How important is marketing your business?

Oh, I’m guessing at the end of the day you’ve concluded it’s pretty important – the problem is that at the end of the day, you’ve not done a thing that you could call marketing.

I know this is true because I hear it from almost every small business owner I encounter. “I just can’t seem to find time.” My experience is that time comes from priority. There will never be enough time to get everything done – particularly with all that email wasting it. The trick is to get what needs done, done. And marketing really needs done if you plan to create more than a really bad job for yourself.

The only way you can ever begin to give marketing the time priority it deserves is to make it a daily habit. You can’t afford to do marketing when you get free time.

Marketing work, either planning or implementing, needs to be a part of your daily routine or else. Right now, open up whatever calendar tool you use and go schedule a monthly marketing planning meeting, a weekly marketing action meeting and a daily marketing appointment. Put it on the books and keep it.

Then at the beginning of every day, write down 6 things that you must get done today (one must be marketing) and do the hardest one first – I’m guessing for many that’s a marketing task. Get your daily marketing task done before you open the email, return the phone calls, or meet with staff. Do this daily and the collective amount of what you will accomplish will finally start to look and feel something like marketing momentum.

My favorite books on time:
• Getting Things Done – David Allen – Allen has built an entire series of products around a simple philosophy affectionately known by users as GTD. His advice really helped me get a handle on my email inbox.
• 10 Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management – Hyrum W. Smith Smith is the original brains behind the Franklin Planner – now Franklin Covey. I’m not that big of a fan of all the planner tools out there (sometimes they become part of the problem) but I love this book because it deals more with priority sorting than execution.