Four Time-Saving Tips for Marketing your Business

Marketing is a vital component to your business — an opportunity to have increased engagement with your audience, drive additional traffic to your website, and even increase your sales volume — ideally with the investment of a few minutes and a couple of well-phrased tweets. And yet, marketing can waste considerable amounts of your time when it is attempted without a clear goal or a focused purpose.  Accordingly, here are four time-saving tips to make your social media accounts work better for you.

Create Your Content in Advance

Stopping throughout the day to write Facebook posts or to push other social media content not only takes time, but it also takes you away from the important business of the day.  Researchers have found that it can take your brain as long as half an hour to return attention to the original task, and these thirty-minute breaks will compound every time you stop to post an update.  Solve this problem by drafting all of your updates at the beginning of the week — or even the beginning of the month.  You can always add tweaks to address with real-time developments that need to be referenced, but most of your updates should be ready to go ahead of time.

Limit Yourself to Only Two or Three Platforms

As the Pareto principle dictates, 80% of all results come from 20% of your efforts.  This applies to managing your social media as well.  You may be using a variety of social media platforms to push your business content, but the majority of their value is more than likely coming from only a minority of them.  Use Google Analytics (or whatever data analytics might be built into your platforms) to determine which ones are giving you the most engagement, and then focus your efforts on those platforms.

Repurpose Existing Content

Blog posts, Facebook updates, and LinkedIn articles can provide value beyond the first time you share them.  You may need to think a little creatively to bring a new focus to old material, but it isn’t that difficult.  The first share can simply offer the title of the piece; the second, share a catchy quote of a paragraph from the body of the work; the third, ask a relevant business question that is answered by the content.  Using your posts strategically in this fashion saves time and allows you to share the same idea with your audience multiple times, generating more substantial impact.

Measure Only What Matters

Now that social media is such an active presence in our daily lives, the individual platforms themselves offer tons of insights and statistics concerning each and every one of your posts.  Not all of these will be useful, however, so you should be sure to track the ones that actually impact your business.  For example, repeat visits, conversion rates, and total interactions can be infinitely more valuable than your number of followers, total site visits, or even the number of times your posts have been shared.  You should also be aware of your customers’ loyalty and their total lifetime value to your business.

Do not underestimate the importance of staying connected to your audience and marketing your business using social media!