Ah, the world of being an entrepreneur. One hour you’re the CFO, the next you’re trying your hat at IT, then you find yourself in the Public Relations field. It’s exhausting. I know. I’ve been there and well, I’m there right now.

But the easiest way to handle all those tasks is to have a system in place for each one. Steps and procedures.

Fortunately you have me and the team here at Marketing Solved. For those days when you’re wearing your CMO hat, you can always refer to our plethora of resources. I mean come on, it’s in our name, Marketing SOLVED.

Often times I find myself slipping away from my focus on my daily marketing tasks and thumbing through Facebook or Tind… I mean Twitter. For those days I wish I had this article to keep me on track.

Fortunately, now I do, and so do you!

Here’s a simple guide to check off your daily marketing tasks!

 

1) Address Your Engagements

If you’re used to the Office Space type of lifestyle, then this should come naturally, you’ll just have to think broader in terms of channels. Open your email, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or whatever other social media platforms you’re on and check your engagements. Likes, follows, shares, messages, etc.

Address them all. If someone comments on a picture or a status update, like their comment and address it if applicable.

This step is first on the list because it’s important to address social interactions in a timely manner. Hubspot’s research shows 72% of customers expect a response from a business within an hour. And this is only trending upward.

However, listening and responding to all of your social engagements can become tiring, especially if you’re on multiple platforms. Fortunately, you can use social tools like HootSuite or my personal favorite, Sprout Social to interact and engage with all of your likes, comments, and messages from one dashboard.

Great tools like Sprout Social will turn this:

 

Into this:

 

Oh, and if you didn’t catch the fantastic article before this one, then you’ll want to check it out to see why engaging with your audience is going to be a major trend in 2018.

See: “9 Social Media Marketing Trends to Use in 2018”

 

2) Review Reports

Once you address your engagements, it’s time to check out those reports. Hopefully you already have an idea of how your reports are going to look by the amount of social interaction you either have or have not dealt with.

But it’s important to know the actual figures as well as some of the more granular engagement records. Especially compared to last month. Although year-over-year metrics are preferred, month to month can be good as well, but be wary, engagement and search trends change all the time day-to-day, week-to-week, and month-to-month. So just because you have a down month compared to last doesn’t mean you did anything wrong, it could just be a natural fluctuation in market trends.

Google Analytics

This doesn’t necessarily have to be the first place you go to view analytics. I just put so much emphasis on it because I’m an SEO and I build websites. So naturally I like to see where my traffic is going and how they’re interacting with my site.

Are they bouncing from my site once landing on it?

How many pages are they viewing per session?

Did any of my optimizations last month make an impact this month?

Taking a look at your “Channels” report will also give you great insight as to where your customers are coming from, as in, which social platform for example. This will help you determine which site you may need to spend more time in and capitalize on.

At the end of the day, it’s not how about how many likes or comments you have, it’s about how many people are interested in what you have to offer from a buying standpoint. If you have 5,000 likes on Facebook while only 300 followers on LinkedIn, it might be easy to say that Facebook is more valuable to be on.

This is where Google Analytics comes in. You’ll be able to see that perhaps none of the 5,000 likes actually visit your website and turn into sales, but 25% of all your LinkedIn followers do. Now which one is more valuable to you?

Social Media Metrics

Much like Google Analytics, social media metrics will show you the important things you need to know about your social profiles including daily, weekly, and monthly comparison reports. You’ll want to keep track of these metrics on each platform because you’ll be able to see where your pain points are, where your engagement is dropping or increasing, and you’ll be able to set measurable goals.

Fortunately, if you pay for HootSuite and Sprout Social, you can get all of your reporting data in one place and you don’t have to flip flop through your windows.

Search Console

I always check Google Search Console reports for keyword data to my site. I highly recommend you get this set up if you don’t already have it tracking keywords to your site.

You’ll be able to see what people typed into Google for your website to show up. And often times you’ll see that you may not be showing up until the 4th page of search results for a specific keyword. This will give you an idea of what you need to optimize for in the coming months.

Related: “12 Things You Should Do To Every Blog Post Before and After You Publish”

 

3) Review Upcoming Content and Posts

If you’re a smart and proactive business owner, you’ve probably got posts ready to go in your pipeline. Now that you’ve reviewed analytics and data from yesterday, or even last week if you’re doing this on a weekly basis, you’re ready to start looking forward.

Take a look at the posts you have in your pipeline. Are they engaging? Does each post have a purpose? Do I have enough posts? Do I have too many?

Knowing your upcoming posting schedule will definitely alleviate the stresses of being your own CMO.

