Remove the Stress from Marketing Your Business in Three Easy Steps

Starting a new business can be stressful. Your to-do list continues to grow longer by leaps and bounds. It seems like you’ll never see the end of the slog and the stress monster is right on your heels and you can’t outrun it. Sometimes it feels like you just get one stressful thing settled and another flies up to hit you in the face.

Online marketing can be a blessing and a curse. It’s great for increasing your sales, but there are so many options out there. You may not even have implemented any marketing because you’ve been so overwhelmed by options. So what should you do?

Take a deep breath. Pour yourself a mug of tea. Put on some relaxing music and then read this article. By the time you are done, you’ll know three easy ways to remove the stress from marketing your business. These methods will surely be useful to you in the coming months, even after your business takes off and your income starts to come in.

Step One: Stop Taking on Everything

A new businessperson’s first and biggest mistake when trying to market a business is to try too many things at once. Is it any wonder, with every single expert out there trying to convince you that their way is the only way a business can be marketed. The good news is that this isn’t the case. Take, for example, the dilemma of social networking.

Most new business owners believe that they need to be on every social network. From Facebook to Twitter, they’re on them all and getting more and more stressed out because social networking is a time sync like almost nothing else in the world. For that reason, it’s time to pair back. Use only one or two social networks, but get deeply involved in them. For example, if you use Facebook, make a page, create ads and reach out to your customers instead of posting all your updates to every single site.

If you’re stuck on what sites to use, try an experiment. Run a campaign to get the word out about your business, making sure to decide beforehand what results you will consider as successful. Then use only that site or strategy for 60-90 days. After that, you can decide whether the social network or strategy tested, worked or not.

Step Two: Planning Time

Now that you’ve got all that excessive work out of the way, it’s time to make a plan. Sometimes, knowing what to do and when you need to have it done by can do a lot to reduce your stress levels.

As you make your plan, it’s also important to decide which marketing tactics to use. After all, switching back and forth from one marketing tactic to another can be both exhausting and confusing. Use the plan to help keep you on track.

If you’re struggling with picking a tactic, try out 5 Important Online Marketing Strategies Every Entrepreneur Must Have. This guide will guide you through finding your target audience, choosing your message and deciding exactly how to market to your potential customers.

The key to making a plan is to realize it’s not set in stone. It’s important to check in every now and then to make sure it’s still working. If it’s not, it’s time to make a new plan or try to fix a new strategy.

Step Three: Tracking the Important Stuff

There are many channels you can track in your online marketing. For example, you could track your social networking likes, your advertising revenue, hits on your website and much more. Literally, everything can be measured. However, doing this is incredibly demanding.

Instead, try tracking only the things that matter the most to your business. For example, you could track email subscribers you have, or the units of a product you sold last month. Figure out which metric impacts your business goals most, and then track only that one.

I know, I know. It can be exciting to see your twitter post get a thousand replies, but does it really affect your business performance? If not, then don’t worry assign many hours to that. If you track only what matters, you won’t be so likely to be stressed out and caught up in the distractions all the time.

Wrapping up!

I know online marketing may seem stressful and overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. If you remember to cut out all the unnecessary marketing activity, make a plan that still remains flexible and only track what’s important, you will find that your marketing activities go much smoother and you can remove the stress from marketing your business. Beyond that, you will streamline the process, making it less of a giant time sync and allowing you some time to catch a breath or work on actually growing your business. If you stick to the three steps listed above, you will discover that marketing can actually be fun and effective.

Image: Photospin 

Author Bio:

Kevin Balcker is a digital marketer, entrepreneur, and owner of Residual Income Secrets. He writes about starting, growing and managing a blog, SEO, social media and ways of generating passive income. You can follow him on Facebook, Twitter or Google +