As a small business owner you have to assume many roles, from the chief marketing officer to the VP of Janitorial Services (e.g., cleaning the bathrooms). With so much on your plate it can be difficult to find time to do what is probably the most important activity for your business, marketing.
If you’re not an experienced marketer, which most first time business owners aren’t, you may find it overwhelming to keep up with the never ending need to market your business. Taking time to research and plan your marketing activities can be difficult when you have dozens of other things to do during the course of the day, but you must spend the necessary time to plan and implement your marketing strategy if you want your business to grow. No matter how great your product or service is, it doesn’t matter if people don’t know about it.
Break Your Marketing Down Into Actionable Steps
Just the thought of creating a marketing campaign would make many small business owners cringe, the key is to break down your marketing activities into bite sized action steps that you can complete in a short amount of time. By breaking down your marketing activities into smaller steps, it allows you to take action more often, without having to wait until you have a large block time. As small business owners, we know those large blocks of time rarely materialize. Below are some things you can do to quickly start implementing your marketing plan.
Create a List of Marketing Opportunities
Make a list of all the available marketing opportunities you would like to pursue. Hopefully you can get this information from your marketing plan. If you do not have a marketing plan in place yet, just make a list of marketing opportunities. You may have been meaning to place an ad in the local paper or to create a new Facebook advertising campaign, list out everything on a sheet of paper or on your computer.
Turn Each Marketing Activity Into Its Own Project
Using a sheet of paper or your computer, do the following:
- Write down the marketing activity you would like take action on
- Write out all of the steps necessary to make it happen, in sequential order
- Gather necessary information and resources that will be needed
- Keep all of your resources together for reference. You can print your resources and place them in a folder or add the reference links to your computer document.
Take Action
Now that you have each marketing activity written down with its own action steps, you are ready to take action. Starting with the most important marketing activity, simply take one action step at a time until the project is completed. Don’t feel the need to wait until you have enough time to finish all of the steps, do one at a time and continue when you have the opportunity. For example, if the project you have has four steps and you think completing all of them will take two hours, start with only the first step which may only take twenty minutes and continue to step two when you have more time. If you do a little bit at a time you will keep moving forward until the project is complete.
Below is a sample of a project created for placing an ad on Facebook To Drive Traffic To Your Website
- Read the tutorial on Facebook on how to create a Facebook ad (15 min)
- Read three articles on Facebook ad best practices (20 min)
- Create a profile for the type of customer I will be targeting (20 min)
- Sign up for Facebook advertising (10 min)
- Determine the budget that will be allocated to campaign (10 min)
- Write out 3 versions of my ad and gather images for each ad (60 min)
- Create each ad and start campaign ( 15 min)
As you can see, I took a project that was going to take me approximately 2 1/2 hours and broke it down into seven smaller steps that can be completed one at a time, without having to continue on to the next step if time does not allow. It may take you a month to set aside 2 1/2 hours, but you may be able to start tomorrow if you only need fifteen minutes to complete a single step.
As you can see, it’s really a simple system, but it works! This method not only applies to your marketing activities but to any tasks that will require time to complete. There is also the satisfaction of crossing off each step as you complete them, getting you ever closer to your goal! To find out more about time saving strategies, check out the Action Method by Behance, which provides some great tools and tips on organizing your business life. If you have a method that works for you, please share it in the comments below!
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[...] your product or service is, it doesn’t matter if people don’t know about it” (accessed from: http://www.thesmallbusinessplaybook.com/163-how-start-implementing-marketing-strategy-today/0). Because there are so many companies competing against each other, it is important to get your [...]