Focus Your Marketing Efforts: Pick One Thing {Worksheet Included!}

One of the things I commonly see with businesses is analysis paralysis.

They are overwhelmed by the marketing tactics everyone tells them they “have” to be doing, so they don’t do anything.
 Or, they want to keep planning to make sure they focus on the right thing. In other words, there’s a whole lot of aiming, but not a lot of firing.

Either way, these businesses are not getting anywhere.

Don’t get me wrong — I think developing a strong marketing strategy is absolutely critical. But, it won’t work unless you implement it.
 At some point, you just have to pull the trigger.

After all,
 if you don’t start, you will fail.

Determine Your Marketing Focus

As
 the pace of business
 picks up,
 what will you be focusing on?

If you’re not sure, I challenge you to pick one marketing initiative to focus in on for the rest of the year.

Quit waiting for the right time, the right people or the right circumstances. Pick one thing to focus on today, this week or this month and get to work.

If you’re not sure what you should focus on, here are some questions to help you decide:

• What is one area of my business that needs the most help?
• What is one marketing initiative that could make the biggest impact on my business in the next four months?
• What is the “low-hanging fruit” opportunity that would be easiest for your team to implement?
• What is one marketing effort that you’ve been putting off that you know could make a difference?
• Which marketing deficiency is hurting you the most? In other words, is there a critical issue that needs to be fixed?

Going through this list of questions should help you determine where you should spend your time and focus.

Build Your Marketing Action Plan

Once you have decided on your marketing initiative, you need to build a marketing action plan to implement it.

And no, I’m not talking about a huge planning document. Although detailed marketing plans can be useful, sometimes it can add another layer of complexity and hamper a business from moving forward.

Instead, build a quick marketing action plan to help identify specific tasks you can focus on each month, week and day.

Here’s how to create your quick marketing action plan:

1.
 Determine the marketing initiative you will focus on.

2.
 Create a task list of what items need to be accomplished to work on this initiative.

3.
 Determine the team members who will be committed to this initiative.

4.
 Pick one action item that each team member can do each day, each week and each month to help you focus on this initiative.

5.
 Create a chart for these items or plot the activities out on your calendar to help you stay on track and keep your team accountable.

That’s it. Simple. Focused. And geared toward action.

If you’re not sure how the breakdown of activities could look, I’ll give you an example.

Let’s say that you want to ramp up your blogging efforts. Assuming that you already have blog functionality in place, here is a quick run-down of what this could look like:

• Daily — Spend time writing every day – even if it’s just 15-20 minutes. You don’t have to write full post in that amount of time, but putting a little effort toward it every day will help keep you moving.
• Weekly — Determine a day to polish up any completed blog posts, find corresponding photos, load and schedule the post.
• Monthly — Brainstorm topic ideas and build a content plan that maps out what you will publish and when.

Yes, this is an overly simplified look at how to get things done. But, that’s the point. Sometimes, we just need to not make things so darn hard.

Cut the complexity and boil your marketing initiatives down into quick action items that you and your team can easily execute on. Not only will you be more likely to get started, you’ll be more likely to achieve success this way too.

In order to help you along in your process,we’ve put together a handy worksheet
 that follows this entire quick action plan step-by-step.
 And the best part?
 It’s free! What are you waiting for?
 Download the worksheet now and start ramping up your marketing!

Do you think this quick action plan will help focus your marketing efforts? If so, share in the comment section what you will focus on for the rest of the year. We’ll cheer you on and help keep you accountable!