Overwhelmed by Your Marketing Efforts?

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Marketing your business can be a nonstop, exhausting task. Here are a few ways to avoid feeling overwhelmed and get the most out of your marketing efforts:

  • Create a SWOT analysis, which is a strategic planning method to evaluate your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. By identifying and understanding these four areas of your business, you can more easily create a strategy that will distinguish your company from the competition, so you can compete successfully in your market.
  • Hire a talented assistant. An assistant can help you manage your workload, get things done faster, and relieve the stress of looming deadlines. Even a part-time assistant can help you free up time to focus on more important tasks.
  • Find a marketing intern. Interns can provide a lot of value… if you let them. Interns are best utilized to help you reach business goals. For example, consider assigning interns to manage social media accounts, write articles and other blogs to increase your web presence, develop creative campaign ideas, etc. Interns can help relieve capacity issues and “test” new hires before making them official.
  • Remember to delegate. It often seems faster and easier just to do something yourself, but you also risk not having trained backup when you really need the help. If you’re nervous about trusting others with key projects, be sure to frequently track progress, give feedback, and help people solve problems.
  • Communicate with other departments in your business to gather new marketing ideas. For example, your production crew may suggest highlighting a new product feature, while your sales team may receive suggestions from customers about requested promotional ideas.
  • Learn from others. Collect examples of marketing materials or creative ideas that caught your attention, and organize them in an ideas binder. Combine your favorite traits from each into marketing ideas that are customized for your business.
  • Create a wish list of marketing initiatives, as well as a list of necessary projects with realistic deadlines. Schedule a weekly or bi-monthly meeting to review your progress, identify issues that are holding you back, and reassign tasks or projects.
  • Consider outsourcing projects if you or your team doesn’t have the time or resources to complete an important project. Freelance writers or designers can also be a great solution to keeping up the pace without hiring permanent staff. One great way to use freelance writers is for customer case studies. As an outside party, freelance writers can often ask sensitive questions and may be able to get customers to open up more as a result.

Whatever you do, don’t forget to put a professional finishing touch on your marketing efforts by choosing a printer who can offer helpful advice, creative ideas, meet tight deadlines, and provide a quality product you will be proud to distribute. We’re here anytime your business needs help putting your best foot forward.