Effective Time Management When Marketing Your Small Business

When you’ve just started up your small business, it can be hard to get everything done, especially when you’re working on your own. Maybe you forget to tweet for a week, or you have let your Facebook page go stale… But all is not lost! We  have found some effective ways to manage your time so you can still work on the “businessy-stuff” whilst getting your brand known.

When Are You Most Productive?

One of the most important things to work out is when you are most productive. For most people, this is in the morning however everybody is different. Once you find when your productivity peaks, try to put your marketing tasks in that time-frame. This is so you can get more done whilst spending less time on the task at hand.

Prioritize Your Tasks

Always do the most important tasks first, even if they are laborious. The most important task is different for each business, you just need to find out what works for yours.

Leaflet Drops

Instead of giving out leaflets yourself, find a young person who is looking for some part-time work and pay them to distribute your leaflets for you. Often, small business owners are worried about getting others to do this for you, but if you use someone who you can trust, it can be a beneficial relationship both ways. Not only are you helping a young person into work, but you’re also getting a task off your hands for a relatively small fee.

Create A Marketing Plan

Many businesses start up with a kick-ass business plan but completely forget about their marketing plan. DO NOT DO THIS. A marketing plan is just as important as a business plan. Complete a SWOT analysis and list some SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic & Time-Bound), and then create a plan on how you will achieve these goals.

Nowadays, marketing is very much digital for businesses and inbound marketing/content marketing is THE buzzword at the moment, so try to focus on creating useful, valuable and entertaining content for your audience.

Define Your Audience

Make sure to define your target audience as much as possible. Think of 3-4 different people (real or made up) who would be interested in your product/service, and write down their interests. By defining your audience, you will spend less time creating content that your audience isn’t interested in, however, some trial and error is always involved. Below is an example of a member of our target audience at Fruitworks:

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Name: Ashley

Age: 24

Occupation: Managing Director @ a small business

Interests: Business Strategy, Networking, Startups, Marketing & Business Development

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For Ashley, for instance, I would create content that would be useful for her regarding her interests and this would also be what we would base events on. Your audience will have many different personas, however there will always be topics that will overlap between them. You can even send out surveys if you already have a mailing list or client base, as this will give you the most accurate results. You can use Survey Monkey for this (which is totally free!)

Social Scheduling

Probably one of the most underutilized tools by small business owners is a Social Scheduler, but it can save you crazy amounts of time. All you need to do is curate content, preferably your own, stick it into your scheduler and you’re done! We highly recommend Buffer as it is simple and easy to use, plus it has some amazing features like Respond, a social listening tool that helps you reply to any customers quickly. Currently in Beta test is the Library feature. Simply put your content into the library, and you can recur post, ie set it up to post an article 10 times over 30 days. This is definitely a must have for small business owners whose time is extremely valuable.

Please keep in mind you cannot automate engagement, and to have a successful Social Media campaign you must engage with your prospects. Each day, make sure you check your Social Media profiles for any comments and reply where possible. This extra 5 minutes can make a huge difference.

Plan Ahead

You may have your current posts scheduled to go out on Social Media for the next week or so, but you still need to create fresh new content. I recommend keeping a spreadsheet of with multiple post ideas so you don’t need to think on the spot. If you are looking to do a blog on a whim (not something I recommend), then there are some great tools for coming up with topics like Hubspot’s Blog Topic Generator.

I also recommend carrying around a notepad with you. This is so you can jot down any topics ideas that you may come across and therefore, spend less time coming up with topics. Make sure you put relevant keywords in the title and body to help with SEO.

Create An Image Library

There are plenty of free stock photo websites out there like Pixabay, Unsplash and Death To The Stock Photo, and these are great for using as blog images if you don’t have the time, or design know-how, to create images yourself. Gather 100 pictures from these websites, as well as some you may have taken yourself, so you will always have images for Social Media and your blogs.

80/20 Rule

An old saying says that 80% of outcomes from 20% of your activities, and this can work in marketing. Work out what your 20% of activities are and just focus on those, the other 80% can be scrapped for now. To do this, you must analyze your analytics, both on Social Media and your website analytics (where possible). Below I will walk you through how to work out what Social Media profiles are working for you.

Head over to Google Analytics.

In the side bar hit Aquisition, and then Source/Medium.

In here you can see where most of your referrals come from. If you do have a huge difference in the amount of traffic coming from each source, focus on the top performing profiles. This is also a way to find people who have linked back to your content.

Alternatively, you can hit Social and then Overview to view just specific social referrals.

Even as little as an hour a day can make a huge difference with your marketing. To start with you may need to spend a day or two setting up Social Media and planning out future blog posts, but after you are done with the basics you can save so much time.

Outsource Where Possible

If you are still struggling to market your business as you don’t have the time, consider outsourcing some of the tasks to a freelancer (usually more affordable than an agency). Usually, the task most small business owners struggle with is finding time to blog or thinking of topics to write about. You can expect to pay anywhere between £5 and £150 for a blog post, depending on the quality required, length and expertise of the writer. Shop around to find the freelancer best suited to you. You can find some great freelancers over at these websites.