Time management: An important aspect of marketing; Part II

The purpose of time management is to make sure that you are utilizing your time to the max. And, as I pointed out in Part I, this will allow you to spend more time with strategies and tactics for marketing your business. If you do this, you will in turn generate new clients or customers and will most likely raise your revenue…Who can be against that?

I stated that there are tasks that are urgent and important and I also provided a way to decide which ones fulfill that description. I also began to write about ways to organize activities that are important but not necessarily urgent. Many of your marketing efforts will fall into this category. While I pointed out that marketing is both important and urgent it is not absolutely urgent, i.e., taking all your time urgent…unless you do not have enough customers or clients to survive. At that point it is pretty urgent but, you get my point. These time management tactics will help you to be certain that you make a lot of progress over time and making a lot of progress over time will reap great rewards in future clients and customers.

Marketing must be an ongoing activity if you are to continue to maintain and grow your business. Depending on what your business is, you should spend at least five hours per week on marketing strategy and tactics. Most entrepreneurs spend a minimum of fifty hours per week working (I know most of you spend much more) which would make five hours per week be ten percent of your time. This is really the minimum time you should spend on marketing efforts. It would be better if you spent fifteen to twenty percent of your time per week on marketing efforts. As I stated in Part I you should be using a calendar such as your outlook calendar to work as a guide. If you do this you will find that you will make a lot of really great progress.

Now for a word about tasks that are neither important nor urgent. How much of your time is spent with these activities. What are these activities? Well, one of them is socializing with those that will not add value to your business. I am not against socializing, especially on Twitter, Face book and, LinkedIn but, make sure that it is furthering your marketing strategies. Keep your friends away from your business activities. Let them know that you will take time to speak with them after business hours. In many cases this alone will free up ten percent of your time. Other activities that are neither important or urgent include the time that you take with people trying to sell you something. Delegate this to others. If you have someone else take a short time to find out what is offered, you can be sure that you didn’t miss out on the next greatest thing.

You should really stress this time management thing with all of your employees also. Calendars, to do lists, all work very effectively in organizing time and organizing time will help you to spend more quality time on things that are important and urgent.