It is always fun to entertain a hypothetical scenario, especially one that could prove to be true at some point in your future. You may find yourself in a situation in which you need to turn around a marketing plan within twenty-four hours.
Imagine yourself giving a presentation to investors on the state of your online marketing campaign with very short notice. What would you do?
Let’s take a look at how you might spend your time if you only had one full day to improve your business’s online marketing.
Improving Your Online Marketing
Assumptions
First, let’s start out with a couple of basic parameters.
In this scenario, you have zero notice that you will be improving your marketing life. This has a definite impact on how you spend your time, considering you won’t be able to plan for what to do.
Not only that, but you also won’t have time to set meetings except with potential vendors, who will charge you extra for the convenience.
Finally, for the sake of argument, let’s also assume that you have a decent budget with which to work, because your boss (or you yourself) have deemed this a critical activity.
The First Twelve Hours (The Easy Ones)
Let’s start with a simple task to get us warmed up. There is nothing that reflects more poorly on your online marketing efforts than a bulked-up inbox with lots of unfilled requests. Categorize, sort, and respond to pending emails in the first hour. This has the added benefit of allowing you to focus on your work, not your email, for the next twenty-three hours.
Next: planning. Take one hour to sketch out short-term plans and one hour for longer-term plans. This can help inform how you approach your work, and doing this early in your marketing day will ensure your mind is fresh and ready. What sorts of things can you do in the short term to improve relationships and build recognition for your brand? What about the longer term?
We tend to build our social media presences once and then leave them to grow outdated over time. Spend the next three hours working on updating not only your social media platform profiles (YouTube, Facebook, and all the rest), but also your own website’s copy. Do not get bogged down in implementing it, only worry about how it reads. You can upload it later if necessary.
What are other companies doing that you’re not? After an intense three hours of social media updates, take another two hours to detail where your marketing efforts are being emphasized and what avenues you might be ignoring. If you have analytics in place, make note of any metrics you can find about the return on your digital marketing investment.
Four hours left of the first twelve hours. As you will be coming down from some intense work, here’s an opportunity to focus on the remaining activities that can create a large impact on your marketing efforts are:
- Keywording: generate a comprehensive list of keywords that apply to your work and business. This goes beyond SEO and can influence many aspects of your online presence.
- Blog or Article Ideas: create a list of pending topics about which you can write freely. Don’t write them yet, but let them stew in your mind for future creative endeavors.
- Graphic changes: make a list of the art assets within the scope of your online marketing. Also list which of these should be updated or replaced. This includes icons, color schemes, photographs, etc.
The Last Twelve Hours (The Hard Ones)
This is where it really gets challenging. Let’s update the assumptions: you have already worked a twelve hour day, and you’re already exhausted, so maybe we need to save some of the lowest-impact work, or the work requiring the least amount of brain power, for around this time.
If you have email that’s built up over the last twelve hours of not checking it, now is the time to check it. Take an hour if necessary to get that out of the way.
Put together a marketing survey over the next two hours. Spend time, if necessary, to read a bit about the art of the survey, how to word questions, and in what order to place them. This will include questions about your marketing campaign’s effectiveness, how customers came to find out about your business, and the perception of your brand. Consider offering incentives to those who participate in the survey, and roll it out via social media.
If you are the webmaster of your site, consider two more hours of implementing SEO changes. You will have generated keywords and blog titles at the tail end of the previous twelve hours, so make those changes now. List your site’s pages and posts, and upgrade them with newer and more accurate keywords. Edit content on recent posts to be better keyworded and titled.
Write some new content. Take two hours and explain exactly why you have taken the time to update your online marketing to your customers. Remember that customers in the Internet age value accessibility and transparency. An in-depth article about your experiences reaching out to customers (if done in a professionally honest way) will endear you to your customers.
If you have done these tasks in the last consecutive nineteen hours, you may want to take a rest right now. You have worked hard to turn around what you can, and have planned for your future efforts. If you are taking this all the way to the full twenty-four hours, though, round that out with these activities:
- Resourcing: using the information you jotted down about your efforts versus those of other companies, make note of where your resources are going. Take a look at your return on investment and consider un-allocating some of your underperforming investments.
- Brainstorming: since it’s likely late, or at least you’re likely sleep-deprived, take this groggy time to think of new and creative ways to reach your customers. Go beyond the obvious advertising and social media outlets to forums, news sites, or some completely unrelated place.
- Write more: don’t publish when you’re sleep-deprived, but this may be a great opportunity to get started on drafting some more content. Again, consider something a bit outside the norm for your business, perhaps a series of Twitter posts that tell a story or a script for a new YouTube video series.
- Housekeeping: you are the curator of your own and your business’s online presence. Google yourself or your business to see what comes up. If it’s not what you want, think of ways to change that. Hopefully some of the activities you’ve done in the last day will cover you!
Turning around your online marketing strategy won’t happen literally overnight, but if you had to work on it, you could really make a difference in a day. What have we accomplished with our hypothetical twenty-four hours? We’ve made sure your presence is as updated, accurate, and well-written as possible. We’ve generated new content that reflects on our transparency and honesty, which has definite value to consumers. And, most importantly, we’ve reflected on our current state and made some solid plans for where we will go in the future.
