Last week I explained what an efficiency expert is and gave an example of four very important points that would be need to be dealt with in order to increase the business efficiency of the Life Coach example. Here are those points in more detail:
1. Current marketing tactics
If a marketing tactic isn’t bring in traffic to your website, clients to your door, or building your online credibility, then why would you want to waste your time still doing it?
Have a look at the analytics of your website, do some customer surveys, engage with your audience to find out what they like/don’t like, what they need. If one of your marketing tactics isn’t doing much and doesn’t look like it’s going to change anytime soon, chuck it.
2. Overall marketing plan
Many times I’ve come across folks who say stuff like, “I want to write more on my blog like I used to but I just don’t have the time anymore”. If you incorporate a few different marketing tactics into your small business, it’s easy to lose track of some and then get overwhelmed trying to keep up with them all.
The best thing you can do to save yourself some time, and to make sure that nothing gets lost along the way, is to create an overall marketing plan and incorporate it into your calendar. It could even be as simple as setting aside x amount of time per week to do certain things.
For example, every Tuesday from 1 – 3 pm block off your calendar to write blog posts for the next month. Or, the third Thursday of every month from 10 – noon block off time to create your monthly newsletter.
The idea is to set aside specific times to do specific tasks then block them off in your calendar so that they are not interrupted. It will be tempting at first to put them off if you’re busy or if you want to meet with a client instead, but if you stick to them you’ll learn to work the rest of your business around those times. In the end you’ll find that you’ll be ahead of the game, you’ll have all your ducks in a row with no surprises, and as a result you’ll find you have much more time available to do whatever you wish.
3. New product marketing plan
Now that we’ve got the existing marketing tactics all taken care of, we can see where there is available time to start adding new tactics.
Making a separate marketing plan for a specific tactic really helps to show you all the pieces that are involved so that you can be sure to complete everything in a logical sequence, and therefore have an accurate time line. It would really suck to have planned your first workshop by a certain date only to realize that there is no way to have all pieces of the puzzle ready by that time!
4. Delegation
Not everyone enjoys doing all parts of their small business, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Because we are all most efficient when we’re doing the tasks that we enjoy, it’s good to think about delegating those tasks that you don’t like to someone else whether it’s a virtual assistant or an in-house assistant. Delegation is the easiest way to free up your time and increase your business efficiency.
So, you can see the value of having an efficiency expert on your side: an efficiency expert can not only help you get your current business practices organized, they can also help you ensure that all the pieces of your small business are working together in the most efficient way, weed out those pieces that aren’t necessary anymore, make plans for growing and adding new ideas to the mix, and take unwanted tasks off your plate.