Too busy for marketing? What to do instead

The short story: we got really busy with client work. For us, as for most of you, our customers come first. And if we have a choice between getting something done for a client or writing a blog to progress our own marketing, it’s pretty easy to push that blog on to the next week on our calendar… and then the next week, and the next week.

Does any of this sound familiar? I can’t tell you how many clients we’ve worked with who have struggled with getting the marketing side of things done while still juggling all the other extremely important stuff they have to manage on a daily basis.

And, ironically, often the better the business is doing the harder it is to find the time for marketing.

The problem is that you need to be focusing on marketing when times are good just as much as when times are hard. Marketing isn’t magic. Except in rare cases like a well-tuned Google search marketing campaign, marketing isn’t something you can turn on when you need it and turn off when your tank is full—and still expect to get results.

For most businesses, effective marketing requires multiple touch points, good frequency, consistent SEO building, review gathering, staying top-of-mind, and more… in short, a cohesive and enduring marketing strategy.

And, no, going dark on your marketing for 7 months does not a cohesive and enduring marketing strategy make.

So, what do you do if you’re too busy to keep up with your marketing?

1. Reduce the time needed. Look at your marketing strategy, and figure out which items eat the most of your precious time. Is there a shorter or less time-intensive option that might still get the same results? Instead of a long blog, write a short one. No time to put together a fancy graphic? Shoot a quick video with your phone to post instead.
2. Revisit your perfectionism. I like to say that about 80% of the effort towards making a marketing piece perfect pays off, and the last 20% is just wasted time. Seriously, there IS such a thing as “good enough”. And, when it comes to marketing, “good enough” actually happens to trump “perfect”, if perfect takes months to complete. Every. Single. Time.
3. Tap internal resources. Is there someone in your company that likes the idea of helping out with marketing? Many employees have secret talents that they actually might like using. Find their marketing superpower, and tap it. Sure, you still have to manage everything, but it can help cut down on how much time you’re spending producing.
4. Hire help. That’s what we’re here for, folks… to take the main burden of marketing off your shoulders so that you can focus on other things. And even if you don’t hire a fractionalized marketing director like ourselves, don’t be afraid to outsource certain tasks to freelancers. Upwork is a great resource. You don’t—repeat after me—need to do it all yourself.
5. Change your attitude. No, I don’t mean to stop whining (who said anything about whining?). What I mean is that, in order to get marketing done, you need to make it enough of a priority that it actually gets done. Otherwise, it will continue to slide from week to week in perpetuity. And that, folks, is all in how you look at it.

Well, that’s all for now; it’s time to get my nose back to the grindstone. But boy do I have a warm feeling of accomplishment for actually getting this done!

Happy marketing,

Katie & Theron

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