10 Ways to Market Your Business When You're Short on Time

There’s no understating the importance of marketing for any business that has a desire to grow. After all, it’s through your marketing that you make your potential customers aware of your product or service, and urge them to consider your business as the solution to their problems.

Therefore, it is inevitably a practice that you will have to partake in at some point in your business journey. With that being said though, it’s not always easy to find the time to dedicate to moving your business towards the future. If you’re a “solopreneur”, your time is likely made up of working on your projects, meeting potential clients, responding to emails, managing stock, keeping track of records and the plethora of other unfinished tasks that demand your attention. 

You may have a few networking events scheduled. This is a fantastic way to dedicate some time to connecting with potential clients and customers, but without leads coming in from your website and marketing channels, your growth could be limited to only what’s in front of you right now.

If the above resonates with you, we’re here to help. This article will cover 10 ideas that are designed to lighten the heavy load of marketing in your day-to-day schedule and help you to structure a plan for your communications with maximum impact and less time investment. 

 

Define a Target Audience

The very first step you should be taking when considering how to make the most impact is to determine where you are going to place your focus. There’s a popular phrase used in marketing that says “You can’t boil the ocean”. What is meant by that is that trying to reach anybody and everybody with your marketing is not a productive approach. 

There will be a group of specific people that love your product or service and have shared demographics or interests that you can target. Naturally, it will take a bit of research to find and define this audience but in doing so, you can start to create content specifically suited to them. You can disregard posts and content that would be better suited to other audiences and you’ll find that your marketing starts to resonate more with this audience you’ve chosen. 

There are a few ways that you can start to pick out this audience. You can interview your existing or previous customers and try to find commonalities between them, use the Facebook Audience Insights Tool to find what they’re interested in and how your audience is broken down demographically and you can also get a good overview of your demographics from Google Analytics. Once you’ve found the audience you want to focus on, you can start to craft a content plan based on their interests and shared traits.

 

Marketing Funnels

A marketing funnel is, in essence, a plan of how you take a potential customer from awareness of your brand, product or service all the way to choosing to do business with you. It guides them through learning about what you do, deciding what the right choice is for them and helping them to make a purchasing decision. 

This sounds like a lot of work to commit to and you’d be right in thinking so. However, a well thought out marketing funnel is an investment of time for long-term marketing simplicity. By drafting out a framework for your marketing, you know what’s required, what can be automated, what can be improved and more. 

You’ll have the guidelines mapped out for your future marketing success, you can see what is working and what isn’t and have more faith in the system you’ve built and how it works. It is key for future efficiency and growth, and having that to hand will be an invaluable asset for saving you time while creating the impact that drives your business.

 

Content Curation

Websites need content. It’s the driving force for your marketing because it helps you to guide people to your website, answer questions about your product or service and demonstrates your expertise… The list goes on. 

The problem with original content however is that it takes time to produce. If you’re going to dedicate time to sitting down at your computer and writing something new from scratch, you can expect to be there for a few hours at least. It is a commitment.

While creating your own content is definitely a positive exercise, not everything that you produce needs to be an original, 2000 word, masterpiece. What makes the internet so great is that it facilitates the sharing of brilliant ideas and you can be a part of this without always having to produce your own content to share. 

Content curation is the practice of collecting other people’s ideas and sharing them with your audience. If you find a relevant topic that you think your audience would find value from, you can share this with them. You can add your own short take on what you thought of the article or collect a series of related blogs as just a couple of ideas. So long as you credit and link to the original author’s work, this is a fantastic way to fill the gaps in your content calendar.

 

Sales Channels

If you have an online shop, trying to manage multiple marketing strategies at once across platforms (as well as run your business) can be an exhausting and frustrating cycle. 

However, you could save yourself a ton of time AND create a lot of visibility for your items by utilising Sales Channels. 

These are connections from your store to platforms such as Google Merchant Center, Pinterest Shopping, Facebook and Instagram. A data feed of your products can be sent to each to create product listings on their platforms, and Create makes sure this feed is updated daily so you’re always conveying the right information. 

