It doesn’t matter how much you intend to achieve with your online marketing if you’re not actively producing the work that’s necessary to even give a shot at succeeding.
Hopes and dreams will not help you achieve your goals; you need to develop an online marketing strategy with clearly spelt out, actionable tasks. If not, the risk is that you’ll either lose focus – constantly chatting on Twitter – or wander off topic in your blogging.
Actionable Plans
It doesn’t matter if you’re a solo consultant, a small business or the member of a marketing team, it’s vital that you have a set of tactics to put into practice each day. For example, let’s say you’ve decided that publishing a business blog is a key strategy to increasing your presence in Google (search engine optimziation) and and demonstrating expertise. Deciding on the tactic isn’t enough. You have to follow through, or you’re simply kidding yourself.
Why not try something like this:
Rather than writing when and if motivation and inspiration strikes, schedule your blog topics for a month at a time. I find the best way of doing this is to write 25 titles in a spreadsheet, identifying what aspect of my target audience each post is meant to appeal to. Then when I open up my computer at a designated time, inspiration is prompted by the title or notes that I’ve made for that post.
If your sole job is marketing and communications it’s obviously easier to schedule specific time for content creation like this than if you’re a consultant jugging marketing alongside your actual job. Nevertheless, even a busy small business can create online content efficiently if adequate time is regularly set aside for producing the work.
Twitter & Facebook
Just as it’s important to plan your business blogging to ensure continuity in your marketing, a similar approach can be used for Twitter – one of the most significant online marketing channels to open up in the last few years.
Gini Dietrich recently talked about productivity and described her own day in detail. I noticed how much structure there was in her day for marketing with social media. Getting into a routine of using specific time spots for scheduling tweets (with tools like HootSuite), as well as setting time aside for generally engaging and chatting on Twitter, is a great idea.
If you do do this, though, I’d recommend you keep some kind of track of your results (whether it’s more click-thrus to your website, more meaningful business relationships, leads, follows, etc) to gage whether this kind of activity is delivering results.
The same applies to Facebook Pages. It’s easy to get lost in endless little conversations so a structured approach helps productivity. Try and limit your trips into Facebook to once a day – especially if you’re that solo entrepreneur juggling everything. One tip is to only work with Facebook on your cell phone. That subway journey or cup of coffee whilst you wait for someone to turn up can be an opportune moment to Facebook.
It’s All About Engagement
Ultimately the success of your online marketing comes down to the sustained execution of the right strategy. That doesn’t mean that you can’t tweak your strategy where necessary; it’s just that if you make the commitment to invest in online marketing through exciting channels like blogs, Twitter and Facebook, you need to stick with it. Otherwise you and your business might just head the way of the Dodo.
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