Manage Your Marketing Time

 

Sat here after another full on day trying to get our website in order....yep it was tired, missing bits and nothing was finished off...I feel rather ashamed that it was in such a mess. I am reminded of friends I have in various trades who are the same. Builders whose own extensions aren't finished,  gardeners whose gardens are suffering from serious neglect, window cleaners who can't see out of their own windows and on and on. Sometimes you spend so much time on fulfilling your customers' every needs and then sorting more customers that you completely neglect your own "future" business. I have now allocated time every day to get our own house in order and sort our own marketing out. Shame on me!

I should know better, after all I spend a lot of time putting other people's marketing house in order I really should know better.  No excuses!

Time to read another book on time management, or maybe just put everything I should do into practice. It's so easily done and running any business involves discipline, as you know, so I am making sure time is set aside daily to sort our own marketing out! Right back to it......customers always come first!

Groups are more fun

 

Facebook Groups can get you places you didn't know you could get to! Yep definitely a place to go if you want to get to people outside of your friends group and outside the small group of page likers that Facebook actually let you get to is a group.

The best thing is it's free! Even better is that if you pick the right groups you can target the people you want to target. Many groups are set up for a reason, be that to sell things in an are or promote business in an area, maybe even to promote an interest to a group of like minded people.

So why not pick a group and start posting? No point falling foul of the posting police, so check out the rules of the group (many are set up by people who like to say say no to this that and the other) but many allow you to promote your business especially if you can do so without actually selling too obviously.

You might want to promote your business to other businesses locally and there are many groups for that or you might think a larger audience might be nice. Just search for groups, check out the rules, join and post away. Suddenly you are reaching far more people than you used to.

Build an Audience

Perhaps the easiest and definitely the cheapest way to market your business on line is to use social media. In order to make it effective you need to build a network on all the platforms that you choose to use. It is always best to gradually grow your connections and look to build an audience you can engage with and hopefully eventually get some work from.

We can help you build an audience with our training workshops that are designed to show you how to grow your potential market on line.

Social Media for Dinosaurs

For those of us who grew up in a less than digital age, where TVs were still mostly black and white, telephones had round dials and were certainly not mobile, discos and LPs were trendy and petrol was available in 2, 3 or 4 star, the digital age has been quite an eye opener.

In those dark and distant days if you wanted to advertise your products or services you had to place an advert in the local newspaper. Everyone then read the newspaper so you had a good chance of getting in front of an audience. Another great way of getting the word around about your business was to do a good job and get recommended, that will always be the case. In fact that is where social media can now step in and you can use your on line social network and your customers network to promote your business and to get recommended to new potential customers. Without spending money you can gain followers for your business and generate interest in and enquiries for your business via Facebook, Twitter etc.  With millions of users nationally and internationally it is now possible to reach people globally through clever use of these mediums. You can also target potential customers by location, gender and age as well as targeting special interest groups that contain your prospective customers.

As an addition to more traditional methods of advertising social media can be a great tool, to some it is the only way they advertise their services. Surely as business owners we cannot afford to ignore any medium that has so many potential customers on it and that is free to use.

If dinosaurs like me can get to grips with social media, then so can you, whoever you are and whatever your background. 

If you  need a bit of help with you Social Media why not join us for some training to get you sorted: http://www.getters.co.uk/social-media-day.html