Each time you list a new product, you’ve got new content - All framed for buyers who are shopping for your products on their platforms. 

We ran an experiment to see how much exposure these Sales Channels could accrue for a relatively new website. The results were astonishing. You can find out more about them in our blog:

How Sales Channels Can Be a Game Changer for Your Marketing >>

 

Affiliates & Referrals

Some of the best content you can use to promote your business doesn’t necessarily have to be written by you (or someone working with you). You can encourage others to write about your business or your work too. Affiliates and referrals offer the opportunity for your business to grow exponentially when done properly as you work to leverage the networks of others.

Affiliates are people that will write for you and direct traffic to your website. They are typically paid on a commission basis for either sales made through your website as a result of their content or through the number of people they direct your way. You can set up your own programme through a marketplace such as Affiliately. By doing so, you can potentially gain a ton of exposure through your affiliates networks while they do most of the work for you.

Referrals are recommendations from your existing customers or clients that drive new customers to you. Often in Referral programmes, those who send you new customers are rewarded through discounts or money back. Needless to say, the words of your happy customers are hugely powerful and can really drive your marketing forwards. 

Both methods are great ways for you to leverage networks outside of your own. All it takes is a commitment to set up and manage your programmes. From there, you can generate a multitude of third party content built specifically to drive traffic to your site. 

 

Automate Emails

No doubt you have plenty of emails all waiting to eat into your time and responding to each can sometimes cause a massive time sink in your daily schedule. So the question is, how can you reduce the amount of time it takes for you to send those necessary emails?

In many cases, you can automate a good portion of your emails. If you’re running an Ecommerce store through Create, you have the facilities available to automatically update your customers on the status of their orders. These are easy to set up and can save you a ton of time keeping your customers in the loop regarding their orders. 

Another way to automate your emails would be through a third-party such as ConvertKit, Sendinblue or Mailchimp. These email clients are perfect for updating your mailing lists on news and business announcements, but you can also use them to set up automations based on triggers that often occur. Thus saving you time having to email these people individually.

One more point to mention is that if there are situations that you don’t feel you can automate your messaging or don’t feel it is necessary, an alternative approach could be to build some templates. If there are some repetitive emails that come up, having a format that just needs some slight editing before it’s ready to go can save you time. 

Again, this may take some time in the first instance to put your templates and automations in place. However, Implementing some of these ideas into your daily schedule can really reduce the amount of time you find yourself dealing with emails. This saves you having to divide your personal attention to individual tasks and thus allows you to focus on the bigger picture that helps grow your business.

 

Social Media Schedulers

Keeping on top of Social Media is something a lot of us feel we need to prioritise as a daily activity. It offers the perfect opportunity to connect with your ideal customers where they’re spending their time and can be an integral part of your marketing efforts. 

The problem a lot of people face with social media is that it requires a consistent effort and time to create posts each day. This is where Social Schedulers, such as Facebook Creator Studio, Hootsuite or Sprout come in incredibly useful. 

These online applications allow you to schedule a whole week of content in advance and help you to monitor your engagement. Without having to take time out of each day to plan what you’re going to say and post it across different platforms, you can allocate a slot of time that works for you and get all your scheduling done at once. 

To make this even easier, you might find it useful to document a list of sources that you know are useful for finding and sharing content. Websites such as Flipboard allow you to follow topics and find what’s hot in your industry so you can keep your content calendar flowing with relevant information. 

If you find you’re actively working on social and it’s taking up a lot of time over the course of the week, it would definitely be worth trying out the options above. With these you can assign just one portion of your time during the week and gain more control over your working schedule.

 

Reframe your existing content

So how do you fit your website content into your posting schedule? For many people, it may be the case that they’ll spend hours creating fantastic content on their site to only share it once on social media. Afterall, you wouldn’t want to be sharing the same post over and over on social right?

The key is to find new angles for your content. In each piece of writing, you’ll likely have several key insights that you could use individually for your content calendar. Let’s say for example you create a post about “8 Things to Know Before Meeting with Any Consultant”. You have 8 different posts covering each of the individual points that you can share individually to your feeds to keep this one piece of content circulating.

