Maintaining Momentum When You’re Booked + Busy

Staying consistent remains one of the top marketing challenges I hear about – both from the creative small business owners that I work with one-on-one and those in my own personal networking. 

You’re either doing all of the marketing or not at all – until the anxiety of not doing enough gets too much and you throw out a random social media post or email to check “marketing” off your to-do list and alleviate the pressure. 

There are a lot of reasons why you might fall into this cycle, from the anxiety around being visible to a fundamental mismatch between your business objectives and marketing strategy. 

But what about this scenario: Your marketing was effective and now you’re booked and busy, delivering on client work. 

With deadlines, deliverables and sales to fulfill you just don’t have the capacity to keep up marketing at the same pace. It’s totally understandable that priorities have shifted and there just isn’t the same amount of time for marketing activities. 

That might be fine until a dry-spell looms on the horizon and you gear up to start the cycle of doing all of the things once again. 

And hey, if running your business that way is working for you then keep on keeping on. 

But if it’s not – and given how consistently I’m hearing about consistency in the Slow & Steady ecosystem I’m guessing it probably isn’t! – then there is a way to get off the roller coaster and maintain your momentum when you’re at a fuller client capacity. 

First things first, let’s recognize that you’re just one person who is doing a lot of jobs – jobs that in a larger organization would have dedicated full-time hires and departments to everything that you do: service delivery, order fulfillment, admin, marketing, fixing the printer… 

You’re not bad at business if you’re not maintaining a consistent marketing cadence! You likely just need some tweaks to your approach.

Here’s how to do just that: 

Get to understand what’s true for your business: Where do your clients and customers come from? What are your best sources of referrals? Once they find you, how do they behave? Are they purchasing right away or hanging around in your ecosystem for a while? Do you need a lot of smaller sales to meet your revenue goals or just a few, high-ticket clients that you’ll work with for a few months or longer at a time? What kinds of marketing activities are enjoyable and what drains your energy? 

Business is always going to be an experiment, but there’s no shortage of data and analytics you can look at and analyze to make a more educated decision about your next steps. No two businesses are alike, which is why secret magic formulas or copying someone else’s strategy just isn’t going to be effective (and may actually cause more stress and work!). 

Cash forecasting + planning: Are you anxious about marketing or freaking out about cash flow? While they go hand-in-hand, they are fundamentally different problems with separate solutions. 

Before you even think about marketing planning, get crystal clear on the money side of your business. This is why the first step of Flourish is always reviewing financials, creating a cash forecast and setting revenue goals. And “as much as possible” isn’t a clear enough goal! Without knowing what you’re trying to achieve and why, you’ll always feel like you’re spinning your wheels. 

With a cash forecast you can start to anticipate peaks and valleys and then plan accordingly. You’ll know exactly when you might need to put the pedal to the metal and when you can ease off the gas.

Prioritize “just enough”: I like to think of marketing as a sandwich because a swipe of peanut butter on a single piece of bread, folded over like a suitcase is just as much as a sandwich as a triple-decker turkey club with all the fixings. But depending on your needs, preferences and resources there are times when you’ll choose one over the other.  

The same is true for how much marketing your business needs. There will be seasons when you need more or less; if you’re in start-up or growth mode you’ll probably need to be doing a lot more marketing then when you’re in a maintenance phase. Or maybe you have priorities outside of work and business that need your attention so you’re operating on critical tasks only. 

Not sure where you are? Go back to steps one and two above! 

And in those lean teams when a peanut butter suitcase is all you can muster – prioritize just enough: you don’t have to be doing everything everywhere all at one all of the time. What are the key activities that really move the needle in your business? What does your business really need right now – more leads, awareness, connection or sales? Prioritize the most effective tactics that fulfill those objectives and put everything else on the back burner. 

Put systems in place to free up your mental energy: You may never be able to lighten the mental and emotional load of marketing your business, but you can free up energy from other places by taking advantage of systems and automations when and where you can. 

Let your invoicing, scheduling, task management, client on- and off-boarding and other repetitive admin tasks run on autopilot while you’re out in the real world, building your network and growing your business. When you’re booked and busy, you’ll be glad that you did!