With shorter days and routines picking up pace, we feel the transformation from the casual and carefree cadence of summer days to the discipline of the school year. As we turn the calendar to September, the phone starts to ring with business owners ready to ramp up and buckle down. ‘Tis the season for structure.
Unlike summer, when lazy days are relished, once Labor Day has passed, there is a greater focus on the weeks and months ahead. Year-end sales goals loom, perhaps accompanied by angst and some guilt for not keeping commitments to our own business development. For retail businesses selling to consumers, the stakes are even higher with only eight weeks remaining before the onset of the holiday shopping season.
While most business owners recognize that marketing should be a sustained effort — the Small Business Administration recommends spending seven to eight percent of annual gross revenues on marketing — without sustainable processes, marketing can the first priority to fall by the wayside. And while sales may not show the effects immediately, your success can tumble as quickly as a house of cards.
Ready. Set. Structure.
There’s no time like the present to put some processes in place. Systematic, repeatable processes streamline your marketing efforts and act as enablers to help you maintain marketing momentum. Rather than recreating the wheel each time you publish a press release, for example, you’ll simply follow your documented process to socialize it far and wide.
Embrace these four cadence enablers
Transform your marketing from a house of cards to a solid foundation with these four cadence enablers.
Stop reinventing the wheel
Just because a task seems simple doesn’t mean we’ll remember how to do it the next time. Invest time to detail the steps for activities that you perform repeatedly. These process documents streamline future efforts and save mental energy for new learning and strategic thinking. Even better, they serve as a quality control department, providing a systematic way to help recall steps, sequence and details — whether you do the work or defer to others.
Honor an editorial calendar
Because content inspiration often occurs at inopportune times — while driving, in the shower, or in the elevator en route to an important meeting — and inexplicably, not just prior to deadline, we need a way to capture ideas on the fly. Whichever marketing strategies you employ – content marketing, email marketing, blogging, social media, co-marketing, events, presentations or whatever — an editorial calendar makes content creation a more manageable task when it’s time for the fingers to hit the keyboard.
Create evergreen posts
As with social media, blogging and email marketing should be published on a regular schedule. Subscribers to your channels become accustomed to your cadence and expect to see new content at regular intervals. But even for the most disciplined, that cadence can fly out the window when “life happens” … a busy season, a security breach, a hurricane that causes a weeklong power outage … or another curveball is thrown your way. Proactively create some evergreen posts to enable you to maintain control even when your world is — well, a bit out of control.
Embrace a social media dashboard
Does your head spin from trying to keep on top of all of your social media accounts? You’re in good company. Fortunately, there are a plethora of tools which enable you to manage multiple social platforms within a single dashboard. These interfaces include functionality to keep a pulse on the news in your niche with key search terms, highlight engagement by others so you can respond in a timely fashion, and help maintain social cadence on multiple platforms and accounts with embedded scheduling capability. An added benefit? Spending focused time on all of your social media, rather than flitting from one to the next, reduces anxiety and improves efficiency. Check out our post about our preferred platform, Hootsuite.
Is your marketing a house of cards? We can help you build structures and systems to provide an organized and sustainable process for ongoing marketing.
‘Tis the season for structure …
This post was previously published on this site and has been updated for relevance and timeliness.
