August Marketing To Do List

We don’t know about you but July flew by! We were extra busy with client work and scheming for the future, and we hope the same was true for you! If not, our August marketing to-do list will help you do a little bit of maintenance and a lot of looking ahead for our big fall and winter projects.

Peruse this list and time block your calendar to ensure you can get all of this done this month. We anticipate it will be about 10 hours total.

Small Business Marketing Tasks That Should Take One Hour

Calculate Your Customer Lifetime Value

If you already have this done and regularly check it: brava! You can skip this task and focus on the other ones. But if you have never done it, it may take a little bit of spreadsheet work to figure it out. We detail this process and other things you should be measuring in a recent blog post.

Prep for Fall Events

Whether you have author events, new seasonal beer releases, puzzle competitions, or fall garden prep workshops, you’ll want to be thinking ahead about these events. Venue, agenda, staffing, products, tickets, promotion, etc. If you’re someone who finds the many moving pieces of event-planning to be overwhelming, try to combine efforts to save time. For example, if you’re coordinating snacks for one event, why not do the same for a second event later in the season? If you’re building event pages and adding them to local directories, why not add all of your fall events at the same time?

Prep for holiday promotions

Holiday gift-giving can be a massive boost for your business, so planning for content, sales and other events is critical. Spend time now brainstorming and actually working on that content and event planning in order to not feel rushed or stressed later. Now is the time you will have the opportunity to be creative and intentional about what your messaging will be to connect with shoppers come November and December.

30-Minute Small Business Marketing Tasks

Collaborate with peers

Sharing is caring, and exposing your customers to other related businesses could be key to your credibility and connection with them. And of course, the opposite is helpful too, when your peer businesses share their customers with you! Perhaps there are events you can co-host, a local crawl day, dual discounts, or giveaways. The ideas are endless. Take time to brainstorm a few opportunities and reach out to those potential partners to invite them to collaborate.

Review your directory listings

It’s time to check in with all of your directory listings to ensure all of the information is correct. If you don’t already have one, start by making a list of directories your business is listed in and all the places you have reviews. Then go through each one and ensure hours, contact information, products and services, and website links are up to date. Be sure to also look for opportunities to link back to your own website to help increase your SEO value.

Craft Social Media Content

Brainstorm what you want to post to each of your social media accounts for the next couple of weeks. We recommend a formal calendar in a spreadsheet or other project management tool. Take the photos and videos, edit them into the posts, reels, and stories you need, edit graphics, write out the captions or messages, and even schedule them to go live if possible. This will save you stress later when you only remember to post to social media at 11 p.m. and have no brain power for creative ideas left.

Send Your Monthly Email Newsletter

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, schedule and done! 

Check Your Paid Ads Account

Review your Google Ads account performance at least twice a month. You can add irrelevant keywords to your negative keyword list, ensure you’re hitting the target numbers you set goals for, and make any necessary changes to your daily budget and cost per click. Alternatively, you could use this time to investigate what your peers are doing from a paid ads perspective. Or perhaps you just wrapped up a campaign and want to analyze the results to see what you want to test next.

Easy Five-Minute Marketing Tasks

Update your Google Business Profile

As always, it’s important you are regularly updating your GBP with images, review responses and posts, but every so often, you should also refresh your products, services and other aspects of that profile. Google changes things frequently. For example, there used to be a Q&A section. So it’s important you consciously investigate what new content may be available for you to spruce the place up a bit.

Be Social

Even if you scheduled your social media content for a specific day and time, it’s also critical that you are logging into those accounts every day. This could mean sharing your planned content to Instagram stories, reading and responding to comments, and DMs. Looking at what content you’ve been tagged in and resharing that, sharing other people’s content, researching and saving great ideas for new content you want to make next, reviewing who you follow and perhaps following a few more accounts. You could spend all day on social media, and of course, we’re not advocating for that, but the more time you spend in there interacting with your customers, the better.

Say hello to your customers

In addition to the social media DMs from the task above, you also want to make time to respond to phone calls, emails, reviews and other messages from customers. While this isn’t exactly marketing, it’s not NOT marketing and you should make time for it in your daily routine.

As always, we tried to keep this month’s small business marketing tasks to about 10 hours so it’s not overwhelming and you know exactly what you need to do to stay on track and grow your business. If you ever want help with these or other tasks related to your website, social media, paid ads or email marketing, we’d love to help!