On this week’s Dear Katie, I received this question: If I only have 30 minutes a week for marketing, where should I spend it?

I’ll be honest. Thirty minutes isn’t a lot of time.

But if you spend that time properly, you can still make progress.

So let’s dive in.

I recommend focusing on two main activities that give you the most leverage possible to build relationships and have conversations that turn prospects into clients.

First 15 Minutes: Proactive Outreach

Reach out to people you really want to reach, such as your:

• Dream clients
• Warm prospects
• Referral partners

A quick message can turn into work, and it’s as simple as sending a DM or voice message to someone. “Thought of you” emails also work well and help break the ice if you haven’t spoken to the person in a while.

But I found that these messages work best when you add something valuable into the mix.

Voice messages are always more powerful and seem to have a higher response rate than just text.

Focus your time on marketing that gets the highest response rates:

• 20% to 25% of people will open your emails
• 70 to 90% of voice messages are listened to
• 90% of SMS messages are read

For me, voice messages are quick and easy to send, and they perform better than relying on just email by itself.

Fill your first 15 minutes with proactive outreach, and then do this for the remaining 15 minutes:

Second 15 Minutes: Handle Replies Only You Can

Meanwhile, designate someone on your team or a social media manager to start conversations on your social media account, comment on posts from your ideal prospects and keep those conversations warm.

Then, you can dedicate 15 minutes a week to closing the loop on the most important conversations, like:

• Complex questions from prospects
• High-value opportunities in the DMs
• Relationship-nurturing replies that need your personal voice

What About Content?

If you only have 30 minutes a week to dedicate to marketing, how will you find the time to create content?

Here’s the good news: you can still build authority and post content regularly with the right strategy (and without eating into your time).

Here’s how:

• Record everything. All of your meetings. This is all valuable content you can use to market your firm.
• Have someone go through your content and pull the best clips. Then, have them turn those clips into short-form videos, email content and written posts. 
• Schedule that content so that you stay visible all week without adding more time to your plate.

In fact, I have a schedule you can hand off to your team member to help:

Goal: 

Turn your existing words and ideas into content that works all week.

Source Material: 

• Review call recordings, Loom videos, client Q&As, or emails
• Pull 1-2 strong insights per day

Create Assets:

• Clip 30-60-second video snippets for social
• Draft 1 short post or carousel idea from the recording
• Save text quotes or stats for future email/social use

Load & Schedule:

• Use a social scheduler or post natively to the platform. Make sure captions, hashtags and tags are added where applicable. 
• Save assets to a shared folder for ongoing use.

If you follow this process, you’ll always have more than enough content to post.

Hopefully, over time, you can work more time in your schedule for marketing, but until then, this strategy will get you off to a great start.

And, that’s a wrap on this Dear Katie question.

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Now I want to hear from you. Do you have a question? 

Submit it here

Until next time, cheers to your success!

Katie