5 time saving marketing tactics

1. Be selective with what marketing activity you do

Most small businesses will be limited by two key resources; time and budget. Trying to stretch either of these over doing a full holistic marketing strategy is unrealistic and will lead to ineffective marketing. By trying to do everything, you’ll end up doing nothing.

Pick the areas that will make a difference for your business. If you need to get your name out there, focus on social. If you’re getting eyes on your website but not gaining customers, put your time into improving your website.

Don’t do things because you think you should do a bit of everything; do things you think will make a difference.

2. Focus on outcomes not outputs

There is a perception that businesses need to be posting once a day on social, blog posts every week, and so on. This inevitably leads to social posts for the sake of doing a social post and losing sight of the value that the content we share brings.

Focus on posting and sharing content when you have valuable things to say. Yes, try to be consistent, but you’ll gain more benefit from one quality social post a week, than five low-value posts to meet arbitrary frequency expectations.

3. Plan evergreen content

Planning and creating content can take a bit of time, so when you are investing effort into it, try to make sure it will bring continuous value to your business. Whilst content about highly topical things in the news cycle is great, they bring large, short-term value. By focusing on evergreen topics that will be of interest to people for months or years, you can build sustainable and scalable engagement with your content.

4. Don’t be afraid to outsource

One of the most common challenges we see when working with small businesses is owners wanting to do everything themselves. Your business is your baby, nobody knows your product, service, or USPs better than you and can’t sell the value of it as well as you. This may be true, but don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

There will generally be a laundry list of jobs that need doing longer than you are able to get through. Things like writing content can be relatively cheaply outsourced, and yes, it may not be as good as if you wrote it yourself, but it may be good enough to do the job it needs to do.

Platforms like Upwork, Bark or Fiverr can be economical ways of getting content produced that would either, not get done or distract you from other more important things otherwise.

5. Measure everything you do

Whilst measurement of your marketing efforts might not seem like the best way to invest the limited time you have, it is possibly the most important element. Without proper measurement, you don’t know if the things you are spending your time and energy doing are having the impact you want them to. Proper measurement can help you focus on the areas that are making a difference and stop spending time on things that aren’t.

Make sure as a minimum you have Google Analytics for your website for example so you can see if digital marketing is doing what you need it to.

These five tips are a good starting point to make sure your time spent on marketing your business is time well spent, and not taken away from other important areas of your business.