If You Have Time for Meetings, You Have Time for Marketing

All of us small business owners run into time management problems.  Not because we’re not organized, but because there’s not enough of it, and what we have of it flies by all too quickly.  And, really, who among us wants to work on their day(s) off or into the wee hours every night?  We can’t do everything, though we try.  Inevitably, a lot of stuff that needs to be done gets thrown by the wayside, especially marketing.  Huge mistake.  Huge!

Question: Do you even have a marketing program in place?   Well, tsk, tsk.

I hear the lame excuses why marketing is routinely ignored, and these are the top three: Marketing requires expertise that I don’t have; marketing requires too much time and money; I won’t be able to keep up once I do get going.   While it’s true that you don’t want to ignore whatever your core competency is, you need to be fully engaged with marketing on a consistent basis.  If you don’t keep up, especially with social networking, you will be left behind.

So, where do you find all this time for marketing?  Well, if you have time for meetings, you have time for marketing.  Once you devote an hour or two to get a few programs up and running, you need only feed and water them so they thrive.

Let’s start with the idea that marketing requires a whole boatload of expertise.  Yes and no.  Yes, because you need to be creative and have strong writing and editing skills.  If you lack the latter, it’ll show.  No, because you are the expert on your business.  You know what makes your product or service special, and there is no better person to sell you than you.  Articulate that, and you’re good to go.

Yes, marketing requires a time commitment, but it shouldn’t require a lot of money.  Blogs, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and other social networking sites are free for users.  Email marketing subscriptions are not expensive at all (Constant Contact, for instance, starts at $15/month).  As for the time it takes to set up an account, 30 minutes max for all of the above.  Well, maybe setting up an e-newsletter will take longer if you start fiddling with the templates.  But that’s it!  Only 30 minutes to get going!

As for keeping up with whatever marketing program you do launch, it’s not that bad.  I spend about 10-15 minutes on Twitter and Facebook every day.  This blog post will take me about 30-45 minutes to write because it’s so long (posts need not be long, only interesting).  An e-newsletter will take longer—maybe an hour or two depending on the length.  An email marketing message should only take about 10-15 minutes to put together.   Like I said, not that bad.

Stop waiting and get going today!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 at 8:00 am and is filed under Marketing, social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


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