As entrepreneurs and business owners, we all have a lot on our plate. Any time, money or energy spent on marketing could always be going towards something else in your business. Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs get caught up:
At The Cultivate Method, we believe you can work smarter, not harder by making your existing resources go further for you so you can save your time, money and energy for more important business decisions.
To help you get started, here are our top tips for working smarter, not harder:
If you’ve already spent hours writing a caption for your social media account, putting together a new blog post, recording a podcast, filming a video, or producing some other digital content for your marketing - you can extend the life of that content by repurposing it. We are firm believers that you shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you want to promote your business or product!
An easy way to repurpose content is to lengthen or shorten it, and promote it on another channel. For example, you might have spent 2 hours writing a blog post. Now that it’s published, you can easily take sentences or quotes from that post and turn it into a series of Tweets or Instagram posts linking back to the blog post.
We’ve seen content repurposing taken to the extreme, like one 10 page ebook being turned into multiple blog posts, a series of emails, and weeks of social content. In this particular instance, the company’s audience didn’t tire of the content because they were actually reaching different segments of their customers through different channels (blog, email, social). This effort saved this marketing team hours of time in new content production and increased the value of their original ebook by increasing the number of customers who downloaded it and later purchased from them.
Keep in mind, if you’re lengthening or shortening content, make sure your newly repurposed content fits the format of the channel you’re using. That is to say, don’t take a blog post and copy/paste the entire thing into a Facebook post or email! Repurposing this way is a great way to drive traffic back to the original content, even after you’ve initially published it.
You can also refresh existing content. Let’s say you did a holiday gift guide last year, you can take that content and refresh it for the upcoming holiday season. This is a much lighter load than re-writing or re-doing an entire piece of content again.
Repurposing what you already have applies to in-person businesses, too! If you use signage or decorations, you can always reuse or repurpose those materials as long as they’re still in good condition. If you’ve got a network of other local businesses, you can also see if anyone is willing to swap materials with you, and repurpose that way, too!
Existing customers already have a relationship with your brand, and you don’t need to work on introducing your business to them and then convincing them to buy! But, many entrepreneurs overlook marketing to existing customers and encouraging them to buy additional products or upgrade their existing products.
If you’ve been keeping track of your customers in your point of sale, email or customer relationship management (CRM) system, marketing to them can be very straightforward. Reach out to them via your preferred method (usually email) and present the value proposition of another purchase. Some generic versions of this are:
Marketing to your existing customers will grow your customers’ lifetime value (CLTV or LTV*) and is an easy, relatively low-cost way to resurface your business in customers’ minds.
*A customer’s lifetime value is the total revenue you can expect from a customer throughout their relationship with your business.
Your business’ marketing to-do list might seem like it goes on forever, and part of prioritizing is deciding what is a need-to-have versus a nice-to-have. This will help you better manage your time and energy, and get your most important tasks done.
A need-to-have is something that must get done, otherwise it will jeopardize the health or existence of your business. For instance, in today’s digital age, an online presence is a need-to-have.
On the other hand, a nice-to-have is something that would add value, but may not be critical to your business. In marketing jargon, these are typically tasks that “don’t move the needle”. These can include extra touches like adding a video to your website’s header or changing your logo or company colors.
Once you have decided what’s a need-to-have versus a nice-to-have, you should get the need-to-have tasks done first. You can always revisit the nice-to-have tasks later. By getting your need-to-haves done first, you’ll be using your time more efficiently.
We’ll keep sharing our top tips for working smarter, not harder. If you have any tips to share, send them to us at hello@thecultivatemethod.com.
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Ada Chen
Ada Chen
