Six quick marketing tips for busy mums

Struggling to stay on top of your marketing AND raise your family? Read six quick marketing tips to help you grow your business with minimum time and effort.

With so many responsibilities vying for your time (especially in the school holidays), it can sometimes be incredibly hard as a busy mum to keep up with marketing your business. But you must!

Lapsed marketing will rapidly undo any of your previous hard work, and you potentially run the risk of losing business to less time-poor competitors.

Six quick marketing tips for busy mums

Luckily you don’t need hours of free time to keep on top of your marketing – you just need to make the most of the time you do have, and use it wisely.

To help you create maximum impact with what little time you may have, marketing consultant Paula Hutchings shares her six quick marketing tips for busy mums.

1) Set weekly marketing goals

Find a quiet 10 minutes on the weekend to plan your marketing goals for the week ahead. Be realistic about what’s achievable, but try and note down two or three key goals that will have the most impact on your business.

Example goals might be to send out your e-newsletter, to publish a blog post or to follow up recent leads with a phone call. With tangible goals you can tick off, you are so much more likely to succeed.

2) Plan, plan, plan

When time is tight, it’s time to get military! And mums are brilliant at that, right? Allocate a time estimate to each marketing activity you have listed.

Will the task take 10 minutes, 30 minutes or longer? Having approximate timings in place gives you the flexibility to pick a task and whizz through it if a quiet patch occurs during the day (And yes, they do sometimes unexpectedly crop up – even the busiest of children have to eat or sleep at some stage!)

3) Automate your social media

If you’re active on social media, plan ahead and automate your posts using social media management tools like Buffer or Hootsuite.

Be sure to post a percentage yourself (to keep things personal and topical), but by automating the majority, you will save a lot of time and stress. One incredibly easy thing to tick off your marketing ‘to do’ list before the day even begins.

And for maximum impact, remember to schedule your posts for the time of day that your target audience are most active.

4) Divide and conquer your content marketing

If you write a blog, now is the time to get creative with your content. If it works for your business or brand, mix up your content so that you are not creating every post yourself from scratch. Think about other ways to generate interesting content that will engage with your audience (hopefully you are doing this already).

Could you line up contributions from guest bloggers? Profile interesting and relevant people? Curate and share insights from reputable sources?

Again, for maximum impact, be sure to post and promote your blog when your audience are most active – you don’t want your labour of love to go unnoticed.

5) Keep your newsletters short and sweet

If you regularly send out an e-newsletter, don’t be tempted to skip an issue when you’re busy – it looks unprofessional. Better to keep the content short and sweet but still distribute it.

The likelihood is that many of your recipients will be busy themselves from time to time. But a concise newsletter will keep you top of mind and reflect well on your commitment to your business.

6) Get creative with your networking

You might not be able to travel to meetings all that easily with children around, or if you’re restricted by school runs, but that doesn’t mean networking needs to grind to a halt. Phone calls and Skype can be tricky (if not disastrous!) with children in tow, but try to seek out relevant online networking sessions and link in with those.

Is there a Twitter hour that you could tap into? Many of these run in the evenings after children’s bed time. Or a Facebook or Google hangout? There are countless options. You just need to do some digging to find the right fit for your business. And if you make positive connections, plan ahead and organise a face-to-face meet up for when you’re child-free.

Need more marketing tips?

You’ll find more quick marketing wins in these articles:

Have you got a marketing question? Tweet Paula @MarketingVC or get in touch through her website. She’d love to hear from you.