Tag: Time Management

How to Plan the Marketing for Your Upcoming Event

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How to Plan the Marketing for Your Upcoming Event Big Event

In my last article I talked about Creating a Live Event – The Basics to Get Started. Creating the perfect event at a venue where your clients are really going to connect with your message with a valued outcome is only the first step. If you want to fill the room you have to market your event.

Great marketing for an event, whether it is a live event, a product launch, a telesummit, etc. is really about the planning. Here is a timeline to planning your next event.

Start at The End

Big Event

Start on the date of the event and work backwards to the current date to create a timeline for your marketing touches.

On the day of the event

  • You may want to send out some final reminders to your list. There may be people that have wanted to attend but did not take action and now with this last invitation they may join in. This is especially true if you have a recording that can get after the event, but only for those who are signed up.
  • Send out a reminder to those that are attending so they will not miss the event they have signed up for.
  • If you have a way for people to engage with the event without attending you may want to announce or re-announce that today. For instance, maybe there will be a Tweet-up conversation to follow.

Close to the event

  • Final reminders, flyers, networking invitations: Make sure that everyone that you have told about the event hears about it again.
  • If an early bird pricing is expiring then let people know about this.
  • If there is a change to the event (more speakers, a larger room, sold out) let people know about it.
  • Get others talking about the event (online and in-person)
  • If you are offering a live feed, a recording or a way to engage without attending then announce it close to the event date.

Coming up to the event

  • Do an initial announcement (in the form of a free talk or somehow in person) so that people are energized by your excitement for the event.
  • Have a regular way of keeping this information fresh and top-of-mind for those you want to come.

Before you start

  • Send out a teaser about your event to let people know that something is going to happen – that you have an announcement that will affect your customers and clients.

Remember there are a lot of ways you can do your marketing, from online, in person, and email to traditional mailing, etc. There may be hundreds of ways to connect with your clients and this plan only gives you the basic milestones, you will also need to schedule the type of touches you will want to create and manage throughout this time.

Tools Talk – From a Layman’s Perspective – Social Media

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There are a lot of great tools available to help run your businesses smoothly. Many of them are free. The challenge around looking at tools isn’t that they are too hard to use, because many applications are very easy to quickly learn. The challenge is knowing how to use it in a way that adds value to your business. I want to talk to you about the Social Media tools you can use in your business that are extremely valuable and can increase your ROI if used appropriate or waste your time if used without Intent.

Empire Ave profile for BarbStuhlemmer

Social Media

This could include Facebook, Empire Avenue, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, WordPress, etc. There are thousands to choose from. Every time I turn around someone is inviting me to something new. “Where to start, which ones to use, how much time to spend on it, and how do I evaluate the ROI of my use,” are all really important questions for social media. It is scary to think how much time is actually wasted on these programs when people do not use them with Intent. Here are my top appropriate uses and the ways people waste time with these tools.

Appropriate

  • Start where your clients are. Find out which 2 programs are the most used by your clients. Ask your best clients because you want more of them.
  • Only focus on one or two programs. It is not necessary to be on every social media application. Do not accept every invitation. It is OK to be focused and intentional on one or two platforms instead of spread thin and not very engaging on six or seven.
  • Even if you are not going to actively use LinkedIN I believe it is important to have a professional profile on this platform. I have actually received training engagements through the connects I have made on this platform and I do not use it for my social media activities.
  • Create a blog. You can do this, even if you are not a prolific writer. It gets easier and you can start by having a WordPress website that has a blog you post once a month to. I do recommend you post more often than that if you can, but if you cannot then start with something you feel comfortable with that is at least once a month.
  • Define how much time you will spend doing your social media marketing and when you will do it. Don’t worry; the world will continue to exist if you are not present for a few hours or a few days online. Be very diligent to stick to your focus or you will not see the ROI you hoped for.
  • Use some sort of analytics to help measure the success of your efforts. Some applications have built-in analytics (Empire Avenue, HootSuite, Twitter)and there are lots of third party (outside the program) software applications that can easily be used to measure (like Google Analytics and Klout). You can simply start by keeping track of how many followers you have or how many ‘likes’ you get. This is an indication of influence and ‘influence is the currency of your success online’.

