We hear variations of this sentence a lot: “I had meant to do my social media updates, but the week was mad busy and I never got the chance.”
We’ll admit, it’s not always from clients.
Sometimes it’s one of us saying that sentence.
Look, we know maintaining a presence online—whether it’s through social media, your blog, your website, or your newsletters—is no cake walk.
Before we move on…in case you haven’t heard of a cake walk, and you think we’ve mixed up “piece of cake” with “walk in the park,” a cake walk is when music plays and everyone walks in a circle over paper plates arranged on the floor.
The music stops, and if the plate you landed on has a number on it (flip the plate over to see), you get to take home the cake assigned the same number.
At least, that’s how it happened at the square dances Marci attended as a teenager.
Where were we?
Online marketing. It can be hard stuff.
Often, it gets put low on the priority list, as the thing you’ll squeeze in if and when you get a spare moment.
Deep down inside, we all know that spare moments occur about as frequently as Beyoncé performs with Destiny’s Child (which is to say they pop up and delight us every now and then, but you can’t count on their appearance).
Here’s where things get sticky.
The reason you’re too busy to do your marketing could quite possibly be because you’re not making time to do your marketing.
Let us (cake) walk you through this riddle…
Marketing is the best resource you’ve got to consistently attract your dream customers to your business.
If you’re not consistently attracting your dream customers to your business, you’re probably not making as much money as you’d like to be. Or doing the work you’d like to be doing.
If you’re not regularly engaging in some form of marketing, you’re probably overworking yourself in another area, just to keep the lights on and food in the fridge.
We know this because we’ve been there.
Before we started consistently marketing to our dream customers, we took whatever work came our way. It didn’t matter if it was what we wanted to spend our time doing or not.
We knew we should’ve been regularly updating social media and nurturing an email list, but we would let the paid client work take over, and we would put off, for another week, creating content to advertise the work we would have preferred to be doing.
It was only when we started prioritizing our marketing that we started getting a consistent flow of leads—not just a trickle—to whom we could say, “You’re the exact type of person we love to work with.”
Now we get to do more of what we love (while also keeping the fridge full).
For us, it took designating a “Business Development Day” during the week.
Maybe for you it will take scheduling 30 minutes of social media work every morning…and honoring that slot as actual, uninterruptible work.
No, it probably won’t bring in cash immediately. But over time, every piece of content works together, helping your dream customer get to know, like, and trust you. And eventually buy from you.
Marketing isn’t something you squeeze in around your work; marketing is something you do as part of your work.
Marketing is all about building a relationship with your dream customers.
If that’s something you’re not doing, then your business isn’t growing.
