5 Marketing Tips for Busy Business Owners (part 2)

Last week I started a three-part series of posts to share marketing advice with you, the time-crunched, stressed-out business owner. Many business owners are aware that inbound marketing is the best way to attract and keep customers, but finding time to create quality content and share it can be a challenge. With that in mind, I shared some advice for making frequent blogging (almost) painless, and for staying in contact with your prospects and clients. If you missed it, check it out here.

Today, I want to share some easy tools that you can use to promote the content you've worked so hard to create. We'll be using some tools that you may already use in your personal life: social networks.

Social scheduling

Many business owners I've talked to know the importance of social media, but cite time as their biggest constraint. Knowing which networks are relevant to your target audience, what to post, how often to post and at what times, and who to connect with? It can all be a little daunting at first.

If you're a HubSpot user, then you already have access to a great social publishing tool that takes away some of this guesswork. You can use it to post new articles or blog posts on your social media accounts and effortlessly repurpose posts from one network to another. HubSpot will suggest specific times to post your content to ensure the greatest number of people will see it.

Set-up time: 5-10 minutes per blog post/article to write 3-4 messages, plus a one-time setup of social media accounts to post automatically.

Social Inbox

They say social media is like a dinner party, and no one likes the person that just talks about themselves all the time. But besides monitoring every single person you're following on social media, how do you keep track of what people are saying? The good news is that you can use social inbox in HubSpot to set up specific social searches to watch for on twitter. This makes it easy to keep track of what’s going on in your industry, see who's mentioning your company, or answer questions about your product or service.

By setting up social inbox to fit your needs, you can begin to separate the signal from the noise in social media. You can’t be watching Twitter all the time, but you can get intelligent highlights that are worth your time to follow up on. You can even set up phone notifications or an email summary to make it easier to keep up with what’s going on.