Excerpted from Chapter 1 – User Journey Funnel Without Burnout, Energize Your Marketing Momentum: When You Don’t Have the Time or Expertise
Successful marketing is not a one-time activity. To see results from marketing, you need to build momentum for your brand to be consistently in the thoughts of prospects. From there, you need to implement full-cycle touchpoints to build a strong relationship with your prospects. Simply put, marketing momentum is essential, regardless of what type of life events are happening.
Marketing momentum keeps your brand alive. It makes you memorable and helps you stand out. Consistent branding across multiple channels can boost revenue. Engagement and momentum need to be built through several activities, like public relations (PR), speaking engagements, social media, and others. The point is that momentum must be built and continue through consistency.
Effective marketing momentum is all about consistency and exposure along the consumer journey. Reaching prospects once is not enough. Instead, momentum requires follow-ups and follow-throughs along every touchpoint in the customer journey. There are several strategies that you can use to build and keep marketing momentum.
- Top of the Funnel (TOFU): The awareness is part of the top of the funnel. This is where you are first introducing your brand to people who may have never seen it. Social media is a powerful tool for marketing momentum. Leveraging the most relevant social channels for your brand, you can connect with prospects in several ways, allowing you to reach people throughout the top of the funnel customer journey.
- Middle of the Funnel (MOFU): The middle of the funnel is the bridge where you bring prospects from the awareness stage to the decision stage. Therefore, you need to nurture the leads you have and continue to connect with them. Email marketing is a great strategy for middle of the funnel.
- Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU): At the bottom of the funnel, the customer takes an action toward your services. Sometimes, this may not be your primary service offering, but it’s still a conversion.
Momentum Without Burnout: At first glance, marketing momentum feels like A LOT of work. That’s why so many small businesses and entrepreneurs never implement a lot of the momentum-building strategies that they should. Fortunately, you don’t have to set up every part of your marketing journey all at once. If you try, you’ll burn out. You also do not have to do all these things alone. Automation and delegation are two of the most helpful and important solutions for marketing momentum without feeling overwhelmed and burnout.
Automation and Delegation: Automation allows you to be more consistent without putting in more manual labor. The process only becomes easiest when you also delegate marketing. If you delegate just 10% of your workload, you could grow your business by 20%. Experience has demonstrated that focusing on tasks that a business owner should be doing, which are high-level, versus tasks that are low-level are key and essential to growth.
Low-Level versus High-Level Tasks: Marketing momentum includes a range of both low-level and high-level tasks. The basic concept is to focus your time and energy on high-level tasks while automating and delegating the rest. High-level tasks are the ones that require your knowledge or are at the core of your business offering. Properly dispersing high-level vs. low-level tasks ensures that team members can focus on their primary responsibilities and what they are good at.
Dealing With Your Cap While Marketing Your Brand: The truth is that we all have a time limit. We have the same amount of hours and days in our cap. If we could dedicate all of that time to marketing, it would be incredible, but we can’t. The key is to effectively market within our cap. But how? A few things to keep in mind:
- Life Happens: We can’t predict everything that will happen in life, and circumstances can change on a dime. That means that the time you have now may not always be available, so you never want to overbook yourself.
- Maximizing Time: Time is a finite resource. By eliminating wasted time and improving processes, we can increase our time for our priorities. Maximizing time is not only about what you do in your business, but also about every facet of life.
The key is to understand your existing caps so that you can get time, freedom, and success back.
Balance and Boundaries: It’s easy to think that the solution for dealing with your cap is to just raise the ceiling. We often think that to make up for lost “time” we have to work longer hours, and even weekends and holidays. This will lead to resentment of the lifestyle you have. Balance and boundaries are essential. It’s the only way to meet business AND lifestyle goals.
Priorities: When it comes down to it, you must figure out what matters to you, in business and life. Having a set schedule when you maximize the prospects you can engage with each day means you say “no” to things.
Improve Processes: The best solution to having more time, more freedom, and more clients is automation and delegation. The power that automation and delegation have is endless. It can:
- Save countless hours on tasks that you don’t need to be doing.
- Focus on core business competencies, providing you with more time and resources to dedicate to innovation and business processes.
- Limit mundane, repetitive tasks, freeing up your brain power and reducing your stress.
- Boost the efficiency of your marketing solutions.
- Earn more money by reducing repetitive work and boosting ROI.
A lot of people want to own their own business to break free of “working for someone else”. They want the freedom to set their own schedule, to determine their own path. Regardless of your role in a business, business is not all we have in life. Consider your lifestyle goals and things in life that matter to you. Figure out your lifestyle goals and how to visualize them – if you don’t visualize it, you won’t prioritize it.
Valeh Nazemoff is known as a strategist with unique strengths in connecting the dots and recognizing patterns to improve the user experience. She is the founder of Engage 2 Engage, a digital marketing services company, and President and Owner of Acolyst, a strategic business cultural transformation consulting firm.
User journey stock image by GaudiLab/Shutterstock
