Small business owners tend to be in a perpetual cycle of business development, then service delivery, and back to business development. Have you ever looked up after a particularly busy season of service delivery and realized your sales funnel is empty? Don’t stress about it. Instead, focus on these 10 things when business is slow and when things get really busy again, you’ll be happy to have these things set up and working for you.
1.Round up testimonials and client success stories to share across platforms. Write case studies for your website and ask clients to leave you positive reviews on Google and Facebook.
2. Review past blog posts and add internal links to new content you’ve written. These can be added at the bottom as suggestions to keep reading or can be dispersed throughout the post as hyperlinks when you hit on topics you have other posts on.
3. Refine your lists in your email platform. Sort through contacts and assign relevant tags to help you segment future content to make it the most targeted message possible.
4. Create an email newsletter if you don’t already have one. If you do this already, review what you have and see what can be polished up.
5. Remix your content to pitch to publications as guest blog posts. Make sure your bio links back to your own website. This accomplishes two things- first, it increases SEO as link building and builds credibility of your own website with search engines. Secondly, it allows you to promote your business as “being seen in” those publications.
6. Brainstorm ways to repackage your services. How else can you do what you do, but in a different way? Are there smaller chunks of value you offer that can create a new entry point for prospects? Are there new services you offer that your current clients aren’t familiar with? Look for ways to package those services as upsell opportunities.
7. Revise your marketing plan. What’s working? What’s not? If you don’t have a marketing plan, stop whatever you’re doing right now and create one.
8. Turn your blog posts into videos and share across social platforms with Content Samurai or Lumen5.
9. Create an ebook of resources your web visitors can download. Ideally, this piece of premium content will be something people will want to exchange their contact info (subscribe to your blog) for.
10. Brainstorm potential collaborations with people you’d like to work with. Reach out and have the conversation- you never know what it might turn in to.
Focusing on these tasks will not only keep you busy when business is slow, but it will help strengthen your marketing down the road for when you’re focused on other things. Circle back to this list whenever you can!