Overstuffed cupboards? Drawers that won’t close? A garage that you are SCARED to enter? Before Marie Kondo came along with her cute cardigans and convincing smile, who knew that purging these areas of your life could have a dramatic effect on your stress levels and overall happiness?
To be honest. I had it all backwards. So, for example, I assumed my wardrobe was too full BECAUSE I was stressed – in other words my daily life was making me too busy to spend time clutter-busting. Little did I know, it’s the other way around. Too many items in each ‘category’ is, in fact, a major stress contributor!
I’ve now realised, it’s the same with marketing. The less you do, the fewer things you have to keep on the boil and the more time, skill and/or budget you can apply to each one, and the better and more effective it will be.
We’ve mentioned refining marketing activities down so many times that it’s becoming a mantra.
Today I want to share three things you can do to give your marketing efforts a lighter touch, without reducing the effectiveness of your endeavours and your overall strategy.
1. Analyse where your best business leads come from, and double down in those areas.
Take some time to review all of the new business that has come in over the last six months. Where possible find out and make a note of how each new client came to know about your business. (Note: if you can’t do this because you don’t have the data, instead use your energy right now to set up the systems that will allow you to do this in the future.)
Whichever method of marketing is bringing you the most good clients, do more of it. If three activities have generated 80% of your revenue, bin the others and focus on those three. See if it has a tangible effect on your business.
Remember that there is a difference between the activities that generate leads, the activities that generate the leads that convert into clients and the activities that generate the clients who turn into repeat buyers. If you can find out, specifically, which of the marketing tasks you are undertaking are the ones that bring in repeat, high revenue generating buyers, you have suddenly got some priceless information to work with.
For example, you might be running Facebook adverts, that are generating lots of warm leads, but if these particular leads don’t ever become clients, or the clients that are generated from this activity are your low spenders, OR these particular clients are the biggest pains in the neck of your entire client base, using up hours of your precious service delivery time for little reward! You may have used up your hard-earned marketing budget to winkle out low profit clients.
2. Repurpose
Every time you are creating a piece of marketing content, take the time to answer this question: “How can I reuse this?”
You’ll save hours of work if, instead of starting from scratch every time you need something, you repurpose something you already own.
For example, recommendations obtained via LinkedIn can be turned into graphics for use on Facebook, copied into your website, added to the bottom of emails, or amalgamated into one smartly laid out pdf for you to use as a sales tool.
We rely on past blog posts as the basis for presentation content. If we have a speaking gig coming up, we harvest information from one of our past articles to form the structure of the presentation, this saves hours and a lot of head scratching.
3. Partner up
Talk to your network. There may be other business owners, that you already know, who are trying to reach the same audience that you are. Ask them about their marketing strategies and see if you can join forces. Joint Facebook lives, video interviews, podcast recordings, blog contributions, guest posts etc, could be promoted to both of your databases, potentially doubling up the eyeballs on your content without additional work.
Applying one or two of these reduction techniques could help to ‘spark joy’ in your marketing efforts. It’ll definitely make things easier.
At The Marketing Architect, it’s our mission to make marketing easier. Easier to do and easier to understand.
If this has helped you to find an easier way to do something, why not share it with a business pal or sign up to receive our content in your email inbox, once a week on Wednesday afternoon? That way you won’t ever miss an issue.
