Are You REALLY Marketing Enough?

The first challenge for my clients in our Weekly Marketing Mastermind Group Coaching is to realize what they’re really getting done in terms of their small business marketing. Action matters, not plans. Most people underestimate what they can accomplish in the long term and overestimate what they can do in the short term. Here are two questions to get you started:

• How much time do you spend on marketing in your business, on average, every day?
• How much time do you think your business needs you to spend on marketing every day?

A Tiny Marketing Action Has Big Impact Over Time

Over time, taking a very small marketing action consistently will add up. Creating the habit of taking action on your marketing every day is of huge benefit to growing your business.

Think of water wearing away rock – a drip system of tiny actions can add hugely to your marketing impact over time.

3 Quick Marketing Actions That Take Under Ten Minutes

Ok, so you have only ten minutes to market today. Do one of these:

Marketing Action: Call two clients

Don’t try to sell anything. Just make contact. Find out how they’re doing. Feel you need a reason to call?

• Just say Hi
• Ask for a testimonial
• Ask if they’re going to a business event
• Invite them for coffee or lunch
• Offer a referral
• Request feedback
• Ask for advice
• Encourage them to read a helpful article (on your blog? or mine!)
• Just touch base, and thank them for being a client
• Congratulate them on a new product, customer, or initiative
• Make a suggestion
• Mention an item of possible interest
• (something even more brilliant you just thought of)

Marketing Action: Outline a Blog Post

I know, you only have ten minutes. Draft an outline of a post and save it as a Draft. Don’t worry about actually writing it today. Start with:

• First of all – who are you writing this post  for?
• What’s the topic?
• What are 2-3 points you want to mention?
• What’s in it for them? So what? Benefits, not features!
• What’s your STORY around the topic?
• What’s the take away?
• What’s the call to action?

If you have time, you can start writing the post, but feel free to stop after ten minutes if something more urgent demands it.

Marketing Action: Check Your Website Traffic

Check your website analytics. What search terms are bringing you traffic? Where is the rest coming from? If you have no clue what I’m talking about, go sign up for Google Analytics in your 10 minutes. You’ll need a Gmail account. If you don’t have one yet, click to create a gmail account.

Once your gmail account is created, you can go to Google Analytics. It’s a free service, but you’ll have to log in with your Google Account and associate (connect) it to your website. Basically, you have to “claim ownership” of your website by putting some code in it, or FTPing a file to it the first time you use it. If you need some help with these activities, schedule your free introductory coaching call and I’ll walk you through it while we get to know each other. If you’ve just set up your Google Analytics, you won’t be able to see statistics for a few days. Google needs some time to gather them.

Assuming you’ve set up your account previously, when you’re in Google Analytics, click on View Report. Your Dashboard will show you your website traffic for the last month. The Map Overlay (middle right) shows you where the majority of your traffic originates from. The Traffic Sources overview (bottom left) is very important. You can click on View Report to drill into further detail. You’ll be able to see the breakdown of your three main types of traffic:

• Direct traffic: They typed in your webpage address or used a bookmark to come directly to your page.
• Referring Sites: These are links from other sites that refer to you, other than search engines. Notice in particular the traffic you’re getting from Facebook, Twitter, and other social media activities you’ve been involved in. You can keep using View Report to drill down for more detail.
• Search Engines: The traffic that you get from search engines, and which ones are sending visitors to you.

Also notice the keywords that are bringing you search engine traffic. Could you write another blog post to optimize further for those keywords?

Make sure you also glance at the site usage statistics. Besides telling you how many visitors you had, you’ll see how many left immediately (Bounce Rate), what the average time on your site was (bigger is better!), how many of the overall visits were new visits, and the average number of pages viewed. All of this is accurate and useful information to tell you how your website is performing.

Take a Moment to Imagine

What would happen for your business if you really do (at least) one marketing action every working day this year? Now, imagine if you gave your business the time it really deserved for marketing. Some people say that for a new business, up to 60% of the business owner’s time should be spent marketing. What do you think? Please let me know in the comments, and subscribe so that you won’t miss more quick marketing actions next week!

See also: Consistent Marketing Mathematics

image credit: Matthew High

About the author

Karilee

I'm a big fan of entrepreneurship. Most of my learning, teaching and business is focused on effectively creating "freedom businesses" that allow you to focus on your strengths, and bring what you're really good at to the world - profitably. My clients are looking for more of the right customers - and I show them how to make that happen. I help them develop their web presence through their website, SEO, social media and other marketing tactics.