There's an undeniable truth in business, especially for ND folks like us, that a lot of marketing educators (especially neurotypical ones) try to ignore.
It's basically this:
If you're a service provider, you have to spend 80% of your time on client work, admin, and communications. That leaves 20% of your time for marketing.
Marketers, course creators, content creators, agency owners, they all love to talk about the marketing activities they spend all day doing specifically because they have all day to do them.
Me? I now spend my days in office hours calls (6 hours per week) and creating stuff for my students. Otherwise, my whole job is marketing and sales. It's easy for me to put out this newsletter, or create YouTube videos, or post 6x per day, because I only realistically have to spend 20% of my time on client delivery.
(It took me 20 years of 1:1 client work to get here, ALL of which was spent in marketing, so don't feel bad if you're not here yet!)
You cannot run a service-based business (that requires 80% of your time on client work) while spending 80% of your time on marketing.
That's 160% of your time and, unless you literally clone yourself (and don't have to pay your clone) that's impossible.
The trick is to either:
- Build a model based on higher volumes of clients, so you can spend 20% of your time on client delivery and 80% on growing that higher volume audience
OR - Choose marketing tactics that take up less than 20% of your time.
It took me over 20 years of actively learning marketing and audience building as my job to be able to do the first option, so for most people, I recommend the second. Just choose marketing tactics that take less of your time.
Sometimes, that means all you have in a day is 5 minutes here - 5 minutes there. When your ND experiences increase your support needs for a few days, sometimes it's just 5 minutes per WEEK you can squeeze in.
So, what can you do with 5 minutes?
Turns out, a lot, actually.
Not if you just do 5 minutes of marketing once, of course. But if you do 5 minutes when you can - not consistently, but persistently, coming back to it regularly - you can actually build a reputation and a pipeline that can bring you work.
Let's get specific. Here are 15 things you can do to market your business in 5 minutes or less (that don't require a ton of pre-work or system setup.)
- Reposting old content. Have something that worked well a year ago? Post it on your social platform of choice. Copy, paste, post.
- Engagement speed run. Set a 5-minute timer, and like / comment / react on as many relevant posts as you can. (Great way to also take notes on content topics for the future, based on what people are posting about.)
- Testimonial graphic. Got any recent positive client feedback? Copy/paste the comment into a Canva template and make a graphic to share it, or grab a screenshot and crop it nicely for future use.
- Bio update. Pick a social platform and update your bio to include your latest offer, client testimonial, or value proposition update.
- How to work with me post. Pin a fresh post letting people know how they can work with you this month, quarter, year, etc.
- BTS story post. Take a snapshot of you working, post it as a story on your socials with a simple caption.
- Voice note idea factory. Record a 5 minute voice memo ranting about a topic you feel passionate about. Run it through transcription software, and now you have a rough draft of a blog post or newsletter.
- CTA first aid. Check your links! Are all of your payment and purchase links in order? Is your booking link working and your availability up to date? Make sure it's easy for people to work with you right now if they want to.
- Reach out and touch someone. No, not like that. 🤣 Reach out to ONE person in your network to give them a compliment or share a resource. No agenda, just nurturing connections.
- Resend an email campaign. Sent a marketing email to your list lately? Open your software and click "resend to unopened".
- Transcripts to images. Take your latest piece of long-form content (video, audio, blog, etc.) and run it through an AI tool to summarize it and/or pull quotes from it. Create an image for your favourite summary point or quote.
- Lead magnet lift. Open your case study, worksheet, warmup sequence, whatever you've got for a lead magnet and improve one tiny little section.
- Q&A. Browse social for a question about your niche, and answer it thoughtfully in the comments.
- Spotify playlist. Choose a Spotify playlist you created that your ideal clients would love. Grab the share link and post it on social (sharable content!)
- Magic mirror. Record yourself giving your elevator pitch using Loom. Rewatch it to catch tricky bits, and read the transcript to see areas for improvement OR ideal messaging.
