“I don’t have time to any marketing this week – I’ve got too much work to do.”

“I can’t come to the networking meeting – one of my clients wants to see me.”

How often do you hear yourself saying things like this? These and phrases like them are ones I hear all too often. They’re said by people who are busy running their businesses, but who don’t know where the next bit of work is coming from. They don’t want to turn down any work in case nothing else comes their way for a while. They don’t feel they can ask a client to wait, in case they go elsewhere.

Why is this a problem? Because if you don’t find the time to do a bit of marketing on a regular basis, you’ll find that, eventually, all the work you’re busy doing will finish and you’ll have nothing with which to replace it.

“But I’m too busy to do any marketing!” I hear you cry! “How am I supposed to fit it in?”

The answer is to create a marketing schedule. We do this on flip chart sheets which we put on the wall of our office, so we can all see what needs to be done. Down the left hand side we list all the marketing activities we carry out – blogs, twitter, newsletters, networking meetings, client meetings and all the rest. Along the top we put the date, with a week in each column. For each activity, we can work out what we need to do, what we’ve got time to do and who can do it. For example, in March next year, we’re running another one of our popular SOS Marketing Planning workshops. This means that in February my email newsletter, Scribbles, will be all about marketing planning; the schedule shows that I need to start writing that issue in the first week of February for publication in the third week. It also shows how many blogs we’ll be writing in the run up to the workshop, all about Marketing Planning – how to do it, why do it, what mistakes to avoid. The week that the newsletter is published, I’ll put something onto LinkedIn to say that it’s been published; we’ll tweet a link to the new issue. During January and February I’ll be telling people about the workshop when I got networking. And we planned all this in the first week of December for a March event!

Creating a schedule helps you integrate your marketing – link it all together for better effect. It also means you know what to write, speak or tweet about. Knowing this in advance saves a lot of time staring at a blank sheet of paper, wondering where to start.

For more on how to create your own marketing schedule, grab a copy of Magnetic Marketing from our  website – p63 shows a great example of a schedule – or come to our workshop in March!