Time Waster

  • Don’t just click on to your favourite social media program every time you receive an email that says someone loves you. Either turn off your email so you don’t see these messages or turn off your notification on the program so you don’t get the messages at all. Then you will only see messages when you have scheduled time to do your social media marketing.
  • Don’t follow every breadcrumb trail. A single link can take you off course and away from your goal very quickly. Remember what you planned on doing when you got online. I usually plan on reading 3 or 4 good articles and posting them to Facebook. I retweet (RT) several of my favourite twitter people, ‘like’ some great quotes and re-quote some great people. Then I add one of my own links and I’m done. I use Tory Johnson‘s rule of 80% or more giving and sharing of other people’s information and no more than 20% of my own content. It helps build trust and value for your followers.
  • Don’t try out every program, application, and game. To use any one of them successfully takes time to learn and even more time to commit to creating and maintaining a valuable presence on that platform. Be consistent and present on one or two applications and leave the rest for your personal time, if that is what you really enjoy doing.

I focus mainly on Twitter and Facebook. I use HootSuite to post to Twitter and to keep track of all my lists. I have recently started using Empire Avenue to increase my influence online and I evaluate my influence using Klout. I have an up-to-date profile on LinkedIn and I have fun on Pinterest in my personal time. There are lots of other programs that catch my attention but I know I cannot fit them into my marketing program so I have learned to keep focused on my marketing goals. It has made my marketing time more valuable and intent filled. It has also given me new clients, which is the ROI we all want to see from our marketing efforts.

That’s Done – What Now? 3 Ways to Keep Moving Forward

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You know that feeling you get when you finish a big project. The deadline has been met and all the stress to perform on time is done. Your follow up is complete and your client is happy. For a few minutes it as a blissful feeling of accomplishment and relief. But what is next?

Remember when you first started your business and you would do marketing when you did not have a client and then when you did have a client you did not have time. What happened when you were finished your project with your client? You did not have more work lined up. The same thing happens with sales and marketing projects, so don’t stop planning just because you are working on a project right now.

When you have not yet set your next deadline then there seems to be lag in time after a project finishes. This opening can be filled with the stress of how you will make ends meet with only the sales from your last ‘big thing’. It may be a strange realization to think, I was just so successful and now I have no deadline to build towards. Carrie Fisher once said, “There is no point at which you can say, ‘Well, I’m successful now. I might as well take a nap.'” There is no ‘nap time’ in business. If you are currently sitting in-between projects or you do not have something in the funnel for the end of this project then you need to plan something right now.

The challenge around not planning ahead is that when the time opens up we often fill it with the ‘Doing’ of our business and we lose site of the continual growth. If you are not focused on growth your business will decline. Even to keep a business at the level it is currently you have to continually be focused on adding new opportunities, building new products, creating new streams of income, offering new connections to your clients and reaching new prospects. You must always be moving forward if you do not want to start slipping back.

Let’s look at three ways you can ensure you are not sitting in this aether, between achievement and development where nothing is moving towards the success of your business.

1. Know Your Next Offer or Product

Whether you are building a widget for a new offering, an update for your current clients, or a new training program, you need to have the idea mapped out so that you can start being productive; creating both the product and the interest for it. Determine what you are working towards and set a deadline. Make it a real deadline and make it as unmovable as possible. The more absolute you are about the deadline the more focused you will be to create what is needed to make it happen. The more you allow the timeline to slip, the less valuable the product becomes to your business because it starts costing you extra money, interest, and time.

2. Start With The End Date

Whiteboard with Schedule and planned timelindsStart from the deadline or release date and create a marketing plan timeline. When will you announce the big news? How will you tell your prospects? Where will they hear about it? Map it out for weeks or months prior to the final release date.

For example: If you are hosting a program then the announcement date will be several weeks before the event. Start building interest before the announcement. Create a free event in which people will get great value from you and will also hear about your upcoming event. Give a gift to those that take action when you announce it. Create several touch points after the announcement to allow people to think about being at your event and give them different incentives to buy, right up to the event time.

Related articles

Why Don’t You Want More Clients?

5 Ways to Use Your Marketing Plan to Define Your Business – Communications

3. Everyday Marketing

If you are sitting in a pocket of low productivity then check in with yourself to determine if you have fallen into this stagnant aether. What is the purpose of your business? If you want your business to continue must be you doing something every day that invites new clients to work with you or purchase from you. Marketing is not a seasonal event it is the cornerstone that ensures you continue to be successful.

