Finding the time to concentrate on your marketing isn’t always easy when you’ve got a hundred and one things to do for your business, but unless you know you will have time to follow up on your campaigns don’t be tempted to start something you can’t finish or go through with.
Promotions, Social Media, Marketing Campaigns - however easy it may be to set these up using the wealth of tools available these days finding the time to update, analyse and tweak your marketing is often where you let yourself down and ultimately cost yourself revenue.
For example, I had today booked off to go to a marketing and advertising expo.
I had been looking forward to it, I had written my pitch for networking, I had marked down all the various people and companies I wanted to visit and was keeping tabs on tweets coming out of the build up. All was good, then as I was walking home from work it dawned on me…I didn’t have the time to go.
Ok, so I had the day off to physically appear at Earls Court and mingle, but to actually interact, follow up and put everything I would learn to good use? Nope, no way.
And there’s no point in going if you’re not going to follow up and act on what you learn.
At the moment I’m working on a couple of client projects which are taking up a lot of time and they will be keeping me busy for the next 2-3 months, which in marketing is a lifetime.
What’s cutting edge now will be old hat in no time, so anything I learned today would be replaced by something else before I would get a chance to implement it.
So what to do?
The last thing I wanted to do was to give prospective clients and partners the wrong impression by talking the talk and then sitting through the ‘walking the walk’ part.
I had a quick flick through the preview guide and website and found that a lot of the exhibitors I had already met and have dealings with, and those that I hadn’t met yet were going to be at Marketing Live later in the year so I could meet with them then.
Looking through the previews for both shows I found they were quite similar in many ways, so I could afford to miss this one in favour of making sure that next time round I would have time to network properly and act upon the wealth of information you can pick up at these shows.
I decided that it would be better for me to spend my day working on my projects rather than go, as for the sake of waiting until the next show I ultimately would be more able to engage contacts and have a better relationship with them in the long term.
The same is true when doing any form of marketing or networking - however good an idea or campaign may seem it’s better to wait until you’re ready and can afford yourself the time to follow up and succeed than to rush and miss out on opportunities you otherwise would have benefited from, simply because you can’t spare the time.
That’s my take on it anyway.
