The Trouble with Time

We see this with our clients often – they start a marketing project with all sorts of vim, vigor and vitality and then, as real life starts to creep back in, they put their marketing efforts on the backburner. Of course we warn our clients about this trend and how it can have a negative impact on their project timelines. And of course they tell themselves that they won’t fall victim to that pattern. And of course they often do.

In fact, a lack of time available to dedicate to a project is one of the most common reasons that small businesses cave in and seek out “professional” help. We hear it quite often.... “I really enjoyed trying to learn how to build an adwords campaign. Then I got another project on my plate and I let it go for a couple of months. I now realize, I don’t have the time for it.”

In light of the fact that we as a Marketing Agency know that this happens all of the time, we should never fall victim to the same situation. Right? Wrong. In spite of this being what we do, like others, we find projects that fall onto our own plate and the first thing that we take off of our plate is the marketing of our own company. And ultimately, you can’t do that for very long.

A steady marketing effort ensures that the funnel of prospective new projects keeps filling up. And, in the same way as if you were filling up a pool of water, a slow steady stream of prospective projects is a much more efficient way of filling up that pool than trying to fill up all of a sudden in one shot and having most of the new “water” splash over.

So when it comes to your own marketing initiatives, try to avoid having those projects slip by scheduling regular team meetings to follow up on progress. As well, break the project up into smaller, measurable milestones. Make sure that you hit these milestones and you will avoid missing a longer project timeline. Finally, before tackling a project, be honest with yourself. Is this something that you are trying to squeeze on top of everything else or have you actually designated time out of your schedule to work on your marketing initiative?