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Want to know how to market your business when you are fully booked?
When you are fully booked it is easy to stop marketing your business either because you don’t have the time, or it doesn’t feel important. However, marketing your business when your fully booked is key to staying fully booked. Keep on reading to find out how to market your business when you are fully booked.
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Why you need to continue to market your business even when you are fully booked
If you are fully booked, you might think that you no longer need to market your business. In fact, there are many business owners who see marketing as an activity they do when they need sales and as soon as they are fully booked, they don’t think marketing is as important anymore and since time is tight they stop marketing their business. This is a big mistake!
What often happens to business owners who have the above attitude to marketing is that once they’ve finished working with those clients they find themselves panicking because now they aren’t fully booked and they don’t have any leads for new clients. Don’t make this mistake. You should always be marketing your business whether you have 0 clients or are fully booked. Consistently marketing your business is maximise your chances of having consistent enquiries and leads into your business.
How to market your business when you are fully booked
1. Consider outsourcing your marketing
Now depending on what fully booked means to you fully booked may mean that you don’t physically have any time left to do your marketing. In that case, it may be that the only way you can continue to do your marketing when you are fully booked is by outsourcing it. Depending on what marketing you do for your business you might look to hire a virtual assistant (VA), a social media manager (SMM), an online business manager (OBM) or an ads manager.
Outsourcing can feel like a big step for many business owners and whilst it will free up time eventually you will need time to find the right person and to manage a successful onboarding process.
One thing I want to emphasis is that if someone else is going to look after your marketing then you need to have a comprehensive marketing strategy in place.
It may be that the person you hire is capable of creating and delivering a marketing strategy. However, I’ve found with many virtual assistants (VAs) that they are great at delivering, but don’t have the strategic knowledge to create the marketing strategy in the first place. In that scenario, you’ll need to create a marketing strategy yourself or have one created for you to ensure you get the best out of the VA (and I can help you with that!)
I specialise in creating marketing strategies that are designed to be managed by one person. That can be you or your VA I run Strategy Days where in just one day you’ll have a personalised marketing strategy made for your business then you can hand it over to your VA in confidence. Find out more and book a strategy day here.
Outsourcing is the obvious option in relation to continuing your marketing when you are fully booked. However, not everyone wants to outsource. If you don’t want to outsource then there are still options for you. However, I would highly recommend you read How to stay fully booked as coach or consultant. In this blog post, I go into greater detail about how to establish what fully booked looks like where you still have time to do the essential work outside of client work, such as marketing, finances, email etc.
2. Define what are your minimal marketing activities are
As a business owner, you need to make a commitment to what is the minimal marketing activity you’ll do no matter how busy you are.
Personally, for me no matter what is going on I commit to the following:
- Publishing a new blog post every Wednesday
- Sending an email newsletter once a week
- 4 posts on Instagram per week
Now normally I will do more than this, but as an absolute minimum I commit to these marketing activities and I know exactly how much time I need to set aside to complete those activities.
If you have decided to not outsource your marketing, you need to decide what are your minimal marketing and how long does that take.
3. Use technology to the max
When you are fully booked time is your most precious resource. Outsourcing is one way of expanding your resources. However, technology can also do some of the work for you. It may be that you look for using technology to automate a process that you do over and over again, or you might look to see if there is some technology that could replace something else you currently do.
CLIENT ONBOARDING AND OFFBOARDING
One area to look at is your client onboarding and offboarding. If this is currently a very manual process you could consider investing in software like Dubsado and Paperbell that automates most of the process.
CALENDAR MANAGEMENT
Another area that is often a time-consuming activity is calendar management. If you are currently having conversations with prospects to book discovery calls and then clients to book sessions calls then stop right now. Using software such as Calendly or Acuity means that people can book directly into your calendar and you no longer need to go back and forth all the time.
SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGEMENT
If you are posting all of your social media content in real-time then consider using a social media scheduler. Not only will enable you to take advantage of batching the creation of your content (Read about how batching your content can save you time here ) but by using a scheduler you’ll likely save even more time by not getting distracted when you just pop onto Instagram to do your post and then get caught scrolling.
EMAIL NURTURE SEQUENCES
Another area where you can maximise your time is via email marketing. I’m a big fan of setting up automated email sequences. They take work in the beginning but once you’ve taken the time to make the sequence they can run for months if not years without any more involvement from you. There are so many types of automated email sequences you can use but if you are new to this type of marketing I share 3 automated email campaigns every small business owner should try here.
All of the examples aren’t necessarily related to marketing your business, but any time saved from using technology across any part of your business will free time that you can then use to market your business.
4. Run paid digital advertising
If you are fully booked, I’d like to think you are making a healthy amount of profit in your business. If you aren’t then you need to rethink your business model and pricing. This might give you the opportunity to start or invest further in paid advertising. The beauty about paid advertising is once it is set up it needs some monitoring, but definitely is a lot less work than constantly creating content to post organically on social media. Nowadays there are lots of options to get started with digital advertising. There are digital advertising options on most social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn), as well as being able to run ads on Google, YouTube and Pinterest.
5. Drive people to your waitlist
Some business owners have told me one of the reasons they don’t market when they are fully booked is because they worry that if people can’t work with them straight away then they might lose the potential client. Yes, you might lose a few people, but unless your business caters for something very time-sensitive then people may be prepared to wait. In those situations, you can take advantage of a waitlist. Talk about the work you are currently doing with clients and how you are fully booked, but that people can sign up to your waitlist to be the first to hear when you have spaces available.
You can find out more about how to create and manage a waitlist here.
6. Make the most of your current clients
One of the big advantages of being fully booked is you should be currently be working with lots of clients. You can use this to your advantage in numerous ways.
Firstly, you can ask for referrals. This is particularly effective when you are coming to the end of working with someone. Tell them that since your working relationship is coming to an end, you’ll have space for a new client and is there anyone they think would benefit from working with you.
Secondly, use your current clients to spread the word about you. You might be too busy to do marketing, but that doesn’t mean your clients are. Think about what you can be doing to help ensure that your clients are sharing with others (in-person and online) that they are working with you and the great results they are getting.
There you have it! You now know how to market your business when you are fully booked.
Becoming fully booked is a great achievement, but don’t be fooled into thinking that once you’ve hit that level that you can stop marketing your business and still have a fully booked business.
If you want to stay fully booked it is key that you find a way to keep on marketing your business and hopefully by using the above suggestion, you’ll get clear on your minimal marketing activity and find a way to ensure it happens.
In the comments, I would love to hear about what you found most useful in this blog post.
WANT HELP WITH YOUR MARKETING STRATEGY?
I create personalised marketing strategies to ensure that business owners have a strategy that is manageable based on a business’ resources (time and money), as well as ensure the strategy is moving the business from its current position to its future goals.
If you are reading this blog post, then I’m sure time is tight and that is why I run strategy days. In just one day I’ll work with you to create a personalised marketing strategy that you can confidently deliver yourself (or let your VA do it). To find out more or to book a strategy day click here.
Don’t think a Strategy Day is right for you, but know you need some personalised marketing support. Don’t worry I offer a range of services. You can find out all the other ways I work 1-to-1 with solopreneurs and small business owners here.
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