7 small business changes to maximize time for marketing

Marketing is essential for every small business and content creator. After all, in order for people to buy your products, they have to know you exist!

As a content creator, you wear many hats, which means that sometimes there might simply not be enough time for you to do everything. While you are busy running your business, and creating new offers, you might not spend as much time as you want on marketing.

The good news is that there are many small and effortless changes you can make within your business that will allow you to allocate more time to marketing your business, which will ensure growth and long-term success.

7 small changes to make that will help you run your business more efficiently

1. Get an accounting software

Every small business owner needs good, reliable accounting software. It will allow you to see your profits and your spending, and you will be much better at managing your expenses. This will allow you to deal with tax returns much more efficiently, which means less stress and more time for other things, like marketing.

Also, the majority of accounting software allows you to invoice directly through them. This means that you can make invoicing as easy and quick as possible, without having to manually write and send invoices.

The accounting software we recommend are:

• FreshBooks
• Xero
• QuickBooks

2. Outsource to virtual assistants

There are some tasks in your business that require you to be the one who executes them. However, there are also plenty of tasks that you can definitely outsource to someone else, which will give you more time to focus on more important matters.

You can hire a part-time assistant if you are ready for this step in your business, or you can hire freelance experts to help you with things like graphic design, website building, etc. Even hiring a virtual assistant for a few hours per week can make a huge difference.

Here are some of the business tasks you can easily outsource to your virtual assistant to free up your time:

• Writing invoices
• Editing course material
• Editing video and audio files
• Creating graphics for social media and your online course
• Answering business emails
• Customer service
• Managing your schedule
• Data entry
• Research
• Simple website maintenance
• Planning events

3. Use AI

AI tools like ChatGPT can be a fantastic way to help you be more efficient with your time. You can use the AI tools to help you outline your course materials, brainstorm ideas, and craft sales emails and other marketing copy. There are so many different uses for AI.

However, the most important way it can help is by making content creation much more effortless. Use AI to generate ideas, and to get you started when you are creating content for your online course, or digital products like ebooks.

AI tools are there to make your work as a content creator easier, so make sure you utilize them. You will notice that when you are able to produce content much faster, you’ll be able to create more offers and spend more time marketing your business so you can reach more people.

4. Create templates

Another way to optimize the new product creation is by creating templates (or formulas) you can use over and over again. Every digital product, from a workbook to an online course will have a formula you can use to create the final product. This formula or template will be the skeleton you can build on every time you create a new offer.

Let’s say you sell online courses and products on sustainable personal fashion. You might want to create a template for an online course so that every time you want to create a new online course, you can use the skeleton to build out a course on a new topic.

The same can be done with other digital products like ebooks. Let’s say you have an ebook about building a capsule wardrobe for fall. When you want to create an ebook about building a capsule wardrobe for summer, you can use the same template to save time and create a new offer with ease.

Creating different templates for a variety of products will take some time upfront. But it is a worthy investment because it will save you time and effort later down the line.

5. Use Google Calendar

Use Google Calendar to track your time, appointments, meetings, and even new product launches. This will help you be more organized, and will greatly decrease your chances of missing a deadline or forgetting something. You will have much more capacity for being creative and even marketing.

You might also consider using a time-blocking system to manage your time. This will allow you to be much more attentive to where you spend your time. It will also help you be more productive because you will know exactly what you need to do at what time.

Also, some productivity experts swear by the task batching strategy, which means that you batch similar tasks into time blocks, to avoid switching between different modes (creative versus business, etc.). This might help you find more time for marketing if you can dedicate a time block every week solely for those activities.

6. Optimize your email inbox

Finding an effective way to manage your email inbox can free up a lot of time in your day. Harvard Business Review found that on average we spend almost 1/3 of our day checking and responding to our emails.

If you notice that your inbox is occupying a lot of your attention every day, consider using a tool like Clean Email to help you be more efficient with email management. This tool is especially useful if you have a lot of unread emails, and need to organize your inbox.

It has features like Smart Views which groups certain types of emails together, so you can easily sort through the categories that are most time-sensitive or important on any given day. There are many more useful features Clean Email has that can greatly reduce the time you spend in your inbox every day.

7. Manage projects in one place

If you are mostly working solo, with only occasionally outsourcing to freelancers or virtual assistants, you might not be using project management tools to manage your business. While it might work, chances are that if you used a project management tool even if you’re solo, you’d be much more efficient when you work.

You see, when you have all of your notes and documents organized and in one place, you can be more focused on what you need to accomplish each day. Plus, these tools allow you to break down projects you are working on into manageable tasks.

When you do hire a freelancer to help you with your project or part of the project, you can also share pieces of information or content with them more easily, which saves you time. So, when you switch to a project management tool, you will be making your life easier in the present and the future.

Here are some tools we recommend:

• Notion
• Trello
• Asana