Being a business owner doesn’t mean you will be skilled in running every area of your company. One area managers often struggle with is marketing. Marketing is essential for any business. It’s the difference between a brand that is alive and well or one that is dying a slow and painful death. That might sound dramatic, but without the right marketing, your profits will dwindle, and slowly but surely, your business will get knocked out of the market.
Marketing can also become complicated and take up a lot of your time - to the point where it becomes your primary focus and unprofitable. While this is understandable, it’s not where you want your head to be. You need to focus on other areas too and understand how to prioritize marketing goals, perhaps by networking with your community or gathering social proof benefits. That’s why you need to look at ways to make marketing a little more simple and straightforward - and automate where it makes sense for your business. Here are a few suggestions to consider.
If you sell on Amazon, using software for amazon sellers can help you promote brand awareness as well as help you with your business finances. Automating or tracking your workflows with tools like Trello, Honeybook, or Dubsado can also make lighter work of your marketing efforts. We have used all three of those tools. We switched from Dubsado to Honeybook to handle client proposals for the Creative Freedom Incubator and Trello is how we track all the tasks required to launch each episode of Creative Freedom.
If you’re not hiring a professional team to handle your marketing, particularly on your website, you might want to think about using plugins to help with that. We use a plugin to run our quiz, and plugins for email marketing and managing our online courses. All automated and mostly pain-free once they're up and running.
How long a user stays on your site will affect your search ranking. That’s why a number of these plugins do provide a way to grade your writing on the site and ensure it is at the quality you need it to be.
You might also find you can use your plugin to correct the website structure. The structure is important, as it will determine how easily a search engine can crawl across your site. The easier this is, the more likely it will be your site ranks higher in the SERPs. Through a plugin, you can do this all in seconds.
While plugins are useful, you still need to complete a lot of work for them to be effective. If you want to keep your marketing as hands-off as possible, you need to look into automated possibilities. With automatic solutions, you can keep things firing even when you aren’t even at the computer.
There are various forms of automated marketing including Google advertisements. You can research the best automation tools for Google Ads and find the right one for your needs. You should look at various factors including price, capability, and level of management.
When you create a content marketing strategy, think about both what you're creating and when you'll publish it. Templates can help make content creation easier, and it is possible to use software that will distribute that content like clockwork. That’s crucial. If you want to remain in the spotlight, you need to make sure content is delivered regularly, but consistency and frequency are NOT the same.
Automating content delivery (or hiring help to do it for you) takes you and your personal schedule out of the loop. That means things get done even when you're off the clock! We use tools like Later, the Facebook Creator studio and SmarterQueue (FYI: that's a referral link that gives me credit when you sign up.) to make things easier for us and our clients. Find the tools that work for YOU and do what you can as you are able. This isn't about creating MORE work for yourself, but finding ways to make it easier to do the work you're already doing.
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