How Much Time Do You Need to Spend Marketing Your Small Business?

Time. You're given 24 hours each day. How you use them productively to manage and market your business could be the key to success or failure. 

Most of you, as a small business owners, are not marketers — you are experts in what you do. Marketing -- especially today’s crazy marketing -- is overwhelming! 

A recent report from OutboundEngine.com notes that 58% of small business owners only spend 5 hours a week marketing their businesses. 

Is that enough? 

It depends. 

How effectively or productively are you using that time? 

Here’s a checklist of marketing tasks you can do to spend those 5 hours wisely…

1. You need to write a 300-word blog article at least once a week. That should take you about 1 hour. You shouldn’t have to do much research if you are an expert in your field. If you don’t know what to write about, visit the Q&A site Quora to see what questions people are asking in your field of expertise then answer the question in a blog. 
2. Review relevant content from trusted sources to share on your social networks then use a scheduler to schedule them out to your social networks. This should take about 10-15 minutes a day. Feedly.com is an online newsstand where you can subscribe to various blogs and e-zines. I like Buffer.com to schedule out posts to your social networks as you find them. If you discover a trusted content source and you’d like to share all of their posts (within reason — some content sources post several times a day — you don’t what to over do it) use dlvr.it. Dlvr.it will share articles as soon as they are published. It’s set it up and forget it.  
3. Spend the rest of time checking comments, responses, likes, retweets, with a tool like HootSuite.com. You can monitor several social media networks in one place. 

Now all this takes for granted that you’ve already:

1. Defined Your Target Audience and created Target Buyer Personas. This should have been part of your initial marketing plan
2. Determined which social media networks your target(s) frequent the most and built a following.
3. Set up your social media profiles and they are well-branded and look like an extension of your website with keyword-optimized descriptions/bios/about sections. 

If you’re just starting out and don’t have a following, be prepared to spend more time up front setting everything up and building a following — at least 90 minutes a day for the first month. Plan also to write 3-5 blog articles for the first 2 weeks so that Google will notice you. Then 2-3 times a week for the rest of the month. Then you can go down blogging once a week. 

“Nearly half of SMB owners surveyed do not have a marketing plan for 2019, while nearly 25 percent of respondents are unsure of how they plan to grow their businesses in 2019.”  Source