I regularly receive newsletters or tweets or read blog posts about how you must stay on top of your marketing, how you should put time aside each day to do it and how not doing so will spell doom and disaster. And they’re right.
Except that I am in the marketing world and even I don’t always have the time to do it. I’m so busy doing the marketing for my clients that I run out of time to do my own. For example, those of you who are signed up to receive my newsletter might be wondering if I’m ever going to send another again. Then again, if your inbox is anything like mine, you probably get so many newsletters a day that not getting one is a boon. This blog is long overdue an update. And I’ve had a document open on my machine for a month (yes that’s a month, possibly longer) in which I am rewriting my web copy because my website is sadly out of date.
But when you are a mother and you’re trying to squeeze a full time job into school hours, there just isn’t enough time to do everything. But I am on a new found mission to sort it out. Not because business is drying up. To the contrary. I’ve had 8 new business requests in the last two weeks. But because I can’t talk the talk and not walk the walk.
This always- on, twittering, facebooking, blogging, frenzied world we live in means that we have even more to do than before. I see conversations going on which I know I could and should be contributing to, but it would mean my client’s press release not getting written or a call to a journalist not being put in. Right at this very moment I should be calling the Guardian, the Independent and the Sunday Times to see who wants to bite on a story. But I’m doing this blog instead. Partly because I know my own marketing is just as important as the client work I do, but mainly because I want to be able to cross it off my to do list.
So to everyone out there who feels as though they have been letting their marketing slide as they stagger under the weight of actually running their business. Don’t beat yourself up. It happens. Just try to squeeze in a bit when you can. This has taken me 15 minutes to write. Still plenty of time left to call those journos. See. Not that hard after all.