Time management for marketing
We do a lot of things for our clients – we write great sales copy, direct mail, blog posts, and ebooks, among other things.
But many of our clients say that one of the best things we bring to the table is structure, discipline and time management.
Here are some of the time-management techniques that we, and our clients, have found helpful.
- Measure the return on investment for each marketing activity. If something isn’t “earning its keep,” stop wasting time and money on it. This gives you more time for activities that generate good results.
- Group marketing tasks and tackle them at a specific time each week or month. Many of our clients write blog posts on a particular day of the week, we run reports and have marketing status meetings at a specific time each month.
- Write a series of emails or blog posts in a single sitting, then edit them later. Writing is easier when you’re “on a roll.” If you can produce four at a time, you may be done for the month!
- Limit the time you spend on social media – spend an hour a day while enjoying your coffee and getting up to speed on the day’s news, as an example.
- Limit the amount of time you spend on email – check it two or three times a day, but don’t let it constantly interrupt your other tasks.
- Consolidate meetings. If you can meet once a month rather than once a week (with follow ups and action items by email) do it.
- Work in small groups. A group of three people producing a brochure or video will get it done much faster than a group of five or seven.
Some of the things that ABCI does to help our clients with time management and marketing:
- Automating and managing lead generation and fulfillment, by using your website to collect leads and sending regular emails and postcards to your prospects.
- Structuring your products and services into seasonal and time-oriented offers.
- Creating materials that match the editorial schedules of aviation publications.
- Handling regular, time consuming tasks like keyword research and search engine submissions.
- “Ghost writing” drafts of blog posts, newsletter articles, and white papers.
- Capturing and following up on marketing action items in our Monthly Marketing Reviews.
Although some of our clients have full time marketing staff, ABCI’s economies of scale allow us to perform these tasks in a way that is more professional and less costly than training your current employees and committing their time away from other tasks, or even worse – hiring, and training, new people.
We spend several thousand dollars a year on social media and search engine optimization seminars and books on the latest marketing techniques and technologies. But since we use this knowledge for several clients, we can afford to stay current in a very expensive and rapidly changing field. Our learning curve is short since we know marketing, we know business, and we know aviation!
Marketing should be the LAST thing that you should consider downsizing in a poor economy. Finding new customers is crucial to your cash flow and your sanity.
