time management Archives - Page 3 of 9

Getting Your Must-Do Marketing Items Done Before Year’s End

As the holiday season approaches, it can be overwhelming to think about what needs to be done before the end of the year. For you personally, there are often extra family and social obligations. Adding your business marketing to-dos on top of that can create an even bigger sense of obligation and overwhelm.

Luckily, there’s something you can do about that.

When getting your end-of-year marketing done, try these tips to make your life easier and create space for those things that are most important, personally and professionally.

Four Ways to Measure Your Marketing

by Kristine Carey | Getting Things Done

It’s easy to start a new year thinking, “This year will be different! I’m going to stay on track with my marketing, and really get the word out about my business.” Yet once again, the months fly by and by the time you reach mid-year, you find yourself wondering if what you’ve been doing is working. Are people more aware of your business? Are the places where you’re putting your efforts making a difference? How can you tell if the marketing you’re doing is on track?

Not Reaching Your Marketing Goals? The Time to Act Is Now

by C.J. Hayden | Getting Things Done

If you’re like most self-employed professionals, you started the year with goals, plans, and maybe even dreams, for your business. This was going to be the year you reached ambitious marketing goals, implemented a realistic marketing plan, or expanded your business with a new market or service. And now, you find yourself not on target. The goal’s not met, the plan isn’t in place, or the expansion hasn’t taken off. That’s a pretty normal state of affairs for us self-employed folks. Stuff just gets in the way.

There’s really only one solution to this problem, although it comes in a number of different flavors. Take action. Now.

Advanced Maneuvers: Getting Things Done Beyond the Basics

by Kristine Carey | Getting Things Done

As a service-based professional, you’re likely familiar with marketing basics, yet are you taking advantage of advanced maneuvers beyond those? If you’re not sure what the difference is between the basics and the advanced, keep reading to learn more about the distinction, and why you may want to consider moving beyond the familiar.

Marketing Basics are those things that apply to the foundation of your business, things that help ensure you know who to talk to, and what to offer, and how to keep your business organized. Some of these basics include:

What Stops You from Marketing… and What to Do About It

by C.J. Hayden | Getting Things Done

The number one complaint my clients and students — self-employed professionals — bring me about their marketing is that they aren’t doing enough of it. You would think this would be easy to fix. I could just tell them to spend more time marketing and selling, and that would solve their problem. But like so many other challenges in life, knowing what needs to be done doesn’t necessarily make that thing occur.

Consider losing weight, for example. If it were as simple as being told to eat less or exercise more, we would all be as thin as we wished just by deciding to make it so. Since that doesn’t happen very often; it’s clear we humans need a bit more help.

Why You Shouldn’t Do What the Gurus Do

by C.J. Hayden | Marketing Plans & Strategies

It’s only natural to emulate successful people. You’d like to copy their success, so it seems it would make sense to copy their approach to sales and marketing. But modeling your marketing after the gurus in your field may not get you where they are.

Simply put, the present situation of these highly successful people may be entirely different from your own. Gurus typically have plenty of money to spend, staff to help, a large in-house mailing list, many followers on social media, widespread name recognition, a suite of products and services to offer, and many years of completed work to draw from. If you don’t have all this in your business, trying to copy their marketing and sales approach may be a recipe for failure rather than success.

When Is It Time to Stop Marketing?

by Kristine Carey | Filling the Pipeline

When should a self-employed professional stop marketing his or her business? Here are a few possible scenarios where you might be tempted to put marketing on hold:

o When your pipeline is full.
o When you don’t need or want any more clients.
o When your schedule is so full you don’t know where you’d fit in another client.
o When you have five proposals pending and you’re afraid they’ll all come through.
o When the holidays / vacation / summer are approaching.
o When you’re so busy fulfilling your current client obligations you don’t have the time or bandwidth for marketing.

Stop Reacting and Start Pro-Acting to Market Your Business

by C.J. Hayden | Marketing Mindset

If you’re answering calls, replying to emails and notes, responding to invitations, and receiving referrals and leads, it probably feels like you’re taking a lot of action to market your business. But it may be that a good deal of what you’re engaged in is actually RE-action.

Waiting to hear from the right prospects is nowhere near as productive as proactively taking steps to seek them out. And a stream of incoming communications can take up time and energy, but doesn’t always lead to closed sales.

Consider these suggestions for getting out of reaction mode and becoming more proactive in your marketing.

Make This the Year You Do Things Differently

by C.J. Hayden | Getting Things Done

At the start of every year, I encourage my clients to follow the same practice I do of reviewing the past year before setting intentions for the new one. I find that a thorough review of the previous year can provide important guidance for moving ahead. I make a list of “Successes, Accomplishments, and Breakthroughs” and another of “Failures, Disappointments, and Breakdowns.” After giving myself some time to celebrate my successes, I analyze my failures. Try this process yourself, and see what it provides.

Looking at each of your disappointments over the past year, ask yourself what went wrong in that area, and what you might be able to do differently. Let’s say you didn’t gain enough new clients last year. What’s your take on what went wrong?

Are You Marketing More or Less Than You Think?

by Kristine Carey | Marketing Plans & Strategies

Unless you’re literally hiding under a rock, if you’re in business and have any clients at all, you’re doing something that qualifies as marketing. People tend to fall into two camps: those who are doing more marketing than they realize, and those who are doing less than they think.

Which camp do you fall into?

As an aside, for our purposes we’re defining marketing as getting the word out about your business, it’s services and benefits, to potential customers so that you can have a sales conversation with them and hopefully close the sale. Marketing creates opportunities to have sales conversations.

« Older Entries

Next Entries »

Pin It on Pinterest