Being a solopreneur or the only person in the small business marketing department usually means having to constantly juggle 101 things at a time. One moment you’re writing press releases and blog posts and the next you’re planning an email marketing campaign or analysing weekly social media stats.

Even if you do have the skills to take on all these day-to-day marketing tasks, the problem is that there’s never enough time to do it all well. So how can you do more (and better) with less time?

In this post we’ll share six tips to help you whittle down the challenge of keeping up with all your online marketing-related tasks. So if you’re the lone-star marketer, here’s how you can get the results you want while also keeping your sanity (and your hair).

1. What’s your primary goal?

Before you start writing and publishing blog posts, sending emails or scheduling Facebook posts, try to figure out what your primary goal is. Is it downloads, leads, signups, sales? Sort that out first, put a number on it, then work backwards to figure out how to get there.

For example, your primary goal can be to turn more visitors into customers. Now, if you’re a new business, you can’t get visitors to buy from you if you don’t have any. So the first step to achieving this goal is to get more visitors to your website.

How? There are lots of effective tactics to drive new visitors to your site, including publishing optimised, high quality content and creating ad campaigns on Google and social media to reach and attract the right people. You can learn more about these tactics from our free course on getting more visitors and customers to your website.

Setting goals is one of the most important things you need to do as a one-person marketing department. Why? Because if you don’t know what you want to accomplish, you won’t know how to get there or what to focus your time and resources on. You also won’t know if the results you’re getting are because you’re focusing on the right tactics, or if it’s simply luck.

Need help getting started? Read our post on how to set marketing goals that will help grow your business.

2. Be realistic about what you can achieve

There’s nothing wrong with ambition. Just make sure you have the time, skills and budget to back it up.

Start by calculating how many hours you have available per week for your online marketing tasks, and then estimate what you can realistically achieve in that time.

If you’re in charge of everything online marketing related, you probably won’t have time to manage three separate social media channels, write five great blog posts a week or run five campaigns on Google.

So what can you do instead? Work with smaller targets that you can actually meet. Focus on an ad campaign a month and on one to two social media channels where you know your target audience hangs out.

The only way to achieve your goals is to limit your online marketing tasks to what is achievable. So make sure you figure out what is attainable and realistic for you to accomplish in a week.

3. Get organised

As a one-person marketing department juggling tens of tasks a day, you need to be relentlessly organised. This is key to keeping your head above water.

How do you get organised? You create a plan that you stick to like glue. Use tools like Trello, Todoist or Google Docs to put together a weekly calendar or checklist of all your online marketing tasks – website content refresh, blog posts, social media content, ad campaigns, emails. Then create a realistic work schedule to help keep you on track.

Want to get more done in less time? Consider creating separate calendars for your blog and social media channels where you map out your blog articles and social media posts for the week or month. Here’s how to create an editorial calendar for your blog and here’s how to create a social media content calendar.

4. Automate where possible

Managing a business social media account, creating email marketing campaigns, optimising blog content and title tags – they all take time. Fortunately, you can save some of that time and energy by automating a few of these tasks.

How? There are hundreds of tools out there to help you do anything from scheduling social media posts and blog posts to sending out emails.

For example, tools like Buffer, Hootsuite and Tweetdeck are a time-saver when it comes to scheduling posts for social networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and more.

Want to do even more in less time? Read this post to learn more about other regular tasks that you can automate.

5. Outsource whenever possible

While you can probably handle just about everything related to promoting your business online, that doesn’t mean you should. Consider outsourcing some of your energy-sapping marketing tasks to other professionals.

Think of it as building a virtual department of people who are experts in their field. The great thing about it is that if you choose the right people with the right skills, you won’t sacrifice quality. Not only that but you’ll also make more time to oversee your marketing strategy and keep an eye on results.

There are so many freelancers out there who are skilled at whatever you need, from blogging and social media management to influencer outreach and pay-per-click advertising. So why not take advantage and create more time in your day?

In these two posts, you can find more tips and advice on the marketing tasks you can outsource when you’re short on time or skills, as well as popular places where you can find people with the skills to help you.

6. Monitor what’s working and what isn’t

Being a one-person marketing department means that your time is extremely limited and valuable. You don’t want to waste it on strategies that don’t produce results.

But how can you know if a strategy is effective or not if you don’t track your efforts and the results they return?

So if there’s one thing that you absolutely need to do, that’s to constantly monitor what’s working and what isn’t. How?

Start by signing up for Google Analytics. This tool is free and it’s one of the most powerful web analytics software out there for tracking website traffic and getting insights on your visitors’ behaviour on your site.

Take our free course on Google Analytics to learn how to use it and what valuable information you can get from it that can help you to improve your online marketing efforts.

Wrapping up

There’s always going to be something to do when you’re a one-person marketing team. To be effective, you have to first set your goals and then identify the activities you need to do to achieve those goals.

Get organised, outsource and automate whenever possible, and always monitor the results of your marketing efforts to make sure you’re investing your time, money and energy in the right strategies and channels.