 

4) Seek Out Post and Content Opportunities

The greatest posts on there are ones that are contextually relevant. This means the content doesn’t simply have a message, but that it is relevant to either the context or your buyer’s persona.

For instance, imagine being in the lawn care industry (because that’s what I’m familiar with), let’s say you’ve been holding a blog post about how to deal with fungus after a lot of heavy rain. Then, you hear on the news that the following week is going to have an 80% chance of thunderstorms and rain all week.

This is an excellent opportunity to be contextually relevant to your audience. Repost the article and share it on social media like crazy right at the end and right after the rainy week. Do you think the engagement on this post would be about the same or better than if you posted this during a fairly dry month?

Another thing to do is look up national holidays (even the lame ones). Find something relevant to your industry or business. A common one is Pi day, you know, March 14th. Bakers and restaurants that sell pie often use the context of this holiday to create an engaging ad.

One of my favorite well known SEO quotes is,

“If content is king, then context is queen. If you only have content, then you have a kingdom of one.”

Other variations of that go like,

“Content is king and context is queen and she holds the purse.”

Keep this in mind in all of your posts. The message is there, but is it relevant to your audience at that time and that place?

 

5) Create a game plan

Now that you’ve responded and engaged with  your audience, reviewed your reporting dashboards, and found opportunities for posts, create your game plan. Create some posts and schedule them out for next month and stay on top of things. But don’t just post to post or write to write. There has to be a purpose to everything that is posted and written.

Start with where you think your pitfalls were last month in the reporting. Did you have high bounce rates? Were the amount of engagements on your social posts lower than you expected? Did you rank any higher for keywords you were trying to rank for previously?

If you were running email campaigns, look at those metrics. What was your open rate? Maybe you need a better subject line. Maybe try segmenting your list for better click through rates.

Whatever the challenge or pain point was last month, create a plan to address it in the coming days and weeks. And remember, just because you didn’t have success with something last month, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work, you might just need to tweak something in your ad copy.

Take a study by Unbounce for instance; they found that just using the word ‘Submit’ on a form fill button can decrease conversion rates by 3%. It seems to just be kind of a stoic, emotionless word. And we all know 90% of all purchase decisions are based on emotion.

 

6) Engage with Your Audience and Potential Customers on Social Media

I swear I’m not just repeating a step here. This one is a little different than number 1. Once you have everything reviewed and your plan mapped out for next week or month, start actively seeking out your audience and engage with them. Like their posts, retweet, and look for mentions of your brand or types of products you sell.

This is one of the best ways to reach out to your audience who doesn’t follow you yet. For instance, every time I post a picture to my Instagram of my work space, I tag Microsoft in it because I’m using their equipment. I don’t do it because I’m bragging that I have a Windows Surface 2 (okay I was there), I do it because I genuinely want to see if Microsoft is paying attention. And wouldn’t you know it, 100% of the time I get a like on my photo from Bill Gates’ baby.

And yeah, that’s right. I just linked this post to my Instagram. Give me a follow if you want to see pictures of my dog and me drinking wine. #NoShame

It shows your brand is listening and paying attention. Nothing is worse than seeing a brand ignore its audience.

I’ll give you one more example. And this is one I do ALL the time. This is the one that actually gets me the most follows, leads, and interactions.

It’s simply me joining group discussions and forums related to my industry (lawn care and landscaping). Join Facebook groups where your customers are. If you sell business consulting services, join a Facebook group for entrepreneurs. Find a forum site online and engage. However, try not to solicit too much. The sales pitch isn’t what these people are looking for. They’re looking for answers.

When I join a group, I wait for a marketing question to come up and I answer it. I don’t try to sell my services, I just tell them exactly how to solve it. Just like I’m writing a blog. And the next thing I know, I’m getting messages. People don’t buy your products or services, they buy YOU.

Or as Jeffrey Gitomer puts it,

“People don’t like being sold to, but they love to buy!”

 

“People don’t buy your product, they buy YOU”

 

7) Continue Learning!

Don’t just get stuck in the endless rinse-and-repeat cycle. Continue learning every day! I learn new things everyday with digital marketing and I always tell myself, “the more I learn the more I find out I don’t know.”

Once you start planning things out, you no longer have to scramble each day trying to figure out what to do for your marketing. You’ll plan out next month. Then when next month is rolling, you’ll plan out the following. Easy, right?

Well if you’re like me and you procrastinate to get EVERYTHING done, then check out our Monthly Marketing Solved program. We’ll literally take care of your social media posts and schedules for you and it’s less than $50/mo when you go annual.

Ha! And you thought it couldn’t get simpler…

 

Still not convinced? Fine! Then have some free stuff. Click the offer below and get some FREE marketing goodies from us.