they’re able to go out and be like a sounding board and a voice and a marketing for you. Because they’re going to talk about you once you’re top of mind.
Talk with people.
Often times people use marketing to hide behind actually doing face to face conversations with potential clients. But if you’re not talking to people, it’s really hard to sell something. If you didn’t talk to people how would you know what to put out there? One on one conversations guiding someone around what you do helps you figure out “How do I sell what I have? How do I talk about it better? What are the words I need to be using to promote it?” If you talk to people, they’re going to give you the language and objections, and all the things in their head, which you can use to promote your business in some way, shape, or form.
Promote your content.
You have to promote what you’re creating and promote what you’re doing. You have to talk about it. If you don’t put out your content and you don’t talk about, “Hey, I have this blog, or this podcast, or this live or this sale, or I’m doing this event,”… if you don’t talk about it, people won’t know about it.
We often assume in our minds that we’re boring people or are so obnoxious when we talk about our stuff. And that’s really just your perception of how you feel about your own words coming out of your mouth.
You cannot over market yourself.
I can’t say it enough.
So whether you have a million hours in the week or one hour in the week, you got to be putting yourself out there and getting visible. If you have no clue or if you’re like, I need help, please, please, please, please, I need help on getting visible, please hop on over to get the free Get Visible Guide that walks you through how to create a visibility plan. It has 63 ideas right now for how you can get visible. That’s one of the most important pieces and that’s why I included it first. If you don’t have visibility, you don’t have a business period.
How hard is it to find somebody when you don’t know they exist, right? People are looking for what you do and what you offer, what you sell. If they can’t find you, then you can’t grow and you can’t reach them and you can’t connect with them and nurture them and all the things we talked about in the podcast.
So start with being visible. Download the guide if you need help with that. Build your community. That’s investing in one person who can help you move forward or showing up for a group of people. Remember those concentric circles, how they spread out and word of mouth kind of happens in your business. You actually talk to people so you have a pulse check, and so you get feedback on what you’re doing, what you’re offering, what your price point is, what the languages, the objections, all of those things that help answer conversations, and then promote, promote, promote, promote, promote.
Don’t be afraid to promote yourself and what you’re doing.
During your one hour a week what you’re doing is setting up how to promote yourself for the rest of the week. Take 15 minutes to do that.
Break those down into 15 minute segments to make sure:
• All right I’m gonna slip in a 15 minute call with someone here.
• I’m gonna make sure I’m visible in these four places.
• These are the people I want to talk to this week.
• This is how I’m going to build community this week.
• These are all the ways I’m going to promote my content and put it on autopilot.
There are so many tools out there, there are no excuses for you not to have be able to put stuff on autopilot and show up every single day and promote your business every single day. If you need recommendations, some of my favorite ones to use, clearly Facebook, you can just use the like the scheduler in there. I love Recurpost. Buffer is a great one.
Bonus tasks!
Now a couple of bonus things if you find yourself able to squeeze in more than just an hour a week or you have pockets of time you want to fit this in. The other three things that I recommend to make sure you’re doing is making offers to people, creating content and tracking metrics.
For making offers: This may feel like sales, but if there is no way for people to figure out how to buy something from you or work with you, then your marketing is pointless. You have to be selling things in order to have a business. So whether that’s selling yourself, your services, your products, and event tickets, you got to be talking about it and making offers. So make sure you have a way for people to work with you.
For creating the content: this goes with promoting content. For so many of us, we don’t have a problem creating content, we just forget to ever talk about it again. I would rather you share the crap out of your content, one thing a million ways rather than create a million different pieces of content that you never talk about? So create content if you need to.
For tracking your metrics: Figure out what’s working, see what channel where people coming from, what’s actually getting you closer to your goals. If you don’t have a goal with your marketing, then you’re just doing busy work also. Want to know how I track marketing metrics to get started? Grab my Sexy Marketing Metrics Spreadsheet on Episode 005 here.
I hope that this helps break down and demystify the big marketing activities that I always tell you to focus on your business.
About Marketing Magic:
The Marketing Magic podcast is where women entrepreneurs trying to do all the things come to get inspiration, business strategy, and on-air coaching on how to get their business noticed and growing. If you have a business that people need to know about in order for it to grow, you’re in the right place. This is the place to uncomplicate your marketing. Be sure to listen, subscribe, and leave a review! Join the conversation of other unapologetically successful women in her Facebook community, The #girlboss Club.
