How much time should I spend marketing my own small business?
You should spend as much time on marketing as you can handle if you’re looking to increase business and sales. However, as Australian small business owners, it’s so hard to find the time I know! I recommend as a small business spending at least 1 hour a week if you’ve got everything locked down and sorted. If not, allocate 5 hours a week to iron it out bit by bit. If you’re trying to grow though, make it more. And I recommend spending at least an hour a week on conscious business and sales development in addition to this. Again, ideally more.
This is what we mean by having your small business marketing sorted… You have a clear brand, a logo you can use, your purpose sorted, and you can talk about your business and what you offer with confidence and ease. You should have all your business descriptions set up, a website representing your offering clearly, and an engagement process locked down. You have some business goals for the next five or so years and a simple marketing strategy (we can help if you don’t) so you know what you’re doing is working towards those goals. You also ideally want some digital ads running to flow traffic through to your website. And the icing on the cake is having a simple SEO strategy in the background so you know that you’re improving your visibility online.
Hour 1
If you’ve only got an hour, spend it on tweaking your digital advertisements, your social content, and your website content to improve your SEO, your visitor experience and your conversions online. Allocate the additional 1 hour we mentioned following up leads, making contact with potential partners etc.
Hour 2
If you’ve got 2 hours a week, do all of the above but you’ll have a more realistic timeline to consciously work on this and really work towards consciously growing your awareness, increasing your online following and improving your online visibility with your SEO work and ads.
Hour 3
If you have three hours a week start getting really creative with your branding and your social media content. Consider creating videos for reels, potentially a YouTube channel set up if you can. And blog to promote SEO (hello, look what you’re reading, yes I had 3 hours this week) but also to really offer some value and insights to your online audience that are helpful.
Hour 4
With four hours a week spent on marketing you can get really intelligent with your marketing and look at your current customer database and send out e-newsletters that are highly targeted, consider cross selling oppotunities. Also think about sales and product development - can you expand out your offering and market it better on your website? Are you already doing things that aren’t listed there? If you are package them up, make them available to your current customers and it will work towards you becoming more visible too!
Hour 5
This is where you can get really strategic and look at tactics and campaigns and improving the calibre of your marketing efforts. Test some advertising options and make sure you can track their success. Look into influencers or partnerships, and network to expand your brands reach.
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Who’s the author?
Gemma Saltmarsh is a Marketing Coach based near Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. She works with clients on a budget Australia wide to help them ace their marketing efforts and propel their business forward.
What’s the business?
Salt Brands and Marketing offers marketing with spark on small business budgets to businesses Australia wide. Marketing strategies for small businesses, online marketing consultant services as well as website design, logo design and branding packages.