Recently I sat down with a group of people who I hope to be working with in the coming future. They represent a theatre based charity that provide opportunities for young people to get involved with theatre.
They’re already doing an incredible job and I’m hoping to be able to help them spread the word further and increase the people they help.
One of the biggest issues that they face is overwhelm.
And this is an occurring problem with digital marketing. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a charity, offline business, online business or are just wanting to make money online.
The biggest problem is information overload.
Digital marketing is huge.
There is no other way of putting it.
In the modern world there are so many forms of communication, messaging and relationship building that it can be hard to keep on top of the few that we want to in our personal lives.
When you start moving this into the business perspective where you need to then it can seem like an impossible task.
If you just want to setup a blog properly then you need to:
- Create a website
- Create a mailing list
- Create Facebook page
- Create Twitter account
- Create Instagram account
- Create YouTube account
- Link all social media accounts and website
And that’s just the creation stage. Once you’ve created them you need to keep them all updated with regular blog posts, emails, status updates, photos and videos.
But that’s still not it…
They all need to link together and you then need to talk to your audience by engaging them, replying to them and answering questions.
And even then you still haven’t finished…
Because next you need to develop strategies to generate revenue from these channels and (if you don’t already have it) create the products to generate the revenue.
Wait… there’s still more…
You need to stay on top of what’s going on in your market, where people are talking and add in new channels of communication if your audience are moving to a new one.
All of that before you even start to think about press releases, PPC, Facebook Ads and other forms of paid advertising.
To be honest it’s enough to put even the most confident off.
Just the sheer thought of everything that has to be done is draining.
And that’s the problem… none of it “has” to be done.
But we’re conditioned to think that everything needs to be done and it should all be done at once.
Of course if you can do everything then that is optimal. But you don’t have to do everything to be successful online.
In fact you can do just one thing and make it work really well to be a huge success.
What’s more important is making sure that you don’t become overwhelmed and actually take action to get the things that need to be done completed in the time you have available.
So the question is… how do you do that?
Good question 😉
You’ll be pleased to hear that it’s actually very easy.
The first thing to do is get organised, and that means using a simple piece of software to arrange things.
There are lots of project management tools out there, but I would recommend you use Trello. It’s simple, effective and… free.
You’re going to be using this tool to keep on top of projects, apply importance to different elements of your structure so that things get done in the right order and effectively.
If there are a number of members in your team then you can also all discuss each project on it’s own.
And that’s the next thing… everything needs to be split into projects first.
Be sure to make them small.
For example:
“Build a website”
That’s way too big a project to put on their. It needs to be broken down into bitesize pieces more like:
“Create strapline for business”
“Create logo to go with strapline”
“Determine what the majority of website visitors are looking for”
“Decide primary action you want visitors to take when they visit website”
“Rough out the design of website”
And so it goes on. The key is to break down big projects into smaller manageable pieces that can be done quickly and effectively.
Once you’ve done that the next job is to assign levels of importance. This needs to be done on both a larger project basis and on the smaller tasks within that project.
You would start with the larger projects such as:
- Create a website
- Create a mailing list
Once you’ve put the larger projects into order then the next job would be to assign importance levels to the smaller pieces of that project.
These are the ones we looked at above like:
“Create strapline for business”
“Create logo to go with strapline”
You’re now in an excellent position to move forwards. You know an overview of everything that needs to be done (the big projects) and you know the order you’re going to be doing them in.
You also know what’s required to complete each of these (the bite size pieces) and the order that you’re going to do them in.
The only thing that’s left is… to get started!
But before you do I have one word of advice.
Make sure that anything which needs to be done regularly like writing content for your blog, sending emails, updating social media etc… the first time you get to it create a schedule and find a tool to let you automate as much of it as possible.
Don’t feel that you need to do your social media updates every day. You don’t.
What you need is a tool that will allow you to schedule one or two weeks of social media updates at once which are sent out over the next week or two. That way it only takes up 30 minutes once a week, not once a day.
Building these schedules and processes in the beginning will prevent you having to try and create them will save you a lot of time and trouble further down the line.
What do you think?