How to take a break from marketing without your business suffering

Want to know how to take a break from marketing without your business suffering? For many small business owners, marketing is a necessary evil. They know that they have to do it in order to generate leads and sales, but it isn’t exactly something they love doing. If you feel that way it might be that you find yourself wanting to take a break from marketing, but you don’t want that to mean there is a drop in leads and sales. Keep on reading to find out how to take a break from marketing without your business suffering.

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HOW TO TAKE A BREAK FROM MARKETING WITHOUT YOUR BUSINESS SUFFERING

1. Schedule your marketing for your break

If you want to be able to take a break from marketing without your business then the first option you have is to schedule your marketing your advance.

Scheduling is where you will create the content and then rather than posting it at that moment you will set a date for when the content will be published in the future.

Depending on the type of marketing channels and platforms you use in your business it may be that you can schedule directly or you can use a third-party.

For example, you can schedule emails directly in your email service provider, you can schedule the release of YouTube videos within YouTube and you can schedule posts directly in-app for Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn.

However, if you are posting across multiple social media platform it might make more sense to use a third-party social media schedule. For example, I use Later as it enables me to quickly to be able to schedule posts across multiple platforms where I use the same video/image and then I adjust the captions accordingly (add hashtags for Instagram, shorten for X, add the link in for LinkedIn etc).

You can find out more about why I love using Later here.

2. Focus on marketing that has a lifespan of a couple of months and longer

There are many ways to market your business. Each option (and even the way you use different channels or platforms will impact how long the marketing activities last for). For example, if you post a video on TikTok it will usually appear in the feed for a few days and then disappear. But if you optimise your video for search then it can continue to be found for months afterwards.

So, if you want to able to take breaks from actively marketing your business but still generate leads and sales then it would be a good idea ensure that some of your marketing activities last for months. For example, if you know you are going to take an extended break over the summer then you could in spring focus on creating content that would last for months and therefore still be happening in summer.

Here some options to consider:

Long-form content that is optimised for search

You can create long-form content (whether that be blog posts, podcast episodes or YouTube videos) to market your business. Long-form content enables you to be able to provide valuable content, demonstrate your expertise and help nurture people.

The lifespan of long-form content can be relatively short. The majority of consumption is likely to be within the first week of release. However, when you optimise that content for search you can drastically increase the lifespan of that content.

If you optimise your content so that is appears in search engines, like Google or YouTube, you end up in a position where a piece of long-form content can continue to be consumed for YEARS!

Automated email sequences

Email marketing is a great way to great way to generate leads and sales. However, many small businesses predominately use email marketing to send newsletters. My definition of a newsletter is an email that is sent to your whole (or the majority) of your mailing list. Newsletters have a short lifespan. An email will usually be read the day it arrives, or within a few days, or not at all. In many ways sending a newsletter is similar to posting on social media. To keep top of mind you have to keep on publishing fresh new content.

However, automated email sequences are different. With an automated email sequences you’ll create a series (2+) of email and they’ll be sent out based on an action. For example, a common way to use an automated email sequence is that if someone signs up for a lead magnet they’ll then receive a series of emails, which includes the lead magnet, but then will often be nurturing the subscriber with the aim of making a sale.

The beauty of an automated email sequence is that once created they’ll continue to run for months or years. And because they are based on a specific action you can craft your marketing messaging in a very target way.

Digital advertising

So far, I’ve focused on organic (free) forms of marketing. But if you have a marketing budget then you should seriously consider running some digital advertising. The beauty of digital advertising is that you can set an advert up and then allow it to run for months. Ideally, you’ll want to monitor (as things do change), but it can be a fairly passive way to market your business once you’ve done the initial set up.

You might decide to run digital advertising on a social media platform (like LinkedIn, Instagram or TikTok), a search engine (like YouTube) or on a specific website.

MASTER MULTI-CHANNEL CONTENT MARKETING SO YOUR BUSINESS IS ALWAYS BEING MARKETED.

Having a multi-channel marketing strategy will mean whether you are, or aren’t, currently actively marketing your business marketing is still happen. Inside of Sales Beyond Social, my 6-week marketing accelerator, you’ll learn how to master using the content marketing trifecta (blog, email and social) and have a multi-channel marketing approach that increase visibility, clients and total revenue.

Click here to sign up or join the waitlist.

3. Hire someone else to do your marketing

If you haven’t already realised in order to be able to have a break from marketing without your business suffering some marketing needs to happen during your break. So far we’ve looked at scheduling in advance so that it will continue to run over your break or using marketing that last for months so it will be still running over your break. But in both instances the focus is still on your doing the marketing. And, the fact is, marketing needs to happen for your business, but it doesn’t mean you need to do it. There is always the options to outsource your marketing.

There are plenty of freelance marketers and assistants out there that would be happy to market your business for you. Depending on the variety of marketing channels you are using in your business, and the level of experience you need, you could look at hiring a marketer, a social media manager (SMM) or a virtual assistant (VA.

And if you don’t want to outsource your marketing because you don’t want to employ someone then the great news is there are plenty of people who will work for you on a freelance basis.

That’s it! You now know how to take a break from marketing your business without your business suffering.

Without knowing your business, I can’t advise whether your best option is to schedule, to focus on content that has a longer lifespan or to outsource your marketing.

If you are reading this blog post and want to go on a break next week then outsourcing to someone you trust is going to be difficult and if you haven’t already been creating content with a longer lifespan then your best option will be to schedule.

In general, scheduling is usually a good first point of call. Then to make things easier in the future embracing a multi-channel marketing strategy that incorporates marketing activities with a longer lifespan would be good.

I hope you have found this blog post useful. Let me know in the comments what your biggest takeaway has been.