How to Keep Your Marketing Rolling While Overwhelmed
Lately, business has been good for us. Write on Time Solutions, a full service writing company, is juggling multiple clients and working diligently for them, by attending meetings and managing projects. In addition, we do all the other necessary busy work of a small company such as, work with our accountant to track invoices, administer health insurance, and complete piles of business paperwork.
The Trouble
Unfortunately, I feel like we are on an old Spanish galleon loaded with treasure navigating to our destination constantly beleaguered by storms and ship repairs. We have a marketing plan so we know what we need to accomplish. However, we too become distracted (clients and paperwork) which delays us from working on our plan.
We know what we should do but life, illness, emergencies, and our clients’ needs seem to consume our time. We planned to go to a local business expo to pass out cards but didn’t make it for various reasons. We know we need to write marketing letters to send to potential clients so that we continue to get new clients but can’t find the time to finish them. What’s the solution?
The Solution
While checking my email, a post caught my eye called How to Eliminate Marketing Overwhelm on Sydni Craig-Hart’s blog Smart & Simple Marketing. This article helped lessen my panic (see step 1 in her post) and also reminded me of something I learned long ago. To make a big task easier to complete, break it in to small steps and then schedule time to work on each one regularly.
Here’s my idea to get us back to implementing our marketing plan:
Problem: Melody and I try to meet regularly to discuss business strategies and assign tasks that we want to accomplish to expand our company. Lately, we have not been meeting consistently.
My Solution: We need to get back to meeting regularly and working on our tasks. The peer pressure motivates us to complete our work and the praise we give each other for completing tasks encourages us to do more.
Problem: Tasks like performing client research is time-consuming but must be done to build a potential client list.
My Solution: We can hire someone to take over smaller tasks to get the big pieces of our plan done.
Problem: Motivating yourself to accomplish one more task during the business day is tough.
My Solution: As Syndi recommended, I have blocked out time to start working on our plan. I have already completed one task on our list–writing more blog articles!
Have any of you business owners run into this problem. Please let me know is you have and if or how you solved this problem.