To be the most effective and efficient you, that you can be, there is one key rule –
Spend as much time as possible focused on and doing the things that you are the best at inside your business.
Whatever it is you are the best at, whatever your superpower is in the business, you need to develop a plan to spend as much time as possible focused on those key activities.
How do you do this?
Most often it means that you have to find other people to be responsible for other parts of the business.
You have probably heard me talk about the business bullseye before, breaking the business down into the distinct parts of:
- Marketing
- Sales
- Operations
- Admin
- Management
- Ownership
To make the business work optimally you are going to have to find other people to focus on parts of the business that you shouldn’t be spending your time on – your weaknesses.
In other words, what do you do when you identify your weakness in the business?
Today I want to talk about marketing.
For your marketing to be most effective you need to have a plan in place and you need to identify
- your target market,
- your target customers,
- what they are most interested in,
- what their hot buttons are,
- what turns them on,
- what is going to make them buy,
- what is going to make them say yes in the buying process
This is what marketing is all about, getting in the minds of your prospects and customers.
If marketing is an area of weakness, you generally have a few options:
- you rely on one of your partners, whose strength is marketing
- you hire a team member, whose strength is marketing
- you hire an outside company, a consultant or marketing firm, that can help you with the marketing process
Whatever path you choose for your marketing resources, the total package could include something like:
- creating and developing your marketing program
- develop your whole customer story
- your customer personas
- preparing your marketing materials
- any advertisements or videos
- organizing your entire marketing campaign
Generally, you can have somebody in house, that’s on payroll, be responsible for this overall strategy, creation and execution of your marketing.
Or you can have an outside organization, like a consultant or marketing firm, be responsible for any of it, or in some cases for all of it, so it really depends on how you want to structure your business.
Often it depends on the size of your company.
Many organizations are not big enough to warrant having a full-time person with only marketing responsibilities and so what you can do is have an internal person that’s responsible for the marketing, someone that understands the businesses overall goals and core marketing strategy and then they work with outside personnel to create all the marketing pieces.
This is a glimpse of how the marketing component of your business could be organized and run if you identify that marketing is your weakness. You may manage it, you may oversee it, you may be the person that the marketing group reports to, but if marketing is an area of weakness you want to spend as little time as possible on this, while still making sure all the key activities are completed on a regular basis.