May Small Business Marketing To Do List

If you set yourself up well in April with the marketing tasks we suggested, then May will be a breeze. But don’t worry, you still have a few more days in April to get to those urgent marketing to-do items.

Beyond your usual maintenance tasks, May focuses on an audit of some of your marketing tools, as well as prep for end-of-summer fun and early fall campaigns. 

1-Hour Marketing Tasks for May

As always, here are the more complex projects that will take a little bit of devoted time. You should plan these into your calendar this month so you don’t run out of time later.

Event Planning

Are you hosting any events in the next few months? Do you need to figure out catering, coordinate with the special guest or collaborating business, or even just make a day-of schedule? Take time to get some of these easy tasks out of the way well in advance because events always seem to sneak up on us and last-minute tasks build up and stress us out. The more we can do now, the better.

Assess Your Accessibility

Of course, you want your business to be welcoming to everyone, both in-store and online, so this is your chance to audit those spaces. There are tools like AccessScan to help you identify opportunities to improve. Make the easy fixes on the spot and add the harder items to a later list.

Prep For End-Of-Summer and Early Fall

We’re leaving this vague on purpose. Making brain space and physical time for strategy is important in your business, so consider what products you’ll want to stock if you haven’t already planned that. What sales and promotions and even campaign themes and concepts do you want to consider? Consider if you will change your brand elements, like the hero image on your website, to reflect the season.

30-Minute Small Business Marketing Tasks

These are the tasks you can squeeze in if you have a lull in customers, while you’re watching your kid’s tee-ball practice, or over your lunch break.

Investigate Innovative Tools

Even if you have perfectly oiled systems, there may be new marketing tools or social media platforms that may serve you and your team well. Is Bluesky the right alternative to X? Does the Google Calendar scheduler replace Calendly, which means you can save money by cancelling that? Are there processes that are frustrating every time you do them? There are probably ways to tweak or tools to add to your tech stack to alleviate that thorn in your side.

Survey Your Customers

Let your curiosity get the best of you and find out how your customers feel about a specific product or service. This can be a formal questionnaire sent via email, a simple social media story poll, a series of interviews with VIP customers, or even an analysis of customer behavior and purchase data. Use this time to get to know them better so you can deliver an even better experience in the future.

Plan Two Weeks Of Social Posts

Your social media accounts need constant attention, so take a look at your overall content pillars and figure out what gaps you have and what other supplemental posts you’ll want to create. This may be an extra story on a day you don’t have a post or reel scheduled on Instagram. Or maybe it’s a couple more pins on Pinterest. Take the photo or video, write the caption and schedule it to go live so it’s off your plate for the next couple weeks. We recommend at least 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.

Send Your Monthly Email Newsletter

If you’ve got a well-designed newsletter template, this should be an easy task to write a little note and share some business news with your customers. This could include promotions, upcoming events, even photos and plans for the future. Easy peasy!

Review Your Paid Ads Account

Especially if you’re managing your own paid ads on Google and social media, you’ll want to check in on those metrics at least every other week to ensure they are hitting expected results. You can tweak the audiences, target keywords, and of course, daily spends to keep yourself on track for that extra exposure.

5-Minute Marketing Tasks

These marketing tasks can be quick wins with minimal effort that can make a big impact on your success. Consider these instead of doom-scrolling.

Check Your Bios & Profile Images On Your Social Media Accounts

Do you have old links you don’t need to prioritize anymore still listed in your bio (like old event pages)? Are your profile and banner images exactly what you want them to be? What about the text or emojis in the bio section? If you decide to add something timely, just make sure to update it frequently so it’s never outdated.

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.

Publish Your Planned Social Posts

If you did the work in advance, it’s easy to quickly check your editorial calendar and make sure you’ve posted or scheduled everything you wanted to go out today. Double check that everything looks as expected and share to stories or other groups as necessary.

Love On Your Customers

Take a moment to respond to any 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 Google Business Profile 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.

This month’s tasks make up about 10 hours, and that’s if you’ve done most of the prep from last month and have efficient systems in place. If you don’t enjoy these tasks, or just are interested in learning how to tackle them, we’re happy to help! Schedule a free call to get the support you need.