One of the questions I get asked frequently is “How much time should I spend on marketing activities?”
And I always ask, in return, another question. Well, two questions actually.
“How many clients do you have now?”
and “How many clients do you want?”
If you’re just starting in business and have no clients or if you’ve been in business for awhile and hit a dry spell, then you should be spending at least 80% of your time on marketing your business.
If you’ve got a pretty steady flow of clients and you just want to make sure your pipeline is always full and flowing, then you can probably get away with spending about 20% of your time on marketing activities.
On average, my advice to most folks is to allot at least 25% of your time to marketing.
The second most frequent question I get is, “How much money should I be spending on marketing?”
And I have an answer for that, too, but we’ll save it for another day.
My best,
Marty
Soul Proprietor. Huge Adele fan. Email and Direct Mail Marketing Specialist. Lover of all things marketing. Creator of the Stay-in-Touch Marketing System. Graphic designer. Printer.
50% of the time is what I’ve heard quoted most as to how much time is best to spend on marketing. I think there are a lot of variables to that though to take into consideration. I like your take on it, that when new to spend more. Once established then not as much time will be needed because you will have systems in place, referrals, testimonials,ezine, website,& loyal customers, etc. to assist. Makes sense to me.
Thanks for your comments here, Beth. Too often, once people start to get a steady flow of clients, they back too far off the marketing wagon. So the key point, of course, is keep marketing no matter what, all the time.
No clients? 100% of your time. 🙂
A few clients? 60-80% of your time.
Lotsa clients? 20% of your time.
And the caveat to all this is another little gem I was told by Chris Brogan last week: Only schedule yourself for 60% of your work time. Things happen. If all of your business hours are schedule for something, when things go wrong – and we all know they do, occasionally – you’ll have a real mess on your hands because your schedule doesn’t have the elasticity required to handle the emergency.
I love the idea of scheduling yourself with clients or work 60% of the time to allow for contingencies. And I agree, no clients you probably should be marketing 100% of the time. I was allowing a little time for program development. But you are right. Thanks for the comments.