Schedule time for marketing (Step 4)
Marketing – as opposed to sales remember – is one of those proactive tasks that seems to get pushed aside for more urgent ones. An astute commenter in my last post mentioned you need to always be planting seeds for future business to grow. Just like your workouts if you put marketing time on your schedule each week and hold it sacred, you’ll see the benefits very quickly. Here are some tips for finding the right time to work on your promotions, social media, advertising, whatever you consider ‘marketing’.
- Don’t plan it late in the day. It takes creativity and a fresh brain plus it might get pushed off by late meetings, crises or other urgent stuff
- Don’t schedule more than an hour and a half at a time. It’s hard to concentrate on these tasks for much longer than that if you’re not used to it.
- Schedule your tasks according to your plan. Think of your marketing strategy like a project plan and break down your strategies into tasks that can be accomplished weekly.
- Make sure it’s a time when you’re least likely to be interrupted. I like to work on my own marketing first thing in the morning. Sometimes I’ll schedule myself in an hour earlier to work on it.
You’ll feel really really good if you make a plan, schedule your tasks and commit to it. And when the seeds of your labor begin to bear fruit it’s even more fun. Be patient though – don’t get discouraged.
If you’re a Stephen Covey fan, then you know about the Time Quadrants – marketing falls in Quadrant II. For more on the quadrants here’s a post from Brian Johnson’s Philosophers Notes I think you’ll like.
Tags: Marketing, small business marketing, small business promotion, time management
December 29th, 2009 at 10:34 am
How to schedule time for marketing…
It’s hard to find time for proactive marketing tasks. Here are some tips to make it easier to commit to building your business long term. …
December 29th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
Good tips if applicable. I mean, the sentence “… schedule your tasks and commit to it.” is not always so easy in certain industries. So, that part would need to be done in my free time, I guess.
December 30th, 2009 at 5:56 pm
you have absolutely right, time is the most important thing in business
January 5th, 2010 at 4:57 pm
You are absolutely right and we should all dedicate sufficient time for marketing – which is the lifeblood of any business. I find that if I devote enough time for it, I come up with some good marketing tricks and techniques.
January 8th, 2010 at 6:25 am
Marketing is one of the most important aspects of any business. For example I repair computers for a living. If I do not send out plenty of paper advertisment every month. My business would be nothing.
January 11th, 2010 at 5:01 am
Marketing may be even more important in this day and age than Sales. With the advent of the internet Marketing efforts many times are your Sales efforts. Many companies and individuals put off their marketing and allow it to settle towards the bottom of their “to do list.” This should not happen. Marketing should be a proactive activity that is constantly repeated. Where the results are tabulated and used to determine ROI and alternative or more cost effective marketing efforts. SEM and SEO are great ways to enhance your web presence and increase profitability and ROI for a fraction of the cost of conventional marketing means.
January 15th, 2010 at 6:00 am
Marketing might be even more important than the product itself these days. There’s no point having a great product but nobody knows how good it is.
February 4th, 2010 at 5:17 pm
Thanks for the great post! I have a problem with finding enough time to market. I create a “To do” list every single day, but never get most of my marketing done. I know how important it is, but a lot of us bloggers, marketers, etc end up focussed on other things. I find however that when I spend the time to market, market, and market, I get great results and more traffic to my blog.
February 17th, 2010 at 7:36 pm
I agree 100% and many internet marketers fail to implement a weekly marketing tasks schedule. On my desktop I have a folder for each day of the week, one is labeled mon, one is labeled tues and so on. each folder has daily tasks and I allow a certain amount of time for each task. In mon’s folder you may have 8am-9am facebook, 9am-10am warrior forum, 10am-11am write new blog post, well you get the picture. Switch it up also, on mon you may have facebook and tues twitter or diggs.
The point is that if you do not have a schedule that you consistently abide by, you will end up using up most of your time with non productive activities.
Joseph
February 17th, 2010 at 7:58 pm
Wow Joseph…I have to say you take the cake in terms of organization. Excellent advice…I hadn’t thought of doing a folder per day but it’s a great ida and I plan to try it.