De-clutter your marketing plans the Marie Kondo way

De-cluttering isn’t only for shelves and sock drawers – the Marie Kondo magic works for marketing plans, too.

Do you feel on top of your marketing?

If you answered ‘No’, you’re far from alone.

With new technologies and an ever-widening array of marketing channels, there’s a lot more involved in planning and executing a campaign.

The risk of overstuffing your marketing plans can lead small business owners to create a campaign that ends up ROI-negative.

But the fact is there’s no way that any one business can do it all. Nor do you have to.

A fresh approach is to do less and do it more effectively.

Trying to do every type of marketing all the time is stressful.

If you have small budgets, then often the marketing that you’re doing is probably costing you more in time than in money.

But the more time your marketing takes, the less time you have to be working in or on your business.

There is only so much you can fit into every working day.

Businesses that try and do everything and get it wrong are no better off than businesses that choose three to five marketing activities for the year and focus on doing them well.

So it’s time to de-clutter your marketing program for this year.

READ: What’s a marketing plan?

Let’s simply, de-clutter and become more strategic so that you achieve more with less. Let’s get our ‘Marketing Marie Kondo’ on.

For those who missed the recent Marie Kondo mania that was taking over Australia, Marie Kondo is Japan’s expert de-clutterrer and professional cleaner. She has written a book called The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying.

You may well be wondering how does keeping a drawer tidy have any relevance to marketing?

Applying Marie Kondo’s de-cluttering principles to our marketing allows us to develop a leaner, meaner marketing machine for ourselves. As a bonus you may just be inspired to de-clutter your office as well.

By taking the time to work through these five steps you’ll be closer to having a marketing plan that will be more enjoyable for you to do.

So let’s start with the first step.

Step 1: Visualise how you’d like your marketing to be

Would you like to feel more in control of your marketing and less hectic on a day to day basis? Would you like to feel confident that whatever resources you are investing in your marketing is paying dividends?

Perhaps you’d like to see your marketing made up of all the fun jobs.

Step 1 is your vision. It can be whatever you like.

Having a strong vision of how you’d like things to be, enables you to make changes easier.

Step 2: Conduct an audit of your current activities

List all the forms of marketing you are doing now. Identify what is working and what is not working. Rate your marketing activities in terms of effectiveness, time or money required and how stressful you find them.

Step 3: Identify what activities bring you joy

Look at the tasks you’ve listed in Step 2 and identify the tasks that bring you joy.

It might be social media, it might be phoning your customers, working on your website or doing sales calls. It might be none of those things.

You may not find joy in any of your marketing tasks, which may call for a different strategy such as outsourcing your marketing.

Step 4: Throw out all marketing that is no longer serving you

Review your list of marketing plans, consider which ones bring you joy and honestly assess which ones have been working for you. Then put your brave pants on, it’s time to look at what marketing is no longer serving you.

This might be marketing that you have always done almost out of habit rather than strategy – for example, Yellow Pages advertising, a weekly blog, employing a sales rep, and so on.

Be honest with yourself and look at the marketing activity investments you’ve made that are just delivering returns. Now mark these off your list of marketing activities for this year.

Step 5: Re-organise your marketing sock drawer (metaphorically speaking)

It’s time to get clear about what marketing you want to do out of all the options available to you. I recommend choosing three or four key things.

Make a plan for how you are going implement these. Get help to flesh out your strategy and action plan if you need to.

Keep these plans visible and then turn your focus on to the actions then just do it. Remember, it’s better to successfully complete three marketing activities than to poorly complete six.