If you’re a small business or a sole trader and you’re dealing with your promotion, you may well be facing the problem of how to manage it at all
So you already have enough work to do with the business itself, the administration around it, and still have time to create social media posts, prepare outreach campaigns, and deal with SEO?
I mean, you can’t do that.
In the version you’re thinking of, maybe you really can’t.
However marketing you need, so what to do?
Rules of Successful Marketing
ease + meaningfulness + persistence = success
This equation has made marketing work for me and will make it work for you. However, it’s important to keep all three of its components in mind. Your promotion
- must be easy
- must make sense
- must keep doing it for the long term
If any part of this mix is missing, the chances of success drop exponentially.
Good marketing for a small business is like brushing your teeth. This is a mental model that will help you in thinking about promotion.Good marketing is like brushing your teeth
You don’t have to think about brushing your teeth, it has a set time and you know what results it will bring.With marketing, you have to have a similar thing.
- Knowing when you’re going to pursue it,
- What activities this “dedication” will consist of,
- and have an idea of the results that these efforts can produce.
Marketing needs to be a routine first and foremost, that’s the most important part of the whole story.
But how do you make marketing a routine when you already have a work schedule bursting at the seams?
1. Document, don’t create
This advice from content creator and walking empire Gary Vee may sound trite, but it’s not.A lot of people struggle to create content for marketing, which costs a lot:
- effort,
- time,
- resources.
Creating content is definitely not easy, and anything that isn’t easy is also much harder to sustain long-term.But if you change your approach and document instead of create, you will get rid of the maximum friction and the whole process will be greatly simplified.
You won’t have to worry about what to create or originality, since no one else is you.
Documenting instead of creating is the first trick to making marketing a routine.
What can documentary content look like in practice?
- Create an article, video or podcast to show and describe what you are doing or have done in a given period
- You engage others in documenting and collect customer reviews (references), which you then share with fans in marketing channels
- Choose a channel (blog, email, social…) where you’ll be available on a regular basis and people can just ask you about what they’re interested in
There are a plethora of options, and even if you’re not an extrovert, there are plenty to choose from.
The link to all the options is that you describe instead of invent. Which is orders of magnitude easier.
I’m very aware of this in myself. To write a concept article like this I would rate the difficulty as 80/100, while to write how I managed to get into the top 3 in Google for a keyword I would rate as 30/100.
Since I’ve already gotten there, I’ll just sit down and write this up as a report on the trip I was on yesterday. The creative challenge is practically 0.
And that’s definitely appreciated in busy days and weeks.
And if you’re skeptical, I recommend giving documentary content a try. Compared to traditional content creation, it’s much easier and the results are often the same or better.
2. Start lightly
Burning like paper is not an art in the marketing world. In fact, it’s easy to do, as this environment invites it. To start with, however, post scheduling tools on many social networks are at once more of a siren call than a helpful crutch.Start simple.
You will be on your own for most of the marketing. Therefore, you will choose only one channel of communication to use and focus on.
You can add another once you have mastered one.
The key is to choose the channel that you suspect you’ll enjoy the most, even if it’s not the most effective.
If you like to write, write articles or a newsletter and feel free to ignore the advice of consultants who say that anyone who isn’t on TikTok is as good as gone.
On the other hand, if you like talking on camera and making videos, ignore people like me who adore newsletters and instead make videos on YouTube or Instagram.
If you enjoy it, the chances of you sticking with it are much higher, and that quietly trumps the fact that it’s not a trending channel.
Personal experience
I like to write. That’s why I decided to base the entire promotion of this site on blog, which many people consider a dead format…
However, as you can see in the image from the search console:
It’s not a dead format. And while the numbers aren’t overwhelming so far, I believe that thanks to the teeth-clearing marketing approach, the chart will crank up even more in the future), we’ll see).Promotion channels are like juggling balls
Once you’ve got one channel perfectly mastered, you can think about the next one. It’s like juggling, with each additional promotional channel (SEO, social network, YouTube, podcast, etc…) being another ball.And you only want to add another ball when you’re confident with the balls you already have in the air.
Personally, I’ve decided to focus primarily on articles. Once I have over 100 of them on the blog, I’ll add LinkedIn, where I can use only those articles that have proven themselves. From the articles that prove themselves on the blog and LinkedIn, I will then select the ones suitable for video processing and create YouTube videos.
That will be all.
I’m not even saying this because of specific social networks or because I want you to start a blog. Rather, I wanted to illustrate that you don’t need to be everywhere right away, and once you’ve mastered one channel of promotion, adding others will be orders of magnitude easier.
3. Create a routine and be uncompromising
Once you know what and how you might document and what marketing channel to use, here comes perhaps the most important part.Make it a routine.
But let it be:
- one post per day to the network you have chosen,
- weekly newsletter,
- or a monthly case study…
It needs to be regular. With clear time requirement.
The power of marketing teeth cleaning lies primarily in the stacked interest and the fact that it is difficult to commit to long term and ongoing marketing.
That’s why many companies don’t manage it, and offer you a huge competitive advantage, which is simply that you will manage it…
Regularity > excellence.
Despite what various experts will tell you.
Be uncompromising. Like you’re going to start with the gym:
- make a plan,
- make time to dedicate to it,
- dedicate yourself to it and if you sometimes don’t stick to the schedule, make up for it right away.
Results will come.
And the extent and earliness of them may well surprise you).
What is my routine?
Personally, I use Notion (let me know in the comments if you’d like me to send you a template), where I generate a 5-point checklist every Friday.
I’ll check off what I’ve already done during the week and finish the rest of the points. It won’t take more than 30 minutes. Usually within 10.
The goal is to make sure that I still have something going in the right direction and still be able to make it through the busy weeks.
The specific points will be different for different businesses.
Create a routine that you know you can manage and that makes sense to you. But above all, create one.If you take nothing else away from the whole article, take this away.
Word in conclusion
Slovak author and economist Juraj Karpiš says he doesn’t even try to add habits and routines to his life that he already knows in advance he won’t be able to maintain for the rest of his life.
He is well aware of the power of compounding interest and the unsustainability of complex things.
And you want to be aware of this in your marketing efforts.
That’s why it makes a lot of sense to me to think of marketing like brushing your teeth.
Besides meaning, though, it also gives me results. If you’re interested, please try it out and then let me know what results you got using this method).
Thank you for reading this far and
let me know in the comments how you’re doing with marketing in your business right now?
