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Over the years I've worked with 1,000's of companies and I've come to realize something that is pretty mind blowing to me. When I start to work with these businesses and personal websites, I find out that many of them weren't doing any sort of marketing for themselves. They simply relied on word of mouth and foot traffic to their stores in order to make a sale, which isn't very reliable if you want to stay on top of your competition. I've even worked with plenty of websites in the freelancing, writing, marketing, blogging, and web design industries but a lot of them aren't doing anything for themselves.
Now, this could be a good thing for service providers because they can just jump and and take over the marketing for these companies, but there's something that stops them. The companies I talked with didn't want anyone to work on their marketing, until I approached them. The only reason I got them to crack was because I showed them what they had wrong and what their competitors had right, which opened their wallets. I'm not here to talk about that, I'm here to talk about how these companies could have been doing their own marketing with just 15 minutes a day invested into it.
I read up on some statistics and found out that roughly 1 in 5 business and website owners have no plan to do any sort of online marketing. They set up their businesses and do what they know in order to capture a sale, but that's all. They don't think about running any sort of PPC campaign, banner advertising campaign, social media campaigns, etc.
In this discussion I'll be going over a few things you can focus on to do your marketing in just 15 minutes a day.
Get to Brainstorming
Before you can do anything right, you need to figure out what you can actually do. You need to brainstorm for a while, probably a few hours, then come back the next day and go over your notes. Now I'm sure some of you are saying "You said I could do my marketing in just 15 minutes! Why am I brainstorming for a few hours!" and that's because you aren't marketing just yet... you're brainstorming to make the marketing easier lol.
You need to figure out what you're trying to do before you set out and do anything. Are you trying to capture leads, establish that you're the main authority in your industry, or get more sales through your website? Each of these takes a different plan of attack and you can't do that correctly if you aren't sure what you're going for.
You can begin with posting to your blog then sharing it on social media. You can then go to niche related blogs and forums to comment and try to drop a link back to your posts or homepage in order to build up your authority. This will look great when Google finds your links, and they will evaluate you as more of an authority than you already are. This is just a quick example of what you can do, but there are many other methods of getting sales, leads, more clients, subscribers, etc.
If you aren't brainstorming in order to have the best plan of attack, you won't have a focus and you will be all over the place in terms of marketing.
Focus on one marketing method and stick with it
When you're starting off, you don't need to implement 10 different methods in order to generate a lead, capture a sale, obtain traffic, etc. You need to focus on one method and build it up as much as possible in order to see the best outcome. This can be something such as building up your LinkedIn profile and staying on that platform to do your marketing. Another example of this would be to get on Quora and build up your profile over there in order to send plenty of traffic over to your website.
The more you work on a single method, the more it will benefit you in the long run. If you work on all of your social platforms and try to build then at the same time, you will be spreading yourself too thin and you will eventually think that none of your marketing is doing what it's suppose to. What you're not seeing is that the marketing is working, you're just not doing enough of it on specific platforms to see it work as well as it could.
After you build up your profiles or have a good marketing game plan for a specific method, you can move on to a different one. Think of this as a rinse and repeat method, you perfect one marketing method and move onto another. Now, you can't ignore the other methods you perfected, but you don't have to work on them as much to see great results from them.
Get in the habit of marketing
It's much easier to not market your website or business than it is to do it effectively. It's not a difficult thing to fit a little 15 minute window into your day for just marketing your website or business. It's best to do this at the same time everyday and make it a habit. A lot of people like to do this at the beginning of the day, right before or after lunch, or right before they leave the office for the day. This way it becomes a regular routine and they know exactly when they're going to be doing it.
Making your marketing as easy as possible is what you'll need to do in the beginning so you don't get burned out too quick. You will get overwhelmed if you're doing too much, so you need to focus on the little things first and build on top of that over time. You can start by posting to your social media accounts daily for 15 minutes and boost it up over time to post on niche related blogs.
All it takes is 15 minutes of posting, whether it's to social media accounts or blogs or even some forums you're frequently on.
Set goals and reward your actions
If you're just starting out, you'll need to set up a lot of small goals. You will need to have small goals in order to boost your moral when you hit them. These small goals can be something like this:
One shouldn't rely solely on word of mouth because in any business which involves selling products and or services marketing is always the name of the game because the purpose is to sell and how can you sell without marketing right? Well logically speaking, one could get some sales but why be contented on that if you could sell a lot more right?
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Even in the olden days when there was no internet yet, word of mouth was potent in spreading the news about a product or business but it’s not always effective because it depends largely on the kind of customers that you have. Marketing or advertising the product or business is still the most effective because that gives you assurance that your business will be known by your prospects. There is no business if there is no marketing.
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Y es, I like the concept of rewarding ourselves. How often in business or anywhere else really do we do that? I think it is something very helpful and can keep us motivated and on track. I think it should be done every day honestly.
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Setting up small goals is a great way of motivating yourself to keep on improving because at least you have some sort of benchmark for progress which you can see immediately. Focusing on only 1 big goal may worry you and don't give you a real sense of how your company is doing because you don't see results, but only 'failures' from not reaching your big goal when in fact, you are slowly climbing up to reach that goal.
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I do agree on setting marketing goals by having a daily things to do list. Having this would teach you to do marketing regularly and once you've attained regularity then positive results would be realized.
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Brainstorming is one good way to go about your marketing strategy because it's very hard to remember everything at the exact same time that you need to make use of them. But with brainstorming, you would have everything well covered, thereby making sure that you are not leaving any stone unturned in your marketing project.
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I agree that focusing on one marketing method can bring you better results than using several methods. But, of course, the marketing method you are using should be tested for effectiveness. Using only one method can also make you feel convenient since you are used to it already and you can easily detect if something is wrong or if you need to change to another method that you think is more effective.
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Some individuals and companies are still averse to adopt the concept of aggressively marketing there work to maximize their profits. they do believe that the traditional methods of marketing are enough to attract traffic and sustain their business. if however, they are able to come out of this mindset and accept the change and adapt themselves accordingly they will be able to see a considerable growth in their profits in the long run
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pawan2002
Great strategies Razzy. Really like your way of explaining. You are right every business should contemplate about their marketing strategy.
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