2 Tips for Keeping Your Sanity (and Marketing Flow) During Busy Season

Truth time: it’s been three weeks since I last published a blog. What started out as a weekly effort, became a biweekly one, and now a “when I’ve got a great idea” one.

If you listen to traditional marketing advice, you would hear that I need to get on the ball and get back to weekly posting ASAP.

“Your leads are going to dry up.”

“Your audience will forget about you.”

“Your business is going to suffer.”

What that advice leaves out though is one BIG thing that matters to solopreneurs and small business owners: life.

Sometimes life just gets in the way. Sometimes our business (aka servicing clients) gets in the way. Sometimes it’s both.

Whatever the case, I am here to tell you that it is 100% ok to experience these declines in consistency. The key is to not use a busy time as an excuse to totally derail the marketing strategy you KNOW works for you.

Here’s two ways to prevent that from happening.

1. Keep in touch with your audience on at least one platform.

So I haven’t been great about writing blogs and sending emails the past few weeks. You know what I have been awesome at though? Staying active on my social media channels.

I am sharing Instagram Stories almost daily and engaging multiple days a week with my LinkedIn connections’ posts.

I have not cut myself off from the DCM audience in all ways and only remained in contact with my active clients. I have just prioritized the marketing channels that are possible for me to manage when the client load is high.

I highly recommend you do the same.

2. Be conscious that one season doesn’t become four.

Each month on the coaching calls inside my membership I ask the same thing:

What are your goals for this month? How can I help you achieve them?

The answer I received to the first question struck a chord: survive.

Literally, that is the only goal this client had. She wanted to survive the summer.

You may identify with that feeling simply because of the uptick of vacations and calls of sunny, warm weather pulling your attention away from computers.

For the members, who are all parent entrepreneurs, summer means the balancing act of work + life gets more heavily weighted on the “life” side with kids out of school and needing entertainment.

So for the summer, we focus on surviving. No new lessons, no pressure to keep EVERY marketing channel flowing, just a focus on some form of marketing to ensure the business stays connected to its audience and continually moving forward, no matter the pace. Just like when training for a marathon (which I do a lot of here ICYMI), forward IS a pace.

We can’t always be the fastest runner. I will probably never be the fastest runner in a race. What I will be is a consistent runner. I keep going. Even when it’s hard or seemingly impossible, I keep putting one foot in front of the other, even if its not as fast as I’d like it to be because guess what? No matter the pace, I will STILL get to the finish.

Even if you don’t want to run a marathon, I encourage you to apply that same perspective to business. Forget if someone else seems to be doing more than you or scaling quicker. They may have had their “just survive” season in the winter when you were cruising along checking boxes off your to do list.

The thing to remember is that ONE season where the scales tip one direction (or the other) is not going to break your business. Just put a deadline on your calendar for when that season will be over and set clear timeline goals for what happens next.

When one low marketing season turns into two…and three, that is when you have real trouble in your business.

So even if you can’t do ALL the things your marketing strategy dictates work best for you, do something and give yourself a deadline for getting the rest back up and firing.