How To Market Even When You're Busy Or On Holiday
When you run a business, things don’t stop just because you’re on holiday. The good news is it is incredibly easy to keep your marketing consistent even when you have no access to the internet. This is also very useful during peak wedding season. Letting your marketing drop off will affect your bottom line and make it seem like you aren’t serious about your business. The truth is, your customers don’t care that you’re on holiday, they expect to hear from you.
Here’s how to do it: Stop marketing in real time. If you wait until the night before blog post has to be done or until the day a tweet needs to go out, you will always feel behind. Now you can’t automate interaction, but you can definitely automate a lot of things to make your life easier. There are two parts to this: do the prep work and use tools to automate what you can.
Doing the prep work just means you spend a little bit of time getting things set up so you can easily make use of them in the future. Here is some of the prep work I’ve done:
- I have a template in Aweber that I use for all of my emails that I send out to my list. All I have to do is copy it into a new message, add my new content and schedule the email.
- I batch my writing. I talked about batching tasks in this post but essentially I sit down and write several blog posts in one sitting.
- I have a collection of blog post ideas saved in Evernote. I add ideas to Evernote as they come to me and at the moment I have over 50 ideas saved there which really helps when I’m not sure what to write about. It has helped me break through writer’s block many times.
- I regularly share other people’s content that I think you’ll like and I recommend you do the same. I have a group of people I follow and I use Google Reader and Twitter lists to see what they have posted recently so that I can share it.
- I’ve set up a schedule for my content. I post to my blog and email my list once a week, tweet 3 times a day and post to Facebook once a day. This takes any uncertainty out of when I should be doing things and helps keep me on track.
Tools To Help With This
Buffer
Buffer is one of the best social media tools I’ve ever used. It allows you to schedule your social media posts and track how they perform. The best part is that you can set pre-defined times and fill up your Buffer account with posts that you want to share. Buffer will then automatically send those posts out at those times, which means you can schedule your posts ahead of time when it’s convenient for you. There is a free plan and a paid plan for Buffer and I’m sure you’ll fall in love with it. It even integrates with other applications for maximum efficiency.
Google Reader
I use Google Reader to share other people’s content because it’s not all about me, it’s about the customer. There are people who write posts I know my audience will love, so I check Google Reader to see what is new with them. Google Reader is being discontinued in July 2013, so I will be switching over to Feedly.
Facebook Page Scheduling Tool
Facebook recently launched their own scheduling tool which is great because they had been punishing people who used 3rd party schedulers for a long time. To get maximum visibility, schedule your Facebook posts within Facebook by clicking the clock shown in the image below.
Aweber
This is my email marketing service and I love it. Aweber allows me to create attractive HTML emails and they provide me with reports on how each email performed.
WordPress Editorial Calendar Plugin
This free WordPress plugin lets me see at a glance what posts have been scheduled and when they will go live. It has a really nice calendar interface that is easy to work with.
Email Auto Response
This is one that people forget about but is very important. Make sure you set an out of office message on your email if you don’t intend to check it while you’re on holiday. Even if you plan to check it, it may be nice to add one to let people know you might take a little bit longer to get back to them.
Hootsuite
I love Hootsuite because it allows me to manage my Twitter lists in a visually appealing way. I spend a few minutes reviewing what people on those lists have posted and if anything sounds like it would interest you awesome people, I add it to Buffer.
Evernote
I don’t know what I would do without Evernote. I use it as my idea repository to make sure that nothing slips through the cracks. I also use it to store resources I know I’ll need in the future. It keeps me from having to try to remember every idea I come up with which frees up my focus so that I can truly concentrate on the task at hand.
Take Action!
Take some time today to do your prep work and familiarise yourself with these tools. Do this and you can rest assured that your holiday or busy times will no longer cause your marketing to suffer.
