As the owner or manager of a growing business, your focus is on the work you do for your clients and rightly so.  You are probably busy running your busy that you have little time to spend on marketing right? Marketing is usually one of those agenda items that is constantly pushed back to do ‘when you have time’.

The most common statement I hear from business owners is ‘don’t have the time or the expertise to market the business. I have no idea where to start or what I should be focusing on. It all just gets too hard.”

It is possible to have consistent marketing for your business that runs on autopilot without you having to spend hours every week to make it happen. It follows this Simple Marketing Framework.

The first step to take is to identify your objectives, challenges, audience, budgets and priorities.

You need to know why you are embarking on this digital marketing journey. What is it you are trying to achieve? Is it to drive sales? Increase brand visibility? Launch a new product or service offering? Become market leader?

Write down your top 3 objectives and then put these in order of priority. You can’t achieve everything at once, so identify what is most important.

You also need to define what your ideal client looks like for you? A good exercise is to think of an existing client that you would love to clone. This is usually the client, that is easy to work with, does what they are asked, is enjoyable to work with and pays their bills on time. Write down all the attributes of your ideal client, describing them in detail to form your ideal client persona which becomes the foundation that your marketing is built around.

Everything starts with your clients – everything! Your marketing messages, content, channels you are using all start with your ideal audience. Your client only cares about the outcomes they can achieve using your services.

Also, consider your budget for executing your marketing. How much can you realistically commit to growing your brand presence? Will you manage this inhouse? Will you contract an outside specialist? What time frame does this need to happen within?

Just like when consulting with one of your clients, you need to have a clear direction or strategy in place, so you know how you are going to get to the end result. Your plan determines how you are going to move from where you are now to where you want to be.

Your marketing strategy looks at 3 key areas:

• Where you are now
• Where you want to be
• How you are going to get there

A strategy does not belong in your head. You need to put it on paper and share it with your team so they are on the same page as you, when it comes to implementing your business vision. It should be a working document, not something that gets written then stored in a draw.

Once you have your strategy you need to break it into priorities, accountabilities, and add deadlines.

Work out what are the most important tasks to execute first – these are always your foundation marketing tactics, Then, determine who is going to accountable for executing them. Do you have the time to do this? Will it be someone on your team? Will you engage an outside company to make it all happen for you?

Then, most importantly you must have deadlines so you action what needs to be done to ensure you get forward movement.

You cannot be everything to everyone, so stop trying! Don’t make the mistake of trying to maintain Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, Pinterest, Instagram, and YouTube accounts (unless you have a big marketing team). Be realistic in your expectations and focus your time & effort where your audience is

The rule is this – Align your digital channels to your audience. You cannot possibly use every digital platform so you need to focus on the channels where your audience is spending their time. That allows you to focus on having the right conversations, creating the right content, and sharing the right types of marketing messages.

 Now it’s time to do! This is when you need to execute the tactics, that you identified in your strategy. The order of your execution is based on your priorities. What is needed first and what is most important in order to get the foundations set up and for you to be building your digital visibility?

This usually starts with the channels you own and control – websites, landing pages, blogs, and email marketing. Continued execution will keep the momentum going, stop procrastination, and get results faster.

(If you want to get set up faster or don’t want to spend hours figuring it all out yourself which is when you usually make costly mistakes, then get in touch)

Being busy, your digital marketing needs to be automated to create consistency and eliminate the ‘too busy’ excuse. The most successful businesses in the world, market more when they are busy, and this should include you.

What should be automated:

• Email marketing campaigns can be set up to run automatically This can include marketing funnels and regular newsletter type content. You can use a simple platform like Mailchimp for this
• Social Media – you don’t have to spend a lot of time on social media – you just need to be consistent. A simple way to do this is to use a tool like Buffer or Hootsuite to schedule the content you have created, repurpose old content, or share curated content
• Blogs – Batch write your blogs or article then schedule them to go live on your website. This provides fresh content that Google love and allows you to have a consistent presence. Most website builders like WordPress allow you to do this easily

Most automation tools are free or low cost so if you have a limited budget there is no excuse. Automation allows you to communicate with your audience at any time of the day or night (yes even while you sleep)

This provides consistency with your marketing, which is highly important for results. You need to maintain a consistent presence online (and offline) to remain top of mind and in the shopping cart of choices for when that client is ready to engage your services.

Once you have everything set up and running, you need to ensure review, refine & measure your results. Do not set and forget.

You need to regularly look at your Google Analytics data and social media insights to determine what is working and what is not. This helps you to determine what you should be measuring, otherwise, it is easy to get overwhelmed by a tonne of data that is just not relevant to where you are at in your digital journey.

 

If you want to know what you are doing right and where you are missing opportunities I invite you to book a Free Digital Health Check. It’s super easy and takes 15-30 minutes for me to review your digital channels and give practical advice that you can take away to improve your marketing to generate new business while you sleep.

CLICK HERE TO GET STARTED