The best way to do Marketing

Here’s a good tip if you find marketing a bit painful. And if you do, take heart, you’re not alone.   I think loads of us would rather be doing the stuff we love (making, creating, writing, baking, bookkeeping, hairdressing, training, finding products or whatever) than marketing. But we can’t run a business without customers, so marketing is a must. And like lots of ‘musts’, the very best way to do it is to do a little every single day.

Here’s how:

1.  Make a list of all the marketing activities you could or should be doing. I know this kinda assumes that you’ve got some ideas. If you’re a bit short in that department we’ve got some fab discussions over on the Facebook page (like this one) and lots of recipes in the Kitchen.

2.  Have a think about how much time you can spend on marketing every day. Be careful not to overestimate this. Remember you’re going to do this every single day so be realistic. Maybe it’s half an hour, maybe it’s just 15 minutes.

3.  Take the activities from the list in Step 1 and break them down into tasks that fit your daily time in Step 2. Pop these on a new list “Daily Marketing Tasks”.

4.  At the beginning of each week (or at the end of the previous week if you’re super-organised) take a look at your “Daily Marketing Tasks” list and plan your week’s marketing tasks.

5.  You might find it helps to do your marketing ‘half hour’ at the same time each day. That way it becomes a habit. When it’s a habit it stops being painful and just becomes something that you do; a bit like brushing your teeth or taking the rubbish out.

6.  Finally, did you read the post about the 15 Mile March? It works super well for marketing tasks. Here’s a short interview I did for ABC News 24 which explains it a bit more.

There’s another fabulous reason to get into the habit of doing a little marketing every day: it gets you doing it even when you’re really too busy to fit it in. Businesses that only do marketing when they’ve ‘got time’ find themselves in a cycle of being super-busy then super-quiet. This is because marketing is like a blow dry – it doesn’t last that long! If you stop marketing when you are busy you’ll soon find you’re, um, not busy.

Do you do a little marketing every day or are you more of a binger/starver?! Do you think half an hour every day would work for you?

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