My greenies’ guide to marketing takes the old adage of ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ and applies it to marketing your business. Being a conscious consumer doesn’t only apply to tangible goods either, but to offerings and ideas that we’ve perhaps dismissed because they didn’t work the way we thought they should, or we are keen on something new, something glamorous, something exciting.
Reduce marketing
Typically, we don’t think about reducing our time spent marketing, we worry that we’re not doing enough. But spending time on marketing tasks that aren’t fruitful is time that could be better invested – into paid work at the coalface of your business, into developing new partnerships and products, and into spending time with friends and family.
Look at where you’re spending your time and attention when marketing your business – is it useful, helpful, valuable and relevant? Are you taking meaningful measurements, reviewing these regularly and using these metrics to inform your decisions?
Could you spend less time in your inbox and on social media, and more time on growing your email list, bringing you the sales, professional profile and awareness you’re after? Could you spend less time analyzing what your competitors are doing and obsessing over the latest shiny new marketing tool or tactic?
How could you narrow your marketing focus so that you do less and do it better?
Reuse marketing
Countless times I’ve heard business owners say, “We tried _____________ and it didn’t work”, before I find out that they gave the strategy or tactic about two minutes before writing it off. This approach is not only misguided, it’s wasteful.
First, because you don’t give yourself the time and focus to build the necessary skills to do a good job; second, because you haven’t given enough time and iterations for the strategy or tactics to have an effect.
Reuse also applies to templates – what are you redoing and redoing which could be done from a template? Any process that you repeatedly do should be done from a template. Not only does this save significant time, it ensures that your quality is consistent and nothing is forgotten.
Recycle marketing
The carefully-worded email that you labored over can be recycled into a blog post. The presentation you gave can be shared on SlideShare, recycled into an audio or video, and uploaded onto your website behind an email opt-in, to grow your list.
Your E-Book can be recycled into a serious of blog posts or turned into an online or face-to-face course. Your most popular blog posts can be edited and recycled and pitched to other blogs.
Too often, we believe that things crafted completely from scratch are somehow superior to something recycled. It puts us on a treadmill of working, fueled by pressure to be consistently original.
A fantastic byproduct of recycling your marketing content is that you’re developing a point-of-view and reputation. You can’t build a professional reputation without repetition and reiteration.
Your defining opinion doesn’t spring forth, fully formed. It’s developed through years of reiteration. Recycling your opinions isn’t about becoming a bore, nor about digging your heels in when new information, relevant to what you’re saying, comes to light. It’s about finding ways to say the same things a hundred different ways, learning and growing, and making your opinion relevant.
Remember, saving the planet is the result of a thousand tiny actions of what we do and don’t do, every day. The same goes for marketing. So tell me – what can you stop doing and how can you make do with less, for a bigger impact and an improved result?
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Will I see you at my upcoming Blogging for Business and Social Media Savvy courses?
