April To Do List: Small Business Marketing
If you’re staring at your computer thinking to yourself “How am I going to grow my businesses,” or “What do I do first?” we think it’s always helpful to break down the Giant Scary Thing into a plan that will help you make incremental progress each month and establish marketing your business as a habit.
So while there is no magic wand list of tasks you can do to guarantee growth and success, we wanted to share a few things that will get you started in the right direction and remove some of the uncertainty about what you should be doing and how often. Without further ado, here’s the first post in our new series of Monthly Marketing To-Dos For Your Small Business.
1-Hour Marketing Tasks for April
We want to list the big things first because those will require setting aside time in your calendar and making brain space for these tasks. Maybe you tackle one or two of these big things per week this month, or maybe you block an entire day to knock out all your big marketing tasks for the whole month. Many of these things are easier to do on a “big screen” versus from your phone, so keep that in mind as well.
Review Your Annual Goals
Time flies when you’re having fun, and it’s easy to stray from all your big goals you set at the beginning of the year. Since it’s been three months, it’s time to check in on your progress or your annual goals. Have you prioritized tasks related to moving those needles? What do you need to add or remove from your to-do list to get back on track, or how can you continue to make great progress?
Brainstorm A Partnership For The Next Quarter
You likely have an opportunity to give back to the community or collaborate with other businesses who share your values (and prospective customers), so take time to decide how much time, money, or other resources you have to give and who you’re going to give to. Perhaps there is an event that aligns with your values you want to sponsor, or a Little League team that you enjoy supporting. It could be a partnership with a relevant business or nonprofit—the ideas are endless. This is mostly a brainstorm. But if you’ve already got the vision, start executing and bringing it to life.
Tend To Your Most Loyal Customers
Check in on your loyalty and retention programs. Are your VIPs taken care of? Perhaps a personalized outreach is in order. Or are there additional benefits you can offer as a nice surprise to these folks? Is this program something people get excited about? You may need to beef up the offering so more customers want to join.
Freshen Up Your Email List
Do a little bit of spring cleaning in your email marketing tool. Are there folks who haven’t opened any emails from you in six months? Send them an email asking them what content they’d prefer to see from you, or invite them to unsubscribe. You would rather have an engaged list of subscribers who are excited about your messages than a really big one where no one is reading your stuff. A little email hygiene goes a long way for deliverability and ending up in the Primary inboxes versus spam folders.
Perform Light Website Maintenance
Audit your website for broken links. You don’t need to do anything else other than make sure everything links to where you intend. We hate to see footer social media icons that go nowhere because someone forgot to add the correct links, or a really cool product that was discontinued and not redirected to a similar option. There are lots of tools that can help you do this like Screaming Frog but if you have a simple site, it’s likely something you can buzz through yourself. Just be thorough, and make the quick fixes immediately. Or enlist a friend or family member.
Think Ahead To Summer
And finally, it may seem way early, but you should be prepping for your summer campaigns and promotions. This could mean determining what sales you’ll run for what dates, what products you’ll stock, any events, store closings for holidays or holiday hours, and, of course, social media campaigns for summer vacations, patio season, Memorial Day, Independence Day and so much more summer fun. Writing the content, gathering the photos and video content and putting it all together can take time, so it’s much less stressful to start early.
30- Minute Marketing Tasks
These are tasks that can be squeezed in over your morning coffee, a beer before happy hour ends, or between meetings/customers.
Plan Two Weeks Of Social Posts
Think about what content you want to post to each of your social media accounts for the next couple of weeks. This could be as informal as a note on your phone with ideas, or as structured as a monthly editorial calendar. Ideally, this list is more than a concept. Write out the captions or messages, take the photos or videos, edit any graphics, and even schedule the content to go live if possible. Again, it will depend on your goals, but we recommend a minimum of 2-3 posts or reels with 5-6 stories on Instagram and Facebook per week, 10-15 pins on Pinterest, 2-3 posts on LinkedIn, or 10-15 videos on TikTok.
Fill Out And Send Your Monthly Newsletter Template
Send a monthly newsletter to your entire email list with business updates, promotions, and upcoming events. If you already have a template for this, it could be a quick copywriting exercise, then plug it in and voila!
Review Your Paid Ads Account
Check your Google Ads account performance at least every other week. You can add irrelevant keywords to your negative keyword list, and make any necessary changes to your daily budget and cost per click. Or perhaps you just wrapped up a campaign and want to analyze the results to see what you want to test next.
Update Your Team
Check in with your staff to make sure everyone is on the same page regarding promotions, upcoming events, and priorities for marketing and sales at least monthly. This could be that you have an author event coming up, a new vintage release, or a social media campaign where you’re asking folks to take photos in your shop. Ensuring your staff is aware of what’s going on will help them best serve your customers.
Complete A Website Check-Up
Review your Google Analytics to understand your best-performing website pages, what source people are coming from, and how many website conversions you have had. That way you can use this intel when you want to add more content or make tweaks to your site. Work smarter, not harder.
Send A Targeted Email Campaign
Send one personalized email campaign to a specific segment of your email list based on your tags (customer behavior, engagement or purchases, or self-assigned preferences). You could invite them to an upcoming relevant event or demo a new product they might like because they bought something similar.
Refresh Your Events Online
Update your website with any events you plan to host in the upcoming months. Then be sure to add them to Facebook, and other event listing websites so you can get folks excited and buying tickets or reserving their spot.
5-Minute Marketing Tasks
If you only have a couple of minutes between customers or on your phone waiting in line for something, the following tasks are great options. These tasks should be done regularly, depending on your goals and priorities. Many of them need to be done daily or weekly but a couple of them can be done just monthly.
Hit Send On Social Posts
Check your social media editorial calendar for what you need to post today, then go ahead and post it!
Quickly Engage With Customers
Respond to and social media DMs, comments and reshare posts from your customers to stories. You should also respond to any reviews, customer emails and voicemail messages. Ideally, you can reply to these things immediately or within 24 hours, but we all know some messages get pushed to later and we like to have this item on our to-do list to make sure we go back and check that everything has been taken care of and nothing slips through the cracks.
Keep Your GBP Fresh
Look through the last week of posts on your social media and choose the one that got the most engagement or the most important one and share it on your Google Business Profile as a post.
Check That You’re Open When You Say You Are
Check your Google Business Profile, Google Maps, directories, and social media profiles to ensure your hours are correct and share when your hours are going to change for holidays or other reasons.
Scan Paid Performance
Check in on your paid advertising campaigns. That could mean your boosted posts on social media, paid search or any other advertising you have out in the world. Are you spending what you expected to? Are you getting the reach you aimed for? What about the actual clicks or sales? If not, add it to your 30-minute list to investigate what you should be iterating on to improve them moving forward.
We recognize that all of these tasks equal about 10 hours per month. And that’s if you already know how to do these things. It doesn’t include if you need to Google how to do it. We totally get that you need to be focused on actually running your business and are happy to help get it all done. Schedule a free call to get the support you need.