How much do you schedule your business activities, especially marketing? Working with clients over the years, I’ve seen the impact a schedule — or lack thereof — can have. The good news is that when you find a schedule that works for you, it can make a big difference in being productive, getting your marketing done regularly, and feeling on top of things.
Does it seem like there are always too many things to do to market your business? It’s easy to get overwhelmed by marketing ideas, plans, and tasks, especially when many of them involve learning new skills. And then people are always telling you about something else to do. But you’re only one person.
Have you ever found yourself knowing exactly what you need to do about marketing your business… and then not doing it? You are not alone. Many self-employed professionals and creatives find that the hardest part of marketing isn’t figuring out what to do. What’s hard is actually doing it.
When you look at your marketing to-do list, do many of the items on it look all too familiar? Have entries like “call Dolores Sanchez” and “follow up with Wallingford Corp.” been copied from a previous week? Putting off unappealing tasks may be human nature, but for a self-employed professional, procrastination can be deadly.
Delays in contacting a prospect can lose the business to the competition. Failing to get the word out about an upcoming event may forfeit dozens of opportunities. When prospects don’t hear from you for a while, they forget you exist. Wasted marketing time can never be recovered. By the time you realize you might not make your sales goals for the month, quarter, or year, it may already be too late.
What’s your way to get things done? Do you feel you’re an achiever who enjoys checking off boxes? Or do you see yourself as more laid back, getting to things whenever you can? Whatever your style, the truth is, if you’re in business for yourself, you need to get things done, and chances are, no one else will jump in to save the day. Which begs the question: how do you do things most easily and in a way best suited to you?
What’s your style?
In working with clients, I see two typical categories of doers: 1) those who love making a list and working through it, some going so far as to draw their own little check boxes next to each to-do item in a notebook, or 2) those who take a looser approach, writing items on the backs of envelopes, on their hand, or random sticky notes. Both approaches have their merits.
It happens to the best of us. We have brilliant plans for marketing our business, but the rest of life keeps getting in the way. We know we won’t succeed if we don’t spend time on marketing, but somehow days and weeks slip by, and our marketing to-do list gets longer instead of shorter.
Over the past few months, I’ve been writing and thinking quite a bit about making post-pandemic changes in your business as a self-employed professional. First there was Reinventing Your Business to Survive a Pandemic…
Now that the world’s opening up, and you’re creating a “new normal” for your work, chances are you’ve got a vision that’s forming, one you’d like to bring to life. Which may leave you wondering… how are you supposed to do that, exactly?
As business owners, we’re all looking at the way we did business before the pandemic and asking if we really want to go back to the way it was.
I know I don’t, and neither do the clients and colleagues I’m speaking to.
For well over a year, we self-employed professionals have largely been wrapped in a home-based cocoon. Yes, many of us have continued to serve clients, sometimes even in person. But we’ve also spent a whole lot of time on Zoom. An entire category of business marketing has been absent…
