Business owner and Author of Time Mastery; Banish Time Management Forever, Karen Meager, recently graduated our Marketing Masterplan programme. Every month she’d ticked off her task list, and more! She impressed us so much in how she managed her time around running a business, speaking professionally and having a life. So, we asked her to share her tips on getting it all done. ~ Bryony Thomas
“I haven’t had time” is the biggest excuse around for why us business leaders haven’t done marketing activities. It’s understandable, we get caught up in the day to day running of our business or in customer issues. We all KNOW it’s important for the long term success of our businesses to focus on marketing and yet somehow other things still get in the way. Here are my top time tips to help you make your marketing a healthy lifetime habit:
Plan marketing to fit with your own time chunking style
If you like to get yourself immersed in activities, if you are an ‘in the moment’ person, it is best to organise to do your marketing in big pieces of time so that you get stuck in, a half day or even a whole day rather than in bits and pieces.
However, if you are more in flow when dipping into activities, plan your marketing in small pieces and just do one small thing at a time. People with this preferred way of sorting sometimes don’t get started because it all feels too much. But when they break it down into small 15 or 30 mins chunks they find it’s actually very doable.
This is as much about energy conservation as efficiency as you will do better work and enjoy it more when you organise activities to fit with your own preferences of working.
Be conscious of competing priorities
As a business owner, you will have competing priorities and this is probably the number one reason we don’t spend as much time on marketing as we should. More immediate needs take over from activities that will benefit us in the longer term. This is normal so when it comes to marketing, you need to consciously choose to put it first, not every day, but maybe one day a week. That doesn’t mean you won’t do other things but for that day you are saying to yourself “today, marketing is my top priority”. It helps to focus your mind and, even if you get distracted, you are more likely to return to it.
Let other people know you are unavailable
One of the main problem business leaders have it that they know marketing is important but other people in the business don’t. “By the time I’ve explained to them why I can’t do this today, I might as well have just done it”. Let’s face it, everyone has their own priorities and you can’t expect them to understand yours, so rather than explaining yourself, make yourself unavailable. It’s your business after all, you don’t need to explain yourself. I go to a place where phones are not allowed and tell everyone that if they want me they have to e mail me. I can check those every few hours and decide whether they need my attention today.
Too many businesses don’t do as well as they could because they don’t get their habits right, not because their strategy was wrong. By making small tweaks to your routine you can make marketing something that you just do, rather than something you have to ‘make time for’.
If you found this useful you might like these other posts:
- How long does small business marketing take?
- When should you outsource marketing?
- Why you can’t build a marketing strategy one tactic at a time
- Marketing timing: how to make sure you show up at the right time
© Watertight Marketing Ltd
By Karen Meager – Monkey Puzzle Training and Consulting. Karen is an experienced and accredited NLP Master Trainer working with organisations get the best out of their people and helping individuals to achieve their dreams. Her book, Time Mastery; Banish Time Management Forever, co-authored with John McLachlan comes thoroughly recommended by all of us at Watertight Marketing… as you can see from Bryony’s wee video below!
