How much time should you spend on marketing your one-person biz?
When time is the most valuable and yet the most scarce of all your resources, this is the million-dollar question.
As a business owner, the ‘how much time’ question is tough because there are no fixed time-boundaries. Your business will take as much time as you grant it, and there’s always ‘more’ to do – ESPECIALLY when it comes to marketing.
You know that marketing could be your route to bigger, faster success ... if only you made time to follow this trend, jump on that content channel, take on this challenge, be MORE omnipresent, MORE visible, MORE always-on.
BUT! Left unchecked, ‘more marketing’ can quickly become your fast track to burnout and overwhelm, as you carve out MORE time in your life, losing sleep and sacrificing weekends to chase those trends, feed those channels, embrace those challenges.
So where do you draw the line? How much time ‘should’ you spend marketing your business? The answer:
It Depends.
The internet is full of rules-of-thumb that say you ‘should’ spend 20%, 50% or even more of your ‘work-time’, marketing your business – if you want to ‘succeed’.
Is it all true? Yes.
And no.
Each rule (probably) works for somebody, in their specific set of circumstances. But when it comes to how to run or market a small business, no single rule is good for everybody: because we each have our own, unique circumstances to work within. We have our own expectations to juggle. We each have a different starting point, and a different definition of the ‘success’ that we are willing to work for.
I’m not going to give you a rule-of-thumb today: I’m going to give you something much more useful.
I’m going to give you four action steps so you can build YOUR rule of thumb: the one that fits YOUR business, YOUR life and YOUR intentions.
Step 1: Define your Success
Marketing is not a pastime; it’s a means to an end.
So if you are even slightly unclear about what definition of ‘success’ you want to achieve, it will not be possible for you to plan exactly how much effort – and therefore, how much time - it will take to achieve it. Without a clear definition of success, you won’t know what actions to prioritise; nor will you know how intensively (or otherwise) you need to commit to those actions.
A person who wants to grow an established business and who already has a client base and prospect funnel in place has (potentially) a different marketing challenge ahead of them, compared to someone who is building their reputation from a standing start.
A person who dreams of building a global empire will need to commit a different amount of time, from someone who wants to enjoy running a lifestyle business and benefit from time-freedom and flexibility along the way.
Only when you are clear and realistic about the scale of transformation that you want to achieve in your marketing, can you determine what investment of time or effort you will need to make to effect that change.
Action 1: Commit to your vision of success.
Ask yourself: what does success REALLY look like for you, in your life and your business?
(If you haven’t thought about this lately, you might enjoy working through my free Big Vision Workbook – download a copy here)
Step 2: Define your Timeframe
How quickly do you want to achieve the success you’re working for?
Someone who wants to achieve their vision of success in the next six months will logically need to put in a much more time-intensive marketing effort than someone who wants to achieve the same result over two years.
So, be honest with yourself about the timeframe for your Big Vision. Now, ask yourself this: to be on track to achieve that Big Vision within my timeframe, what changes would I need to see in three months’ time?
This is important because marketing campaigns are best planned in bite-sized sprints.
The time commitment that suits your circumstances right now, may no longer be perfectly suited to your circumstances in 3 months’ time. What’s more, you will have learned a lot from the experience of 3 months’ consistent work - you may even have become more efficient in your marketing, too.
Three months from now, you’ll be ready to reassess what works best for you; what you may want to stop, start or continue, and at that point you should refresh your goals and time commitment accordingly.
Action 2: Set your timeframe
Think about the timeframe within which you want to achieve your ‘success’ - write it down.
Now, based on that: define your 3-month intention. What change will you need to see within 3 months, to feel confidently on track towards your Big Vision success?
Step 3: Align your Commitments
How much time do you actually have?
There is no use in telling yourself you’ll commit 20 hours per week to marketing if you know in your heart that you simply don’t have that time sustainably available.
On the other side of the coin: if you are just starting up your business and time is on your side, there is no reason at all that you shouldn’t fill up your ALL the non-client serving work-time you have, with marketing activity – recognising that some of that time may be re-allocated to client servicing & delivery, as your business grows.
Action 3: Be realistic about your commitments.
Consider how much time you can sustainably give to your business per week, in your 3-month planning period. Sustainably, without detriment to your health, your life or your loved ones!
Now, take out the amount of time that you need to commit to client delivery, operations and administration. What’s left, is the time that you have potentially available for marketing, right now.
Step 4: Leverage what Works
You now know how much time you’ve actually ‘got’ for marketing, and you know what transformation or impact you want to create in the time you’ve got.
You probably already have a sense of how well the two things are aligned:
If you have an enormous, distant goal and only a little time, you may need to:
Reduce your goal
Increase your timeframe
Increase your available time
But before you start juggling those choices, there’s one more important factor to bring into the equation:
How should you spend the time you have?
It may be that you don’t actually need to adjust the amount of time you spend, nor to adjust your goals or timeline – you may simply need to focus on EFFICIENCY and PURPOSE.
If your goal is large and your time is tight, your first priority is to leverage what works.
Put simply: for the next 3 months, ditch the distractions.
Be ruthless in your focus. Shut out that noise that tells you to follow a new trend; launch a new channel; start a new challenge, be more present, more ‘on’ and MORE visible … and drill down on what works.
If you have already got great clients in your business:
Ask yourself where they came from: and, based on that, identify what could you most easily do MORE of, to create MORE of the same results - without spreading yourself thin in time that you simply don’t have.
Remember, marketing doesn’t need to be particularly glamourous, time-hungry, nor even particularly visible to be effective: if your success to date has come from word-of-mouth or returning clients: leverage that.
Look inward before you look outward: focus on making it easy for your happy clients and your wider community to refer you; focus on building deeper, more rewarding or even more long-lasting relationships with your current clients.
If your success has come solely from LinkedIn, yet you are churning hours of your time into your Facebook account, your email newsletter or your podcast: refocus. Give yourself permission to do less, and do it better: commit your time to the activities that yield the results.
If you have only recently started up or pivoted your business:
Focus on your strengths. If you don’t yet know ‘what works’; commit to the things that come easily to you – see my post on 4 Steps to Easy, Authentic Content to start building an anti-overwhelm marketing strategy that leverages YOUR strengths and energy, allowing you to get the most value from the time you have.
Action 4: Audit your Activities
Write a list of all the marketing activities that you are currently packing into the time you have.
Now be ruthless, as you ask yourself:
Does the evidence suggest that EACH ONE of these activities is a good use of your valuable time, over the next 3 months?
Is EVERY ONE of these playing a role in leading you towards your 3 month goal?
Discard any that are not, and retain only those that ARE effective for you.
Now you know:
What SUCCESS you want to achieve
What TIMELINE you will achieve that within
How much time you will COMMIT to achieving that success
How you will get MAXIMUM VALUE from the time that you commit.
You don’t need anyone else’s rule of thumb to determine how much time YOU should spend on your marketing. What you DO need, is absolute clarity around these four points, so that you can strike an effective and sustainable balance of time invested, vs success attained.
If in doubt, look INWARD – with honesty and compassion – to identify which of the four elements you are most prepared to adjust right now, to set yourself up for success on your terms: the only success worth working for.
Remember: the first step to building your own, realistic marketing time plan is to get really clear on exactly what success you’re prepared to work for. Now is the ideal time to have some fun and get inspired with your own big goals, using my free Big Vision Workbook: download your copy and start now!