5 Ways to Simplify Your Marketing and Save Time

Every minute of your time counts. That's why you want to spend your working hours in a way that truly moves the needle forward. If you feel like you're spending more time working on your mindfulness business rather than in your mindfulness business (helping students and clients), it's time to pause.

Reaching more people with your business can sometimes feel like a never-ending hamster wheel. As soon as you get new clients or students, it's time to find new ones so you can keep expanding your impact. The good news is that putting effective and mindful marketing strategies in place up-front can save you tons of time.

Besides having a solid marketing plan, there are simple time-saving tips you can implement to work more efficiently. Here are 5 of them you can try out today:

1) Do a Time Audit of Your Marketing Activities

When was the last time you analyzed how much time you're spending on your marketing versus how many clients it's bringing you? If never, don't worry - it's not just you.

The good news is that a simple time audit can help you figure out what works and what doesn't work in your business. That way you can do more of what works and spend less time on what doesn't!

Consider this an invitation to become more mindful of how you're spending the time you work on promoting your business. Use the next week to track the items you work on to get more clients.

• How much time are you spending on networking with people in your target audience?

• How much time do you spend on social media (creating and consuming content)?

• How much time are you doing cold outreach or asking for referrals?

• Which of these tasks could you delegate and outsource so that you can get more time to focus on your zone of genius?

Then reflect on how many connections you made through these activities that could possibly turn into leads. How many of those leads can eventually turn into clients as you cultivate relationships with them over the long-term? Think about what's brought you the most clients in the past. See if you can repeat that and make it even more effective by utilizing tip #2.

2) Conduct Surveys to Learn What Your Audience Wants

Mindful marketing is all about being client-centered. The most effective way to get more clients is to remain super-focused on your target audience and their needs. But how can you know what they need if you don’t occasionally ask them?

Don’t underestimate the value of research - including surveys and questionnaires. These are great tools to help you understand what your ideal clients or students are struggling with. When you know what they’re struggling with, you’ll know how to position your offers as solutions (assuming they are solutions of course :-)).

One way you can do this is to send out a survey to your current subscribers or to people in your target audience. There’s a few free tools online that you can use for this such as MonkeySurvey, Hubspot, or QuestionPro.

Give your readers some sort of an incentive for their time - ideally something that gives them an instant win and that they could use to help move them closer to their goals.

3) Limit Your Social Media Platforms

Yes, you heard that right. You might think that as a mindfulness copywriter and marketing strategist, I’d tell you to go all in on each social media platform.

But while social media can be a powerful marketing tool to get you in front of more people, this is where I see too many mindfulness teachers wasting their time. It’s not because they’re not posting helpful content...it's because they’re not posting it where their target audience hangs out.

If you want to teach mindfulness to moms that work from home, you probably wouldn’t have much success if you’re only posting on LinkedIn. On the other hand, if you’re trying to target corporate executives with mindfulness for the workplace, posting on Instagram or Facebook is probably not going to get you much results.

Rather than stretching yourself thin by posting on all the main social media platforms, pick one where you know your ideal clients hang out. Learn more about their behavior on that platform. What are they searching for? How can you provide more insights in topics that already interest them?

4) Cast a Bigger Net by Presenting at a Conference

Instead of trying to reach people one by one, find a place where a large bulk of your audience is likely to hang out. Grow awareness of your brand faster by presenting at a conference that your target audience is likely to attend.

Come up with a list of three topics that your target audience is likely to be interested in. Not sure where to start? Use tip #5 from this blog on doing keyword research to figure out what your audience might be searching for.

Then do a quick Google search to find large online conferences or summits that they would attend related to that topic. Perhaps if you’re trying to reach large corporations mindfulness, they may be interested in the topic of employee wellness. In that case, you’d look for employee wellness conferences and events related to that industry.

Find the Contact Us button on the conference website. Ask to be a presenter at the next event. Speak about your related topic within mindfulness and invite them to visit your website to learn more. This way, you’ll be reaching more people at one time rather than having to reach out to people individually.

5) Batch Your Work and Stick to a Calendar

The time that you do spend on marketing should be a thought-out process. If you don’t have a strategy in place and don’t set out time to execute on it, you’ll end up doing a lot of different things and feeling like nothing's working. Once you decide on the marketing strategy you’ll use, create a weekly calendar and stick to it.

One of the ways to do that is to batch your work. You could for example designate Mondays as your marketing days. This is when you write out content for the week ahead so that you don’t have to worry about it the rest of the week. Use a social media scheduling software to schedule your social media posts ahead of time.

Perhaps you schedule all of your classes or client calls on Tuesdays through Thursdays and save Fridays for admin and catch-up work. Figure out ways that you can put similar tasks together so you can improve productivity by saving on the costs of task-switching.

If you're looking to delegate some of the work you're doing on writing blogs, emails, or other marketing materials, you can always save time by reaching out to a mindfulness copywriter who does the work for you. :-)