There is always something else you could be doing with your marketing.
Post more often on Facebook or Instagram.
Start sending emails.
Update your website.
Create a Facebook ad.
Make a Reel.
Update your Google Business Profile.
Plan a promotion.
And if you spend enough time online, you can find someone telling you that all of those things are important.
That’s where it can get overwhelming.
Especially when you’re also running the business, looking after customers, answering emails, paying bills and dealing with everything else that needs to get done.
So instead of asking:
What should I be doing with my marketing?
Try asking:
What does my business need from my marketing right now?
Maybe you need more people coming into your store.
Maybe you have an event coming up and need people to register or attend.
Maybe you’ve added a new service and your customers don’t know about it yet.
Maybe you have a customer email list, but you haven’t used it in months.
Once you know what you’re trying to accomplish, it becomes easier to decide where to put your time.
If you need registrations for an event, spending hours trying to grow your Instagram following may not be the priority.
If customers keep asking the same question about what you sell, what something costs or how to book, that information may need to be clearer on your website or social media.
If people are already finding you through referrals, that may be worth paying more attention to instead of adding another marketing channel.
You also don’t always need to add something new.
If customers regularly mention that they saw your posts on Facebook, keep using Facebook.
If people are opening your emails and clicking through to your website, that’s a sign email is worth continuing.
If referrals are bringing in good customers, think about how you can make it easier for happy customers to recommend you.
Before adding another marketing task, look at what is already getting a response.
And look at the time you actually have.
If you realistically have two hours a week for your own marketing, build your plan around two hours.
You don’t need to be on every social media platform, send an email every week, run ads and constantly create new content.
You need to decide which things are most useful for what your business is trying to do right now.
A simple way to sort it out is to ask:
1. What am I trying to accomplish?
More store visits? More bookings? More registrations? More sales of a particular product?
2. Which marketing activity is most likely to help with that?
Social media? Email? Your website? Google? Advertising? A promotion?
3. What can I realistically keep up with?
Choose something you actually have the time to do consistently.
Those three questions can make the marketing list a lot shorter.
Sometimes you don’t need another marketing idea.
You need to decide which of the ideas already in front of you is actually worth your time right now
.