Photo courtesy of Paula C. Eytcheson
One of the most frequent questions I’m asked is ‘How long should I spend on marketing?’ Realistically, I think you should be investing at least three hours a week, but most small business owners insist they haven’t got that much time to spend. If you also don’t have a member of staff or an outsourced support to give it to, here is my quick and dirty guerrilla marketing plan.
Monday
Upload a week’s posts to Twitter, your Facebook Page and your LinkedIn account. OK this means you need to generate the posts and that can’t be done in 10 minutes, but if you invest an hour in putting together some value-based tips, suggestions and advice linked to relevant pages in your website and pay $9.99 a month for a Hootsuite account, you can update and upload these in 12 clicks! (5 minutes)
Take a look at your Twitter feed and comment on a couple of things, retweet something that interests or entertains you. (5 minutes)
Tuesday
Upload a picture and a short comment relevant to what you do onto either Facebook (if you’re B2C) or as a LinkedIn post (if you’re B2B). You could also pin this to one of your Pinterest boards too and post it to Google+ if you use those platforms. The sourcing of the image and creating the comment will take most of the time, uploading is pretty straightforward. (10 minutes including finding an appropriate image)
Wednesday
Ask a question on your Facebook Page or LinkedIn status to get people talking and engaging with you. (4 minutes)
Revisit your Twitter feed and comment, thank people for mentions and retweet interesting posts. (3 minutes)
Check your Facebook Page/LinkedIn account/Pinterest/Google+ and respond to any comments (3 minutes)
Thursday
Do an advanced search for your ideal client on LinkedIn. Choose the best matches who are 2nd level connections and make contact with them. (10 minutes)
Friday
1st week – write a list of subjects that people ask you about a lot with a view to converting them into blog posts. Find a copywriter who can turn these into articles to post on your blog. (10 minutes)
2nd week – post one of your pre-written blogs with an appropriate image and post the blog title and link on social media. (5 minutes)
3rd week – create a newsletter using your blog as the lead article and adding your latest promotion/offer and send to your list. (10 minutes)
4th week – post another of your pre-written blogs with an appropriate image and post the blog title and link on social media. (5 minutes)
Repeat your Friday schedule every 4 weeks, obviously you won’t need to find a new copywriter each month, if you find one that you can work with, you just need to schedule maybe an additional 15-20 minutes to talk through your list of subject and pick two for development.
To start with some of these activities will take longer than 10 minutes, but once you get used to them you’ll get familiar with the processes and ensure you are visible online to help people to remember you.
Ideally, you should be looking at extending this to include things like getting involved with groups where your target clients are active on LinkedIn, or getting your Facebook Page more visits and activity, writing longer posts for LinkedIn, guest blogging, developing social media posts from your blogs and much more. However, in the real world time is at a premium and 10 minutes a day is manageable for most people so this will at least get you started.
P.S. If you’re looking for someone to help with your blogs – we do that! Give us a call on 01245 473296.
