How to make the most of your marketing time

Many small businesses and social enterprises we speak to face a never ending balancing act when it comes to the time they spend running their business and the time they spend marketing their business. And it’s not hard to see why — you need to actually have a business in order to be able to market it, but you need to market it in order to get clients/customers to give you a business. Add to that that digital marketing these days, particularly social media, is a rabbit hole that can become a full time occupation if you let it. So how can you market your business on social media, while still having time to actually run your business? Here’s our five top tips: 

Have a rough schedule in place

Decide which days of the week you’re going to post, snd have an idea of what type of post you plan to do on those days. So for example, you might decide that on Mondays you’ll share something you’re working on that week, on Wednesdays you’ll share a top tip or an excerpt from a blog post, and on Saturdays you’ll share something about your products or services. This means your content is not so structured it becomes rigid, but takes away the last minute panic of ‘oh no, I haven’t posted for ten days, but what on earth should I say?’

Set specific goals and time limits

We need to schedule time to actually engage on social media, not just post our own stuff. This means liking and commenting on other people’s posts. This can be a black hole for time if you end up just aimlessly scrolling through your feed. Instead, set a time limit fit yourself, say 15 minutes, and make it a goal to like at least 20 posts, comment on at least 3, and share at least one. 

Reuse your content

Do you also create blog posts? Send out newsletters? Get into a habit of sharing snippets on social media. You can even copy a few sentences from your website occasionally. Don’t worry about being too repetitive — most businesses make the opposite mistake and don’t post basic information about themselves enough. Bear in mind that there’s a lot of posts on social media, so what we say is unlikely to make much of an impression unless we occasionally say it again, that only a handful of our followers will see every post we do, and that we need to repeat things every so often for new followers. This also applies to using the same content in posts across different channels — usually our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram audiences are different, so we can make a few alterations to the same post and use it multiple times. 

Save notes and images for future posts 

I have a file for future social media posts, and it works brilliantly, especially if I have a day where I really am stuck on what to post — I just go to my file and the idea is there. There’s a few ways to achieve this. When out and about, try to remember to take the occasional snap for social media, likewise if you’re at a loose end, in a waiting room perhaps, amuse yourself by writing a few social media captions. You can also make notes of things that happen to remind you to share them later, and make use of your social media platforms’ bookmark functions to save things you can share at a later date. 

Have a destination in mind 

We don’t want to be putting loads of effort into our social media marketing only for it to end there. To be successful, we need to achieve more than eyes on our posts. What do you want your audience to do as a result of seeing what you’ve published? Is it follow you, go to your website, visit your premises, sign up to your newsletter? Decide what goal works best for your business and gently guide your audience towards it by including calls to action in your content. This could be as simple as ‘now available in my shop’ or ‘I’d love to help you with this’ or ‘more information in my next newsletter/latest blog post’. Just let them know what to do or where to go next! 

I hope these tips help you to make the most of your time on social media, and also get the best results for that time. If after trying them for a bit you’re still struggling, you might need to look at getting some help. If that’s the case for you, feel free to get in touch.