Regardless of whether you’re a lawyer, accountant or other professional service provider you weren’t born that way. You studied, some harder than others, you developed skills and, critically, you learnt habits that help you do your job efficiently and effectively.
Becoming a marketing star for your business is no different. There are many Healthy Habits for a Healthy Business that you can teach yourself to make your marketing efforts more effective and generally just easier for you. Here are just a few.
Find 20 minutes
It’s the classic “working on your business not in your business”. And I don’t mean taking 6 months to plan a 2 day marketing & personal discovery retreat in the mountains. Just find 20 minutes a day to switch off from the client work and progress your marketing and business development plan. Watch out for an upcoming article in which I’ll talk more about the power of just 20 minutes and what can be achieved in this amount of time each day.
Learn to share
If you’re a client of John Gray Marketing you’ve almost certainly been on the receiving end of one of my “stray thought” emails. Now not all of these stray thoughts I’ve had for marketing your business get implemented. Some, rightly so, don’t go any further than that first email.
But the point is if you don’t share those marketing ideas, that idea for a target client, that new product – they’ll never make it any further than the back of your brain. Share these ideas with your team and encourage them to do the same. Don’t wait a few days to think it through – share it now and let those around you work through the thought process. Some of the best marketing ideas start with just one shared stray thought.
Treat your marketing program like a client
Most firms I work with have commitments to client responsiveness. It might be commitments to return calls within 2 hours or to get new contracts out within 24 hours. Unless something genuinely catastrophic occurs they’d never allow one of these commitments to be broken. It demonstrates professionalism and keeps those clients happy. Now picture your most demanding client and imagine how they would react if your marketing program was their file.
I’m a great believer in professionals taking responsibility for their own performance when it comes to marketing, but if your imagination isn’t enough to get you to treat your marketing program like a client then appoint an internal marketing client. Give this person the authority to call you on the tasks that you need to get done. If done properly this will help teach you to treat your marketing program like a client.
Do it now!
Procrastination is death to a marketing program. Everyone’s got a busy schedule but marketing isn’t something you can defer until you have spare time. If your calendar is suddenly free of client appointments you’ve already left your marketing too late!
It goes against what a lot of time management experts suggest but when I get an email or task that is a 5 or 10 minute job I do it then and there. Not because its efficient to interrupt what might be a bigger task I’m working on, but because I know that just like everyone else, little jobs put off rarely get done.
If you need more time to work on it then set that time aside and don’t treat it as optional or something that can be given up easily.
Stay positive and keep moving forward
Learning Healthy Habits for a Healthy Business isn’t easy. Especially if you’ve given yourself an ambitious marketing program to achieve. But remember that for your marketing program any action is better than no action.
Even if you can’t do it all – critical to your success is to stay positive and keep moving forward.
