How much time should business owners spend on marketing?

If someone asks you, “How’s business?” A common reply that I hear all the time is “Busy.”

Now being “busy” could either be good or bad.

It depends on what you’re busy doing.

For example, if you find yourself very busy in your business but not making much progress towards your business goals, then maybe you’re busy doing the wrong kind of things. Or, if you’re busy and your business is also growing rapidly, then chances are you’re busy working on the right things.

So, how can you be “busy” doing the right things? The things that will GROW your business? One effective way is to learn business online.

In this article, I’m going to show you:

  • How to focus your time on the most important things in business
  • How to figure out exactly where to invest your time each week
  • How much of your time should be spent on marketing

You can see the video version of this blog post here:

YouTube player

Focus on the most important things

The first step to using your time wisely in business is prioritizing what’s really important.

There are so many distractions and things you could spend your time on in your business, but they often do very little to grow your business.

Because here’s the thing…

In business, there are really only two main things that matter:

  1. Getting more clients (marketing & sales)
  2. Getting great results for your clients (client delivery)

And the business owners I speak to are usually really good at client delivery (helping their clients with whatever they paid them to do), but often struggle with getting more clients (marketing & sales).

Why does my marketing sometimes NOT work?

It could be a lot of different reasons, such as:

  • Not using the right strategy (psst… Here’s the strategy we use)
  • Their messaging isn’t quite right (watch the strategy free training video for tips on how to do this)
  • Not enough time being invested in marketing & sales (if you don’t invest time in growing your business, it probably won’t grow)

In this article, I’m not going to spend a lot of time going through how to get the right strategy with the right messaging for your marketing campaign to work. If you want to see the right strategy to generate leads, appointments and clients each month, be sure to click here and watch this video first.

Instead, for the rest of this article, I will focus on how to invest your time wisely in marketing and sales to grow your business.

Invest your time wisely

To invest your time wisely in marketing and sales, let’s simplify everything.

If the two most important activities in your business are:

  • Getting clients (marketing & sales)
  • Doing work for clients (Client delivery)

Logically, you would invest most of your time in these two activities.

Now, most of you won’t have a problem with spending time on client delivery. And spending time on sales is basically just having sales calls with your potential clients.

But where most people struggle is getting those appointments with potential clients in the first place.

And this is ALL to do with your marketing.

So, let’s break down how much time you need to invest in marketing specifically to grow your business.

Setup your marketing campaign

When it comes to marketing, the first thing you need to do is create a strong foundation.

In other words, you need:

This free training will show you in more detail how to set all of these systems up.

Typically, to set everything up is just a one-time investment of either your time and/or money.

See also: We have done-for-you marketing packages where we can do all this for you if you prefer.

Maintain your new monthly marketing campaign

Once everything is up and running, the next step is to invest either your time and / or money in ongoing marketing activities.

Here are the marketing activities I would recommend focusing on each week:

  • LinkedIn Outreach (1-2 hours/week)
  • Create Content (2-4 hours)
  • Manage Paid Ads (2-4 hours)

Note: Paid Ads are optional and you don’t need to start this until the time is right for you. You can still get great results even without paid ads.

In other words, you need to spend 5-9 hours each week on your marketing (or, about 1 hour a day each week).

But this is where things get interesting…

Depending on where you are in your business right now, you either need to spend MORE or LESS time on these marketing activities.

For example, if you don’t currently have many clients, it would be wise to spend more time on marketing.

If you already have a lot of clients taking up a lot of your time, you can spend less time on marketing. But don’t ignore it completely!

You still need to invest SOME time in your marketing each week, otherwise, you run the risk of your new business pipeline drying out at some point in the near future.

See also: How to get sales appointments for your business predictably each month

So you personally will have to decide, based on how many clients you have right now and how busy you are with client delivery, how much time you can dedicate to investing in your marketing each week.

I recommend trying to invest as much as you can in these marketing activities. Anything else that’s taking up a lot of your time and isn’t as important, either outsource it, automate it, or do a bit of both.

Schedule time for your marketing

And then the last thing you now need to do is actually SCHEDULE time in your calendar for working on the marketing activities that you’ve committed to.

By scheduling the marketing activities on your calendar, you can be sure they’ll get done and as a result, you’ll start to see your business leads, appointments and clients increase over time.

Top tip: You can set up a recurring calendar events each week.