The buck doesn’t stop there. You could create, or commission, an Infographic to complement your post that you can share on your channels. You could make a video to cover the points which you could then additionally share to YouTube. You could ask questions to your audience pertaining to the topic. These are just a few ideas of how you can reuse your existing content in new and exciting ways.

When creating your weekly content schedule, it’s important to look at what content you already have and consider new ways you can frame the topic for your audience. There’s an added benefit that by sharing so many different angles, you can see which of these posts resonate with your audience the most. This can then be carried forward to future blogs to maximise your engagement; as well as giving your content the exposure it deserves. 

 

Pixel Campaigns

The Facebook Pixel collects information about how particular visitors behave on your website and associates them with their Facebook profiles. This data is stored for later use that can be utilised in building powerful and highly targeted Facebook Campaigns. 

Targeting your Facebook Advertisements can be hard, especially without doing a lot of prior research. However, if you get this part of the marketing formula right, you can attract a huge amount of new visitors to your site. 

The Facebook Pixel takes all the hard work of doing this research out of the equation. It helps you identify key audiences, create lookalike audiences based on your previous customers, retarget those who have already engaged with your website and more. 

With this kind of data at your disposal, you can set up an initial campaign with a strong foundation and all you then need to do is focus on optimising it over time. With everything in place and a reasonable budget behind your marketing, you are essentially automating high-quality traffic to your website. Additionally, it will only become more effective as you take your learnings and apply them to your campaign.

This feature is really easy to set up through Create and will collect data for you in the background without having to be actively managed.

 

Hire a PA

All of the above tasks can help you to make more of an impact in less time with your marketing, but running a business is, by its very nature, a time consuming endeavour. It’s perfectly natural to have a mountain of tasks and your attention pulled everywhere. This then makes it difficult to stay consistent and form a routine that works for you.

Sometimes, a helping hand can make all the difference. You don’t even need to employ someone full or part time. You can find Personal Assistants online who specialise in certain areas and would be happy to lighten your workload. 

A Personal Assistant can help you manage your emails and correspondence with customers or clients, they can help you manage some of your paperwork or help you take care of a number of other tasks that you find yourself dealing with on a regular basis.

If you find you’re overwhelmed with so many different tasks each day, it’s a good thing! It’s a sign of a growing business and progression in your endeavours. It’s worthwhile taking the time to investigate some of the options out there available to you so you can continue to scale your business without fatiguing yourself with jobs that could be outsourced.

 

Wrapping Up

Time is one of your most valuable assets, so in summary, here are some of the ways you can free up space in your schedule for marketing while still making the most impact:

• Define a Target Audience - Decide where your marketing focus would be best placed so you can make the most impact, and save time trying to market to everyone else.

• Marketing Funnels - Build a framework for your marketing that you can depend on and that helps dictate your strategy so you can dedicate your time to a system that works.

• Content Curation - Not every piece of content needs to be completely original. Find other great pieces of writing in your industry and celebrate them with your audience.

• Sales Channels - Create product listings that you don’t have to worry about managing across multiple platforms and increase your exposure to shoppers on their platforms.

• Affiliates & Referrals - Start leveraging the networks of other content writers and your customers. They can drive a lot of traffic to your site for a commission you decide.

• Automate Emails - Emails can take up a huge portion of your day if left unchecked. Find where you can automate responses and build templates for common threads.

• Social Schedulers - Allocate a portion of time at the start of the week to schedule your posts. This helps you stay consistent and focus on other tasks for the rest of the week.

• Reframe Your Existing Content - Find new angles to promote your existing content. Use your key points from your writing to create new posts you haven’t shared before.

• Pixel Campaigns - Create a highly targeted campaign and once it’s running, you only need to consider how to optimise it to grow the traffic the campaign brings.

• Hire a PA - A PA can help you manage the smaller tasks in your schedule that take up a lot of time. If the time has come to bring on an extra set of hands, celebrate your growth!
  
  

We hope you found these tips useful. Let us know if you are going to start implementing any of these ideas in your working week. Do you have any tips of your own that you would want to add to this list? Let us know in the comments below as we’d love to hear from you!