This works whether you are stagnating in-between projects or you are working towards a deadline. The best time to start the planning is while you are working towards another goal so that you can transition into the next project or goal with little or no downtime (unless it is planned).

Get off the marketing and development rollercoaster and take the production train. Develop, plan, and deliver all while you are moving forward to your biggest goals

Creating Systems That Will Save You Money and Time

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Have you ever been called “the Queen of Process”? No? I have along with “Miss Organized”. I’ve been in technology for over 25 years and in technical writing for almost 20 years. What I do know is that if you want to have something very specific at the end of a long development process you have to have systems in place to ensure everything gets done and nothing gets missed.

I have been on projects where the final product was continually being changed to meet newly perceived needs. The problem with this was that people coding and developing to the original specification often had to request additional time to rework something to be able to incorporate the new aspects. Sometimes this additional time was significant and would lead to what the industry called “project creep”, a very costly delay in development.

In business operations this is called redundancy. Any time you redo, rebuild, reevaluate, or rewrite something, because you have to recreate it every time you get a request, you are losing money and wasting time. Try this instead. I am going to use the process of preparing for my Entrepreneur Club Expert calls to give you an example.

Define the Final Outcome

Know what the big picture or final outcome will be for each task in your business. Is it social media marketing on Facebook or closing a sale? You need to know what you are trying to accomplish before you can define the steps. This also helps other people know what they are trying to complete if they are to follow the process you will define.

Example

The expert call outcome is to host a monthly 1 hour free call with a guest expert bringing business strategies and training for business growth.

Evaluate your process as you walk through the stepsWalk Through the Process

Take notes as you go through the process. Don’t just note the steps, note also where you found information, what was needed to get ready, what you had to do to follow up.

Example

After identifying the expert I have to book the date they are available to speak. I will follow up with an email that includes the information they needed to send me, what they will be required to bring, and an overview of the call. I have to update my webpage and update my ezine with the expert’s information for that month. I have to send reminders of the call to the members of the Eclub. I have to have read their bio and have it open for the call. I have to have my conference program running and the recording started. I have to upload the recording to the members’ forum along with any information from the expert.

Create a Process

Now that you know what you have done, create a process with steps. Write it for someone else to follow. In fact, once you are done, have someone else try and follow your instructions and then tweak it to ensure it is clear and easy to understand.

Example

You can easily see the general steps of my process in my explanation of what I have to do, but what you cannot see are the details. The details are the questions another person would ask if they had to follow the steps above.

  • What do you usually put in the email when asking the expert for their information?
  • Where do you store the expert’s documents?
  • How do you get access to the members’ forum or the conference line?
  • How do you start and end the expert call?

After answering the details I have documents and instructions to help someone else do the work. I have an email template I send to experts so I don’t have to rewrite my instructions to them; I have a template for the call flow and a listing for all the access information.

Defining the process takes the most amount of time. Follow these three steps and you can create instructions that will define the processes in your business so you can save yourself and your employees time and money. Create it once and use it over and over.

 

3 Things You Can Do to Make More Room for Clients

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If we can agree we all are only allotted 24 hours per day then to get more clients we have to be more efficient and effective at focusing on the things that generate new business. Here are three simple things to help you create more space in your day and thus more time you can spend on client acquiring activities.

Clean work space1. Clean Your Space

If you have to shuffle items from one side of your desk to the other, search through piles, or agonize over a growing mound that never gets done, you definitely are losing productivity in your work day.

  • Clear off your workspace so it only has the tools that you absolutely need to get your work done. Try taking it down to 5 or less main items like your computer, lamp, printer, and blank notepad.
  • File, offload, or discard items instead of placing them in piles on your desk.
  • If you cannot get something done immediately then book time immediately to re-address it later.

2. Prioritize Your Day

Pick 3 things you absolutely must complete today. They get first priority. Tackle the toughest task first. If you would normally procrastinate making your sales calls to the end of the day, book them first.

Getting the top 3 things done early in your day will leave you tons of time at the end of your day for bonus work. You will feel incredibly productive and successful and that feeling will spill over in your interaction with clients and your personal life.

3. Automate and Systematize

If you are working on mundane tasks that could easily be completed by someone for much less money than you would charge for your time then you need to be giving up those tasks. Start honouring the value of your time and letting it go. To do this you will need to know that exact process you use to accomplish that task so that you can either automate the process or offload it to someone that you can pay less.

