Don't put out fires first thing Monday morning. Do this instead.

Do you put out fires first thing Monday morning? The beginning of the week is always hectic. Mondays are rushed. It’s inevitable right? You have so much to do, like things left over from the week before as well as projects that were late to start. You are behind and you can’t get ahead. I get it.

Let’s say this week we are going to change things. Let’s take an honest look at what the most important work in your business is. I’ll suggest that one of those things is marketing. The reason being is because marketing is directly tied to your bottom line. If you don’t do some sort of marketing, you will struggle. If you don’t do marketing well , then your chances at failing in your business become, like rushed, hectic Mondays...inevitable.

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Now, I know most of you reading this are paying attention to marketing in some shape and form, and that’s really good. But, I am going to suggest a few small tweaks that will take your marketing up to the next level and get you out of that “high chance of failure” column.

Make every Monday, Marketing Monday. So, don’t just jump into your emails and start putting out fires. Instead focus on these top 3 things related to marketing:

1. Ask yourself, what communication can you have today with your community, clients, or potential clients that will help you stay in front of them. Is it an email? Is it picking up the phone and calling 5-10 of them? Is it sending a Thank you card? Then do that one thing.

2. Check-in to see if your communications are mostly consistent. Are social media posts going out every day or at least 3-4 times a week? Do you communicate via email blast at least once a month? Is there a mailing that goes out around the same time every quarter? Do blogs or other content get published on a regular basis? Do you attend the same 2-3 networking events every month to stay in front of the same people? Use Monday to check-in and make sure these things are happening consistently

3. Get educated. Spend about 20-30 minutes reading up on marketing and decide on 1 thing you can implement, change, or tweak based on what you read. So, continuous improvement, or as the Japanese call it Kaizen, is super important. This is especially recommended for CEOs, Marketing Directors, Executive Directors, Development Directors, Sales Directors and Sales Associates. Find a few reputable and trusted sources that offer actionable steps you can implement easily every week. They shouldn’t be huge things. Something small like this week lets change some keywords on our homepage. Or, let’s update our Google local page to see if we can get more traffic. Or this week we are going to actually print out and look at our website analytics and get really informed about who is showing up at the site and what’s happening when they do.

If you spent just 45 minutes to 1.5 hours at the beginning of each week, you would go from being average in your marketing to stellar in your marketing. It’s completely worth it to create this important system in your business.  The author of The Slight Edge, Leo Weidner, wrote that the difference between unsuccessful and successful is slight...there are a few small steps everyone can take to make this huge leap. 

So  now, I have a question for you? What one little tweak will you make to your marketing based on this article? Also, if you have ANY questions that come up on this or related to marketing in general, leave a comment here and I’ll be happy to answer them.