Marketing

Clever Ways to Spend Less Time on Online Marketing

Running a startup can take over your whole life, especially when you’re running it alone. It can be an enormous struggle to keep up with everything when there’s so much to do. You need to stay on top of your earnings and expenses, market your business, get day-to-day tasks done, and perhaps direct employees. It sometimes feels like there isn’t enough time in the day to get everything done, so it’s a relief when you find things that can speed up some of your processes. One of the things that can take up much of your time is marketing. You would think that doing a lot of it online would make things faster, but it only seems to create more for you to do. Luckily, there are ways that you can save time and use it to do something more pressing.

Spend Less Time Blogging

Content is critical to your internet marketing practices, but writing and formatting posts can be incredibly time-consuming. If blogging is taking up too much of your precious time, there are several things you can do to change it. Firstly, you could just find someone else to do it for you. Although you might be hesitant to trust someone else with your blog, there are many skilled writers who can write to your specifications. The same goes for creating images, infographics and videos. But if you’re not ready to hand over the reigns to someone else, there are still things you can do. Some of them are as simple as increasing your typing speed or using grammar checkers to make writing and proofreading quicker. But you can also do things like collecting ideas and information in advance, and writing your blogs in batches.

Use Templates

Whether you’re creating web pages to do some A/B testing, making graphics or inputting ads into Google Adwords, try using templates. You can use tools like this landing page generator to create marketing materials to your specifications. There’s no need to spend hours starting from scratch. You can even use sites like Canva, which make creating graphics incredibly easy. With so many excellent tools available, you can do almost anything you want. You just have to be careful that you don’t start creating things that are too uniform. Your marketing still needs to stand out from everyone else’s.

Create a Social Media Calendar

With so many different social media platforms available, it can be hard to stay on top of them. You can find yourself spending hours every day updating and carrying on conversations. The first thing you should do to reign it in is to limit the number of pages you have. You don’t need to be on every single network, so pick the ones you have the most success with. You can create a calendar to schedule when you need to post and when you should go to your pages and start conversations. Remember that there are tools that allow you to schedule posts in advance, so you can set them up long before they need to appear.

 

Tom McShane

Tom McShane is a contributing writer for The Startup Magazine