With this extra time you can focus on getting more clients and generating new business. Don’t let the small things in your day stop you from doing the big things for your business that can result in helping more people and generating more money.

Succeed or Fail: Which Quadrant are You in?

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There are a lot of things that can add or take away from your success; much of which you have control over, like your skills, personality or leadership traits, experiences, and education. Over the next three e-zine articles I want to focus on The Four Quadrants of the Positive Optimist.

The ability to succeed in business and life, and maintain that success can be attributed to attitude about what is currently happening in your life and your outlook. You’re best and most successful attitude is to be positive about what is currently happening within your life and business and have an optimistic view of the future.

The Positive Optimist

This person tends to be surrounded by a lot of successful people that they can count on and will share their successes with. They see longer lasting success with larger rewards and overall will experience more happiness because their goals are met.

These people focus on the positive aspects of their current situation. Even when things are not going the way they want it is important that they spend time focusing on the things that are going right and their accomplishments. This allows them to take responsibility for the conditions of their current situation (good and bad) and be able to strategize on what can be done to change it if needed.

The optimist part of this person also has a positive outlook of the future. This makes it easier to put short term setbacks into perspective and keeps them from crashing an entire company.

The best way to stay the positive optimist is to have goals and a plan to implement changes to reach those goals. Spend time each day evaluating what has been accomplished, what challenges where encountered, what opportunities are available and what has to change to continue in the path, or to create a new path to success.

Stay tuned for the other 3 quadrants in my next few e-zines.

 

Consistency, Consistency, Consistency! What needs to be consistent?

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OK I get it, consistency is important! Right? We all know this but I guarantee that if there is some aspect of your business that is not doing what you want it to do it is likely because of your commitment to be consistent with what you know has to be done. But what if you don’t know what has to be done consistently?

Darren Hardy, the Publisher and Editorial Director for Success,  shares that one of his top 3 keys to success is “to consistently work hard, for a long time”. (Listen to his other keys to success in the January issue interview of the Success Magazine CD.)

What are you being consistent at? Are you consistently starting new projects, implementing, building, evaluating, selling, marketing, networking, and learning? Great, these are all important to your business, but some need to be a part of your day-to-day work and some need to be a part of your long-term maintenance. Let me tell you some stories that might help you identify where you need to focus.

New Projects (Implementing, Building and Evaluating)

It is important that you are evaluating what you have to sell and what else you could have to sell, but you do not want to be creating and starting new projects every day (unless it is for a client) and it is equally important that you do not get in the rut of thinking you have a great product and you don’t have to have anything new. Here are two stories to help you with this.

The first is a story about a company that never seemed to have time to spare. They were always so busy. I like to think of them as busy doing ‘busy work’. They were always creating something new. The next interesting thing they can do for their clients, a downloadable product, a video, a program and yet when I would ask for delivery deadlines it was always a month or so out. They were creating but not delivering new products. As something that Seth Godin might say, creating without shipping means your product remains unseen, and unsalable. You are no closer to being successful if you cannot ‘ship’ or release or launch.

The second story is about a company that had a key position in a very niche market back in the 80’s and early 90’s. They did not put great effort into developing and marketing anything new and when the tides turned in the communications industry, from X25 to IP they were behind the leaders and no longer a key player. The company slowly shrunk until it no longer exists.

Selling and Marketing (including channels like networking)

Do you have a sales process? Do you have a marketing budget? Have you set aside time every day, week and month to do what needs to be done? In your sales process you must have specific times set aside to do your calls. Even if you have the most advanced online campaign you must still reach out to people on a personal level. If you are too busy to do that then get an assistant to reach out and set dates for you to talk to the key clients that will make your business greater.

Your assistant will need your schedule and thus you must have times set aside for these calls every week. Don’t wait until you find someone to sell to, open up you schedule for calls in advance. Set aside 3 to 5 appointment times every week, at least a week in advanced so you can set your intentions to fill them with calls. Be consistent in your intention to create the time and fill it with calls and you will make a change in your sales.

This is the same for your marketing campaign. People must know about you and hear about you regularly to be able to keep your name above the other marketing noise. This means you have to be consistent in your efforts to connect with your potential clients. Whatever your marketing channels are, e.g. e-mail campaign, networking, paid advertising, PR, article writing, blogging, etc., if they stop hearing from you they stop thinking about you and their need for what you have. No one is unique enough to be the only person or business in their niche. Your competitors are not just in your community but from anywhere in the world, so be driven to make your marketing efforts a daily, weekly, and monthly effort.

