Every Friday, we’ll offer some of our thoughts on content marketing, curate a few interesting articles we’ve come across (from the marketing and legal industries and otherwise), and tell you what we’ve been up to.

Most of our prospects and clients want to market themselves.

The problem is time. It’s the one truly limited resource. None of us has enough time to add one more thing to our plate, especially when we’re trying to grow our business. Making matters worse, many of us feel like we aren’t gifted at marketing. What we’re good at doing is what our day is already full of: the actual revenue-producing work we do for clients.

But if you don’t make time for marketing, you risk finding yourself with plenty of time—because your work has dried up and no new clients are coming in the door.

How can you fit marketing into your jam-packed schedule? You have a few options.

1. Put marketing time on your calendar

Set aside a few hours a week, or, better yet, a whole day for your marketing efforts. The newer your business and the fewer effective strategies you have in place, the more time you’ll need.

The key here is to treat your own business as well as you would treat your clients. That means setting aside time on your calendar to build goals around your marketing campaigns and then protecting that time. Not just once, either! Make marketing a regular habit, and your subconscious mind will start to pitch in, giving you marketing ideas in between your scheduled times.

Also, as you spend time on your marketing activities, record the time you’ve invested in a diary or spreadsheet. You may be spending more or less time than you realize.

2. Focus your efforts on the most effective strategies

If you have a sprawling marketing plan that requires you to spend time on a number of different projects, review your return on investment from each. When time is tight, limit your efforts to the best vehicles: those that are bringing you the most leads and converting the most leads into clients.

Don’t keep doing things just because you started out that way, or even because you enjoy them or feel like you’re good at them. Instead, prioritize the activities that are working best for your business. Consider the clients you’ve won in the last year; if a particular marketing activity didn’t help you gain any of those clients, drop it from your to-do list.

3. Reuse and recycle

You can get more bang for your buck—dollar- and time-wise—by repurposing content. If you’ve written a brilliant article, use that content to create a video, podcast episode, or infographic. Share it on your blog. Find a third-party site that will use it as a guest post. Break it into bite-size chunks and share it on social media. Use an excerpt from it in a client letter. Get creative here, but don’t let that good content go until you’ve squeezed every drop of usefulness from it.

4. Outsource

What if you truly aren’t comfortable doing your own marketing or you just can’t find the time despite trying these strategies? Sharing the marketing load can help you devote more of your time to tasks that you enjoy and excel at and allow you to focus on your typical client work. Remember, you don’t have to do everything yourself!

Chances are you’ll feel some reluctance about giving up control. The best way to push through that resistance is to start small. Find someone who can pitch in on one discrete writing project that you’ve wanted to do but haven’t had time for. Or assign a content-marketing team to write one blog a month and see what results you get.

The key is to find a reliable marketing partner, someone who can take your ideas and turn them into actionable words that sound like you and that bring in more clients without costing you more time and effort. With the right partner, you’ll gradually form a mind meld that may make it easier to turn over more of the reins.

Want to explore what marketing looks like with our team? We’d be happy to design a plan for you.

Looking for some (more) tips to improve your content marketing?

Marketing predictions for 2019 (Marketo)
Six tools that can reduce the friction of marketing (Marketing Insider Group)
How machines can help you improve your marketing strategy (Forbes)

What’s new this week in the legal industry?

Need something to talk about while entertaining distant relatives?

Do you know how to do the Carlton? Fortnite spread the dance like wildfire, and now it may have to stop (Law.com)
What would you eat to avoid a tough question? This is definitely worse than your aunt’s lumpy gravy (Mashable)
What can you do to brighten someone’s holiday? (Washington Post)

So, what has Scribe been up to this week?

Planning our speaking circuit for 2019 (Want to book us? Get in touch!)
Looking to hire another writer or three (Apply here!)
Preparing a survey about law firm marketing practices
Raising money for our favorite nonprofit, the Podium Foundation (Donate here!)
Closing out projects from 2018 and preparing for an even bigger and better 2019

We hope you and yours have a safe and happy holiday season…we will see you in the new year!

Friday scribbles: 4 things to do when you don’t have time for marketing