Your three a day marketing menu

Many years ago, a client told me how she had made herself stick to her marketing by giving herself an instruction to do at least 3 marketing actions every day. As long as she did 3 a day, she felt like she was progressing her marketing, no matter what else was happening in her business.

This is a list of marketing actions, big and small, which can make up part of your 3 a day. Of course, this smorgasbord of marketing actions comes with a health warning – you do risk just doing random things which don’t add up in a strategic way and can become confusing and some of them might not be the most ROI generating marketing actions. But based on the idea that it’s better to do 3 a day than none a day, here are some ideas to get you into action with your marketing

Mini bites – small marketing actions

• Talk to someone on twitter – retweet, comment, respond
• Put something out on twitter
• Check your home page for outdated things that might make you look like an idiot (10 mins max)
• Do a boosted post on Facebook, spending a tiny bit of money to try out FB ads
• Write a super short blog post
• Put a photo of something funny you saw on the street on FB or Twitter, just to prove you’re still alive
• Follow up a client who’s on your hit list and send them something useful
• Remind a client who has said they want some work done, that you might be able to fit them in next month

Main meals – bigger marketing actions with more ROI

• Compile your criteria for the best sort of clients
• Send 3 of your old clients an email to see how they’re getting on
• Send 3 of your old clients an email to tell them about that new thing you’re doing
• Write up a quick case study of something you’ve done for a client and why it was good
• Write a new blog post
• Check your google analytics to see what your best-performing pages were last month/year
• Write a blog post about something similar to your best-performing pages
• Write a 10 question survey for your ex-clients to find out what they liked best about working with you
• Spend half an hour having a look at your main competitors – what are they up to (only half an hour though)
• Write a hit list of clients you’d like to work for
• Work out who is your ideal client and why so you can base your future marketing activity on their needs
• Check your pricing
• Get a secret shopper organised to check your competitors pricing
• Get a secret shopper organised to make sure your staff are being nice to customers
• Stand outside your shop window (or home page) and see what you need to change to encourage more people to come in
• Organise a leaflet drop
• Build a landing page for a key sales area of your website
• Send out your email newsletter
• Check that every page on your website has some sort of call to action
• Schedule 10 old blog posts to go on twitter

Starting on bigger marketing actions

• Start up an automated email newsletter – write 12 emails to go out to people regularly
• Start developing a lead magnet to encourage people to sign up to your email newsletter
• Write a press release about something coming up
• Get new photos done of you and all the staff
• Put your website through the Hubspot website analyser and see if it’s working for you
• Plan a revamp of your website
• Write a budget for developing that new product you keep thinking about
• Decide to take a month off to write a book which will position you as an expert in your field
• See if you can take all your old blog posts and make them into a book which will make you look like an expert in your field

These ideas should get you started. If you want some help in glueing some of these ideas into a proper marketing strategy or really getting to grips with online marketing, then we should schedule a coffee and chat to talk about working together and getting your business onto a healthy diet.

And if you are wanting to develop your knowledge further in marketing then here is a list of advanced marketing books. These are my choice of the best marketing books for small business owners.

Photo credit – Areeb Anwer from Flickr on a creative commons license