Making Time To Succeed
It is too easy for things to be forgotten about when you are busy in the thick of running your business.
- But, you make time each week to ensure the wages are paid,
- But you make time each week to ensure the GST is sorted out
- But you make time each week to stock take your materials to ensure you have items to build your products.
- But you make time planning your week’s appointments to make the best use of your time with clients.
Marketing constantly and consistently is the key to a successful business. That doesn’t mean you must spend a fortune doing it, but it does mean you have to do it.
Think of your marketing as plates spinning on top of poles. Once they are all in place, it takes a little monitoring to ensure that they stay spinning. So you spend a little time on each, which means the whole array of plates keeps spinning. The same is true of marketing.
I would be so bold as to suggest that as little as an hour per week if done regularly (EVERY WEEK!!) is enough time to make sure you are effectively marketing your business and getting the results, you hope for.
I guess that like me; you do the wages every week at a set time and day. How about this for a suggestion. Why not do the marketing activity immediately after this? It makes sense. You have already had to interrupt your work day to focus on your wages, so it is not as if you are going to break your train of thought. Also, you have just had to focus on a what is, for most of us, one of the largest expenses in our business, so it seems logical with that cost in mind we should work out ways to ensure the bill is paid.
Now you have a time set for the activity, what should you do?
As a rough guide to help you to plan, the following is a summary of my weekly activity.
Look at the Google Analytics stats
By tracking your website visitors, looking at the trends over time and taking time once a month to look deeply into their activity on your website will give you an insight into what your clients want. This means you can enhance those areas to become more informative and better lead generators.Review New Work Enquiries/orders
As you took 15 seconds with each customer to ask them where they found out about you, this is an easy process. You need to look at what marketing activity is working. It is easy to see some of the more obvious ones, but some activity is the foundation for the activity that the client mentions. For example, the SEO activity you do to make your site more relevant for Google will make it easier to find in Google, but will not reflect the fact that the clients say they found you by looking at your website. You need to focus the questions you ask, without making them over complex, to help you identify the trends of marketing that are working.Competitor Analysis
Spend 5 minutes reviewing your identified competitors websites and see what is new. Spend 5 minutes looking at one each week in detail and spend 5 minutes googling your industry to see who is using AdWords, who is at the top of the organic listings and see if there are any main changes in how Google is presenting your industry to the world.Where is the website at?
You have created a plan for your ideal website. You have not yet completed the work, what needs doing next to move the site to where you want it to be. I would suggest if your website needs a lot of work, then you need to allocate more time to get it up to where you want it to be as soon as you are able. Turn off any sections that are not done. Your website is live to the world and needs to look finished, even if you know it isn’t.Stock Take your marketing material?
There is no excuse for running out of marketing material. Be that brochure, leaflets, promotional pens, even letterheads and business cards. If you do a weekly check and have a list, you track that on (on a computer or on paper, the choice is yours). On the list, you need to understand the levels that you need to re order and the time frames to re order. Given that you are tracking the use by doing a weekly stock take, you will know when you are approaching the re-order point for a marketing material.If the material is something you know gives you work and succeeds, reordering is simple, but if you suspect it needs work, you need to make time before you order the next 5000 copies of a leaflet to ensure it is focussed correctly and is going to earn its place in your toolkit. This activity would then be looked at in the ‘What needs Work’ area of your allocated time.
Do you count your leaflets? No, you measure them. When you first get your 1000 new leaflets, you measure how high the stack is. For this exercise let us say it i.e. 250mm high. Divide by 1000 and then multiply by 100 to get the depth of 100 leaflets. Then each week you can simply measure the stack and multiply to get the count. Another thing you can do is insert paper tabs at the re order quantity mark as well as a further visual reminder. This is helpful if you think you might need to redesign or replace an item as it gives you a visual indicator to focus on.
As soon as a material is pulled from the stockroom, it needs to be counted as used. Even if it is in your car or bag, or on display in your reception area , as far as you are concerned, it is used.
What is your focus/ What needs Work?
With the above activity, you have reviewed your week, it is now time to focus on using your remaining marketing time to move things forward. Have you spotted any areas of the website that need work? Do you have a leaflet that needs revamping, how are your news schedule and Facebook signposts going?
How do you feel?
Are you happy with the way your marketing is progressing? I would suggest that every three months you need to do a test and measure to ensure that you are hitting the goals you wanted to, and adjust the plan accordingly.
It will be messy at first, but as you start to get into the routine of marketing analysis, you will start to gain a greater insight from even the few steps mentioned above. Keep lists and even a plan of what activities you need to do within the process, there is nothing wrong with having checklists.
You can, of course, modify the activity I have suggested to suit your business (and you should!), but the core message you need to take is that this needs to be done weekly and thoroughly.