- Bonus Idea: Curated Newsletter Content. Go find a short article or resource you like and read through it. Make a short comment. (Do this throughout the week and you'll have a whole authority-building newsletter's worth of content without having to sit and write it in one shot, like I am now. 🤣 )
Reading these and then saying "oh, that's smart!" and never doing it isn't going to help you, so I recommend that you take the ones you like from this list and put them on notes that you can see around you!
Also, just benefit from the mindset shift. There are ALWAYS 5 minute marketing tasks you can do. Follow up with someone, post something, improve something, touch up a bio or a promo material. Make your marketing a "small bites" set of tasks, and you'll make it more manageable.
What are you going to do from this list? Do you have other ideas? Post in the group and share!
- Cheryl
❤️ How to work with me
Ever wish you had a marketing strategist that could live in your pocket, mapping out your full 12-months of marketing strategy and answering all of your questions? Wish you could have someone 24/7 to give you unlimited answers to your burning marketing questions, help you play out scenarios, build your content pillars and offers and lead magnets and more?
I've opened up 5 more spots in the Pocket CMO beta program.
This beta program gives you lifetime access to a custom-built AI marketing strategist. We've built the base engine on OpenAI (you can interact with it via GPT right now) and are in the process of creating our custom UI and adding advanced processing.
I've trained this model on 20+ years of marketing strategy and knowledge. You won't find wisdom like this in any other AI tool on the market, I promise you.
And now, we have Klarna available for Canadians to help make it even more accessible!
If you know you want it, click here to secure one of these 5 spots.
Also a reminder that Solo School has launched a certification program!
There are still 3 Founder's Circle spots left available, which include a private mastermind and 1:1 time with me to develop your accessibility strategy. Pre-reading drops this week, so if you're ready, click here to join us now!
💯 Days Without Deadlines
The biggest question I've been asking myself lately?
"What do I want to work on?"
Every morning, every day, every time something starts to feel like a boring, heavy lift, I ask what I want to work on.
If I ask what I want to DO, the response is...
Run off into the forest.
Knit, or crochet, or do embroidery.
Eat ice cream.
Take photos.
Build a website!
Play Stardew Valley for 7 hours.
Almost anything but work.
So, that's the wrong question. Because I enjoy work, and work needs to continue moving forward! But if I had to choose between "set up a curriculum on my LMS" or "go gather snow yams in Stardew", I'm probably going to pick the video game.
Asking the right question is the biggest, most important piece of the puzzle.
"What do I need to get done today, and which thing do I want to do first?"
"What do I feel like working on right now?"
"What do I want to clean today?"
The questions include the context of the possible answers, so I'm not left farming instead of finishing my newsletter.
If my newsletter NEEDS to happen, the question is, "What do I want to write in my newsletter today?"
The question is the context, and context is everything.
💪 Business adaptation of the week
Journaling. I missed this morning because reasons, but the journaling portion of my morning routine has helped me solve problems before I even get out of bed.
It's not quite the same as verbal processing, but I find that when I wake up, I often have thoughts about problems to solve or jobs to be done. Journaling through them in the morning gives me steps to take and helps me step OUT of my anxiety about whatever it is, and into something more constructive.
I'll stop soon, I'm sure. Doing anything daily isn't exactly my strong suit. BUT. For now, it's helping. And it's using up the pretty notebooks I bought but didn't use.
🎁 My favourite things this week
As mentioned above - Stardew Valley. I was a bit of a gamer when I was younger, but then my undiagnosed self became convinced that everything I did HAD to be productive and have a point. So I stopped.
In recent years I've started playing more games on and off. Candy Crush before bed, Cities Skylines on the computer, Firewatch on PS5, holiday calendar of games on my Switch, that kind of thing. Very much a cozy gamer.
Finally decided to give Stardew Valley a try, and I am hooked! Loving the game progression and the constant surprises and novelty of everything. I have to be careful with this that I don't play too much, frankly!
📚 What I'm reading
Half done Evelyn Hugo, restarted 10X is Better Than 2X, and planning to finish "Unwind" on my kindle while away. Reading 3 books at once helps me finish none of them, faster. Follow me for more life hacks.
Want to follow my reading? Check me out on StoryGraph, the minority-owned GoodReads competitor I love!
