Building A Marketing Strategy For Time-Strapped Entrepreneurs

Building a marketing strategy is an ongoing process that requires a lot of thought and effort. In order to create a successful marketing plan, it's important to consider a variety of factors, from your target audience and messaging to your tactics and measurement framework.

But when there are 1,000 things going on in your business, where do you even start with marketing? How do you know what to focus on? It’s easy to get swept up in a tick box exercise and a “throw something on our socials and that will do” mentality. Although this will make your business seem “alive” and “current” (We’ve all seen those pages were the last post was published 7 months ago with a like from the founder and their mum), that effort won’t exactly contribute to your business’s success.

So here are some steps to follow for time-strapped entrepreneurs who are looking to build a low-touch marketing strategy:

1. Start with your target audience: It’s an effort that will pay off

One key consideration when developing a marketing plan is your target audience. Who are the people you want to reach with your message, and what are their interests and needs? By understanding your audience, you can create a plan for reaching them through the channels they prefer, whether that's social media, email marketing, or other methods.

The benefit of plotting out your target audience when you’re strapped for time, is that you’ll be able to discover the main priority for your target audience: Maybe you’ll discover that the main channel they use is Instagram, and therefore there’s no point having a presence on LinkedIn (for now).

It’ll also give you insight into developing your product or service: If you had to focus on building one thing for your target audience, what would be the most useful for them?

If you’re looking to map out your target audience, you can access our persona template which gives you a handy structure to follow.

2. What are your goals when it comes to your marketing? And are they realistic?

This one’s a biggie, but often overlooked. When developing your plan (marketing or for the whole business) it’s important to think about the specific and measurable goals you want to achieve. For example, maybe your goal is to increase traffic to your website? In which case, any posts you publish online should have clear links that push back to your website. Or maybe it’s to form deeper relationships with your target audience? In which case, you might decide to focus on creating a newsletter where you can speak directly to your audience on a weekly basis.

By setting your goals, you’ll be able to understand what your priority is for your marketing activity, and de-prioritise the rest that will take you more time.

3. Think about what you’re good at and what will take you less time to do

When it comes to marketing tactics, there are a variety of options to consider: Content marketing, email campaigns, SEO, PR, advertising, events… the key is to not only to identify the tactics that are the most effective for your target audience and business goals, but to think about what you’re actually good at and will be able to produce at a high enough standard.

For example, maybe you’re a great writer, but when it comes to graphic design… you’re just not going to do your brand any justice. Maybe think about marketing activities that involve more writing such as email newsletters and blogs rather than socials where you run the risk of making your business look unprofessional (or spend too much time trying to get something right)

At the end of the day, it’s all about consistency

It's important to remember that building a marketing strategy is an ongoing process. It’s unlikely that a strategy is going to pay off within one month; It could be consistently posting on social channels at least twice a week over a year where you may start to see your following go up, or 6 months of sending email newsletters where your audience starts to share the content with their colleagues. The most important thing you can do if you’re time-strapped is choose a strategy and consistently stick to it for 6 months or so, keeping a close eye on the results and seeing how you could improve.

Remember if you’re really time strapped, The Marketing Plot offers a flexible subscription for entrepreneurs that gives them access to an outsourced Head of Marketing. Check it out!

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