5 Ways the Right Marketing Plan Can Help You Avoid Burnout
Stop Working For Your Content, Make Your Content Work For You...
by Scot J Chrisman5 Ways the Right Marketing Plan Can Help You Avoid Burnout
Marketing and content production can be one of the most time-consuming parts of entrepreneurship. Especially starting out. It’s one of those places where you can spend a lot of time feeling extremely busy and then look at your results and have that dreaded feeling… no results. It’s a tough spot to be in and easily leads to burnout.
Let’s look at 5 ways the right marketing plan can help you avoid burnout, and how I’ve used marketing plans to help me and my clients avoid burnout…
- Use strategies over tactics
- Batch create and schedule content
- Make it fun
- Document the process
- Test the market before you create the product
Using these 5 principles to help guide your marketing efforts can make the difference between burnout and a joyful pursuit of your dreams…
1. Use Strategies Over Tactics
Tactics are born fast and die fast. They’re often “get rich quick” type ideas and they have no long term application. On top of that, tactics only have powerful application when combined with a powerful strategy.
Strategies are long term solutions that will get you where you want to go. They’re proven and aren’t swayed by subtle day to day turbulence of any market. Strategies respond though to large shifts in the market and require consistency, which is a secret ingredient to any successful business.
2. Batch Create and Schedule Content
When you wake up every morning unsure of what you’re going to post that day, you often end up trapped by that dreadful feeling… The thought of, “I know I need to put something out but I don’t know what and I’m sick of needing to post… what does it do anyway…”
When you batch create content, you’re forced to get strategic in the way you present it to your audience. It forces you to pull all of your thoughts out on paper and organize them concisely which helps your audience understand the messages and implement them effectively.
Take a weekend every month and create ALL of your cornerstone content for the month. Plan and schedule it out. All you’ll have to do after that weekend is to respond to your comments and document the journey through your stories allowing you to breathe a sigh of relief.
3. Make it Fun
The ones that are able to consistently put out content for long periods of time actually enjoy it at a deep level. They’ve found a way to make content creation fun and exciting. They look forward to it and avoid focusing on engagement but rather encapsulating their ideas in the most articulate and artistic way possible.
They avoid “engagement obsession” and consciously enjoy the process of delivering their ideas to the world. It’s about their artistic expression first and foremost and the impact they make second. When you become obsessed with impact and you forget the process, all enjoyment is lost. Never lose sight of the process during the pursuit of impact.
4. Document the Process
This idea has been shared by a ton of people, Gary Vee and many others have talked about documenting the process. It’s true now more than ever. People don’t want another “guru” they want a real person. A business is built one customer at a time… Letting people in on your process as your building will help you earn your first patronage. Once you’ve earned it, celebrate it and honor it. Cherish it.
Document what you do for internal and external reasons. You’ll want to learn from it either way and others will want to see it. Consumers buy from those they know, like and trust. Earn their trust virtually by showing your humanness in your stories as your document your journey.
5. Test the Market Before Your Create The Product
This is vital and maybe the most important idea I can share with you… When you’re creating a marketing plan, it can be super easy to let the cart get in front of the horse and believe that your idea is certainly going to be world-changing… Often times our own confirmation bias will get in the way of realism and we’ll spend endless hours creating products that have no product-market fit.
This is the easiest way to burnout, continuing down a cycle of “world-changing” and “million-dollar” ideas that have no efficacy in the marketplace. ALWAYS test your product for market fit before you create it. When you know you have a fit it’ll be super easy to cultivate the passion to create and deliver it. On top of that, your crowd will help you create the product and surely ensure that your product finds the market fit you’ve always dreamed of.
**Bonus**
Be unattached to the product and fully attached to service
When you’re unattached to the vessel and fully attached to the motivation of being an agent for change, it becomes a lot easier to find a market fit. Once you’ve established that, is the time to triple and quadruple your efforts on creating the perfect product but again unattached to the product as your audience will dictate how it’s created and what it looks like in the end.
Overall, marketing can be a source of depravity and stress when done wrong. When done right it can be a source of passion and inspiration. Use these 5 principles to guide your next marketing campaign and help you achieve your goals while avoiding burnout.
— Published on May 25, 2020