By Maria Peagler, Published November 9, 2014
You’re going to thank me for this . . . .
I’m going to show you how to exponentially multiply your visibility, leads, revenue and profit in your business using the Pareto principle: that 20% of your effort that leads to 80% of your results.
As a small business owner, you need to be ruthless with how you spend your time. The marketing efforts that aren’t not paying off — ditch them. In a moment I’m going to show you how to identify which marketing efforts are paying off and how to do more of them to grow your business.
Forget coaches who tell you how to get more time in your day and expensive consulting for someone to tell you how to grow the revenue in your business.
Today I’m going to show you how to do all of that yourself.
1. Identify Your Marketing Goals
Can you articulate the goals for your marketing? According to a recent survey of SMOC members, their top three business goals are:
- Grow their business
- Get more sales
- Develop a personal brand
Awesome! Now, exactly what is your plan for doing that?
If you’re not sure HOW to achieve these goals, take a look at my three-part series on setting SMART Goals/Creating an Action Plan/Measuring Your Results. It walks you through every step of that process so you can turn your goals into actionable tasks you can measure to identify your progress.
First, you learn how to set SMART social media marketing goals for your business:
Second, you learn how to turn those goals into actionable tasks you can accomplish:
Third, you learn how to measure the results of your goals & action plan. This is the critical part of the process most people skip. Don’t miss this post:
If you can’t articulate what your goal is, your customers don’t know what you’re asking of them. Tie your marketing to your business goals using the three-part series.
2. Identify What’s Working Now
If you’re already doing social media marketing, do you know which of your marketing efforts is is generating the most business? Being able to look at all of your marketing efforts, from social media to content generation to advertising is neither simple nor easy. But it’s essential for you to prune the campaigns not paying off and double-down on those that are generating the most revenue.
If you don’t already have Google Analytics (GA) installed on your website, then do it now (or hire someone who can).
It’s easy to be overwhelmed with the amount of data GA throws at you. Don’t let that happen to you.
Also, you need to be able to read Facebook Insights and identify who your most profitable fans are. This post identifies how to use Insights to drill down to find where your results are in Facebook:
3. Automate Social Media Tasks Not Requiring Engagement
Social media marketing is an effective marketing tool, but it can be a huge time drain if you’re not savvy about how you spend your time. Not every administrative task requires your attention. Instead, identify what you can automate or delegate to a staff member.
The tasks I like to automate:
- posting to Pinterest – because it requires little engagement and we use the Pinvolve.co app to automate this process
- posting to multiple social networks — use Hootsuite to post once and have it go to all your social accounts
- creating a library of content — we create a content library by adding each social media post URL to a Google Spreadsheet file. We automate this task using IFTTT.com.
- repurposing content – my assistant creates our Weekly Top posts from the most recent lessons, blog posts, and forum Q&A here at SMOC
- automating blog post creation — be careful with this one. The only time I automate a blog post is when I upload a video to YouTube: I created a recipe in IFTT.com that creates a blog post draft automatically that contains the video. We then edit the blog post, add an awesome title, a transcript and time stamps. I do have social media services clients, however, for whom we’ve created an entire blog post automation process: these clients are working multiple jobs or on the road 50 weeks out of the year. Their staffs are overworked already and dread writing blog posts. So we created a process where they can automatically create blog posts generated by tasks they were doing already.
- create content in 10 minutes – yes, this is an authentic tactic I use. Not all the time, but when I’m pressed for time, this workflow saves the day. In fact, I created the framework for this blog post using my 10-minute tactic.
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