Sane On-line Marketing Management

Seeking Balance
Last week, I acknowledged that sometimes maintaining your on-line presence can become overwhelming. Managing your on-line presence all day, every day, is fine if marketing is your ONLY job, but if you’re a small business owner and it’s just one of the many hats you wear, then you can’t allow it to consume you. Obviously, if you’re consumed with marketing tasks, you won’t have time to deliver your product or service to your customers. So, like so many things in life, it’s about finding that manageable balance.

Structure Provides Balance
Although difficult to implement, the key to sanity in this area is structure.

Define Your “To Dos”
Define all the marketing tasks that you want and need to do. Examples might include:

• Publish a blog post every _______ (day, week, month)
• Write content for Facebook posts
• Update website
• Etc.

Group Tasks Logically
Instead of doing the same task every day, many times it is more efficient to group similar tasks.

For example: you may want to write several blog posts in one day and publish those posts over a period of time. Maybe you want to write all the blogs for a week or a month (depending on your blogging frequency) at one time. By grouping this activity, you will be more efficient in your writing effort and it will also free up time to spend  on other business tasks the rest of the week/month.

Schedule Tasks
Some marketing tasks need to be completed daily (or M-F).

For example: You should check Facebook and other sites that have the potential for customer feedback daily, so you can respond timely to any comments from customers. Other social media engagement tasks should be a combination of spur of the moment responses and scheduled value-added content development and dissemination.

Limit the Rabbit Hole
It’s important to stay apprised of trends and current events by reading content written by others, but you should limit this activity each day or week. Determine the amount of time you have available for this activity and stick to that duration. With so many perspectives written on a certain topic, it’s easy to link to story after story to get all the details. Resist the urge to delve too deep and you will save yourself a lot of time.