Learning

I always say that the key law in the universe is “entropy”. Everything in the universe is in a state of decay, working towards chaos, and without the addition of energy it will cease to exist. Everything, from galaxies to insects, from planets to building, from credibility to your skills, constantly needs energy. That is truer today than it has ever been. Our society is changing so quickly. The amount of effort that is put into the knowledge-base that drives the change is increasing with the number of people that can easily join the conversation. You will quickly become irrelevant if you are not constantly learning, improving, and upgrading your own knowledge base. Be consistent with your effort to improve; attempt to learn something every day with a goal to be significantly more educated yearly.

So what needs your focus right now to increase your consistent effort and improve upon? Make your list and then focus on one or two at a time to make the change in your behaviour stick and you will see your bottom line change as well.

 

Tools for Time Management – Don’t ‘WING-IT’

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My friend Rich Grof says, “you cannot manage time”; this is true. Time happens whether we try to manage it or not. The point of his statement is that we have to manage our actions and responsibilities to fit in the time we have. Today I want to talk about the tools you need to use to ensure you are managing your activities effectively.

Calendars

After the first few events and meetings have been set your ability to manage where you are to be, what time is already blocked off, when you are available and your availability to manage a project will be diminished. The more you do in your business the less ability you will have to keep track of where you are supposed to be. I tell people, “if it is not in my calendar it does not exist”.

Don’t feel you have to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to get a functional calendar, because you don’t, but that doesn’t mean you don’t need a paid product. Let’s have a quick look at what you might like to use.

Desktop

The old reliable, or unreliable some might say is Outlook. This Microsoft product is an email client with a calendar and its simplicity will help you stay on time. The key is that you have to make sure you add your appointments, events, meetings and blocked time to the calendar in one place so you know where you are supposed to be at all times. There are also third-party applications to help you sync this to your smartphone.

If you are also using a physical calendar and Outlook, your challenge will be manually syncing the two calendars. If you have missed 2 or more appointments then I suggest you abandon the two calendar system.

In The Cloud

One of the best calendar options online is Google Calendar. Because it is a Google product it integrates with so many other Google products that you are probably currently using, like Gmail. It also functions seamlessly with your Android smartphone. Other products, like proprietary scheduling applications (e.g. TimeTrade) will sync online and show up in your calendar on your phone and on your browser from wherever you are. This is the future of scheduling and it is simple and inexpensive.

Meetings

Have you ever done this before? You tell two people your available time, but you don’t want to block several days, so there is some overlap and they both pick the same time OR you forget to remove blocked time that someone does not book with you? Double booking or blocking time for non-excitant meetings is a waste of your time.

Missing meetings is not a great way to build confidence in your abilities so finding a way to book your time without overlap is key. Several of the people I connect with use TimeTrader (www.timedriver.com). I’m sure there are several of these types of tools online that you can take advantage of. These programs will usually sync with your Outlook or Google calendar so you can manage the inviting of people and the booking of meetings from one place.

This month I decided that this would work well for my business so I signed up for a free trial to test it out. So far, so good and at $49 per year it is a really affordable option.

Information

Being able to quickly pull-up past information that is associated with an event or a person can also help you be more effective in your meetings. If you want to look back at a past conversation or be able to review documents and past emails with a client while you are in a meeting then you will want a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution.

CRM

At the high end of price is the CRM which not only manages your calendar but also the connections to your clients. For instant, it will allow you to create accounts for clients that you are working with and pull together all the emails from all the people at that company as a history. It can keep track of your sales process, link clients to meetings, link documents to clients or jobs, keep track of conversations, etc. This is a very powerful tool and will take some time to implement the process of using it effectively. This tool can also range from a few hundred dollars to many thousands of dollars depending on how many people in your company will need access.

I use Microsoft Business Contact Manager, which came free with Windows Professional and integrates with Outlook. I love the functionality but it is not going to be easy to bring it into The Cloud. It really is a desktop application.

You don’t have to use the same tools I am using, but you do have to use something. Don’t ‘wing’ any part of your business; plan, implement, and manage everything, including your time.

What is your favourite way to manage your calendar activities? Do you have any favourite tools?

Share your tips below.