There is never enough time in the day, when you're a small business owner - particularly if you're a solo-preneur. It's easy to forget when you own a business that there is more to it than developing and delivering the products and/or services that you're passionate about. There is the administrative side to things as well - papers to be filed, taxes to be done, bills to be paid and marketing to be executed.
For many, marketing gets pushed to the wayside. After all, you need the product or service delivered because that's how you get paid. You also need to make sure your “back office” is in check because when bills aren't paid and taxes aren't filed, your business can't stay open.
What people tend to forget, is that if no one knows that your business exists, then there are no customers to sell those products and services to. Therefore, there is no income to pay those bills. How, though, does the small business owner find the time to market their products and services?
There are a couple of ways.
Many outsource. They determine their marketing budget and work with an agency that will do all or part of their marketing for them. Sometimes the hardest part is getting started and knowing what to do. Some agencies, like mine, specialize in getting small businesses and non-profits started with their marketing efforts; creating strategic marketing plans that allow the business owner to execute their marketing quickly and easily.
Some hire Virtual Assistants (VAs), to handle administrative tasks such as social media posting. In this scenario, the business owner comes up with the content then the VA posts it for them, handling details like correctly sizing images for the various social media platforms, adjusting the post content to fit the audience and character limits for each channel and responding to posts comments. Some VAs will also curate content for you. We'll get into content curation in just a little bit.
If hiring someone to do the bulk of the work for you isn't feasible, then we recommend focusing on one marketing channel to start with, learn that channel really well, then add new channels when posting to the first becomes second nature. This path keeps things simple. You can post to Facebook, testing out what works and doesn't work for your business and your audience. Once you get really good at posting to Facebook you can arrange to have your posts automatically posted on Twitter and Instagram. For Instagram, an image needs to be attached to the post.
For those using Facebook as their main marketing channel, making use of Facebook's scheduled posting tool can be a huge timesaver. You can create enough posts for a month, load them all at one time and schedule them to run. Social media management dashboards, like Hootsuite, Buffer and eClincher can be used to do the same thing across multiple social media channels.
Content curation is also a great way to provide valuable, relevant content to your audience and save time. Content curation is the act of finding relevant content online and sharing it with your audience. The keys here are
(1) making sure you give full credit and attribution to the source and
(2) adding a comment or two of your own when posting curated content, letting your audience know why you think the content is relevant to them.
If you're short on time you can curate and schedule dozens of articles, posts, and images to share in under an hour, thereby giving your audience weeks, if not months, worth of relevant content. While you don't want all of your content to be curated, it definitely takes some of the pressure off.
There is no easy trick for scheduling time to market your business. No matter what, you still have to find time to execute your marketing tasks. We highly recommend you take 10 minutes, sometime today, preferably now, and determine how much time you can spend each month on marketing efforts. Be honest. Do you have 15 minutes each month, an hour, 3 hours, etc. Whatever amount of time you can consistently commit each month, put it on your calendar. Even if it is only 15 minutes. Schedule this time out for the next year. We know, your schedule may change and that 15 minute time slot may end up dedicated to something else. That's fine, move the time slot as needed. But make sure it stays on your calendar. The trick here is to not delete it and promise yourself you'll find time for it later. It needs to stay on your calendar.
Once you've determined how much time you can dedicate each month, your next job is to make it as easy for yourself to execute marketing tasks as possible. Bundle the tasks together. Spend one sessions brainstorming content ideas and another session writing (or curating!) the content for as many posts as you can do in the time allotted. Use the next session to schedule the posts through the platform’s native scheduler or through a social media dashboard. We highly recommend that you avoid creating and posting content one by one. If you're finding it hard to be consistent, it becomes too easy to go long periods of time without posting anything. Large gaps in posting means that any audience you may have captured will likely have fallen away due to a lack of interesting content from you. Get your ducks in a row, create and curate content in advance and then schedule your posts at reasonably regular intervals.
These tips won't help you create the extra hours in a day that you, as a small business owner, desperately need. But they will allow you to optimize the time you spend on marketing, thereby getting as much out of that time as possible. And while we focused here on social media marketing the same can be said for traditional marketing. Outsource, share the burden with a virtual assistant or bundle your tasks together for the most bang for your time.
Aisha Cargile is a trainer, author and co-founder of McCord and Cargile Marketing Resources, an Indianapolis-based marketing agency specializing in You-centric marketing and marketing education for small businesses, solo-preneurs and non-profits. Aisha is an educator at heart. She believes that knowledge is to be shared and lives by the saying "give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
Aisha Cargile, McCord and Cargile Marketing Sources
She has volunteered with a variety of professional and charitable organizations, including, Maddie Smiles: Random Acts of Kindness a community-based organization that focuses on improving the mindset and outlook of local populations through acts of kindness designed to inspire positivity and improve community relations. She has also sat on the board of directors for the Project Management Institute Central Indiana Chapter as VP Marketing.
