12 Quick Marketing Tactics You Can Execute in One Hour or Less

Successful entrepreneurs and small business owners know that products and services don’t sell themselves.

The truth is that even if you lack experienced marketers on your team, you must learn to market effectively.

Still, many business owners worry that they don’t have any time to market and never get started.

As a result, their businesses stagnate or worse, fail.

The good news is that marketing isn’t just about big, expensive tactics. Many marketing gains come from smaller tasks that create forward movement.

Setting aside just 60 minutes to concentrate on marketing efforts can make a lasting impact on the growth of your business.

Here are 12 quick marketing tactics you can execute in one hour or less.

1. Create an editorial calendar
2. Research blog post ideas
3. Respond to blog and social media comments
4. Repurpose old content
5. Communicate to your e-mail list
6. Create a customer survey
7. Record a video
8. Batch post social media posts
9. Share 3 industry-relevant posts from others
10. Analyze your top competitors
11. Submit your business to directories
12. Check for dead links

Let’s take a closer look at each of these tactics.

1. Create an editorial calendar

If you want your content marketing to be successful and efficient — you need an editorial calendar.

Don’t let the name fool you — an editorial calendar is a powerful tool that extends beyond simply scheduling blog posts.

Editorial calendars serve as a structural backbone to your blogging strategy. They should be used to brainstorm, plan content, collaborate with others,  and keep on track by following systems in place.

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Once your editorial calendar is set up,  never again will you sit at a computer unsure what to write for your blog — you already have ideas and systems in place!

Editorial calendars can be created in 60 minutes or less.

Popular choices of programs used to create editorial calendars include Trello (we use Trello at crowdspring), CoSchedule, and Asana.

2. Research blog post ideas

Your editorial calendar is all set –but now you need content to feed into it. This is the time to build up a log of content ideas.

If you are just starting out, coming up with a large list of topics can seem daunting, but rest assured that by investing 60 minutes in this — you are actually freeing up time to be productive in other areas in the future.

When brainstorming, consider the following:

• topics pertaining to your business niche
• date-relevant topics (think seasons, holidays, quarters)
• visit competitor blogs and get inspiration from their content
• take the lead from Google’s autocomplete when using keywords
  

For example, we noticed that many entrepreneurs and aspiring business owners were trying to figure out ways to start a business. We were disappointed with the existing content about this topic. Most posts were short, poorly written, poorly researched, and importantly, not actionable. We developed a connected series of ideas that turned into popular content on our blog, including how to start a business, how to start a consulting business, how to start a real estate business, and more.

3. Respond to blog and social media comments

A client or prospect commenting on your blog or social media post is an invitation to have a conversation.

If you want to grow your business, accept the invitation.

Responding to comments allow people to know you see them, hear them, and value them. According to OneCrawl, Responding to comments does the following:

1. Boosts your traffic: Then when you get the habit to respond to comments, people are waiting to receive an answer. They will come back on your site to read what you have to tell. And if you take the time to give an answer that offers real value it will produce a great return on investment. Indeed, that’s a good way to have more returning visitors and retain them.
2. Improves social shares: When you are responding to comments, you can add links to your response. This is a great opportunity to insert links to previous articles you have written. But however, use this technique only if the content is relevant with the comment.
3. Enriches internal linking:  When you are responding to comments, you can add links to your response. This is a great opportunity to insert links to previous articles you have written.

Consider your 60 minutes spent interacting with clients or prospects will put you on the road to conversions. You can alternatively use social media monitoring tools to track real-time conversations and mentions.

4. Repurpose old content

Content has a shelf life. Consider any news story that is relevant one week, and forgotten the next.

It would be a gross misuse to time, to write a blog post, share it socially, and then never touch it again.

It’s vital to keep the content new and fresh.

Consider spending 60 minutes converting an older blog article, email, or social media post into a newly developed piece of content.

Not only does this strategy make the most of your efforts, but it also gives you the ability to reach new audiences and reacquaint yourself (and the world!) with popular posts of the past.

Resharing previous content is great. Repurposing is even better.  

Consider the following:

• gather several blog posts on a topic and create an e-book.
• Review older content and use it as an outline for an e-mail or newsletter. 
• Create impactful quote images to share on social media, taken directly from previous content. 
• Expand on previous posts, digging a bit deeper with more information.

Another great strategy is to invest blocks of 60 minutes to improve old content. For example, we regularly write about brand identity on our blog but over the years, we learned that many entrepreneurs and small business owners wanted a complete guide to building a great brand identity. We looked around and couldn’t find a great guide so we started small and over the past year, we created and regularly update our free brand identity guide. It’s the most complete (over 19,000 words) and comprehensive guide to brand identity on the Internet.

5. Communicate to your e-mail list

Nearly 4 billion people use e-mail.

Growing your e-mail list as a business was no small feat, so take advantage of your efforts. Spend 60 minutes crafting an e-mail, newsletter, or marketing ad.

Consider one of the following options:

• a weekly roundup on what is going on within your business or industry
• sales-focused messaging
• exclusive access for email subscribers only
• a facelift on an older blog post in e-mail format.
• calendar of events coming up.

6. Create a customer survey

The ugly truth is that most customers hate filling out surveys, yet the invaluable data surveys provide make them relevant and necessary in most industries.

Spend 60 minutes drafting a quick customer survey that is both painless for the customer and educational for you as a business owner. And remember to include your company logo with the survey. After all, you want people to know whose survey they’re answering.

When drafting a customer survey, here a few guidelines to consider:

1. Keep it short. Period.
2. Only ask what you need to know.
3. Offer the customer an incentive for completing the survey.

Surveys do not need to be time consuming or expensive.

The result data will help improve the customer experience overall, pinpoint what is working and what isn’t.

Some free tools you can use to create a survey within minutes include Survey Monkey, SurveyGizmo, and Google Forms.

Want a free brand review?

Answer 5 short questions and we will send a custom report with actionable insights and specific actions you can take to build a stronger brand.

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7. Record a video

If you are looking for engagement — video is king.

Consider these statistics:

• Social media posts with videos have 48% more views.
• A website is 53 times more likely to reach the front page of Google if it includes video.
• Nearly 50% of internet users look for videos related to a product or service before visiting a store.
• Adding video to your emails can increase click rates by 300%.
• 90% of users say that product videos are helpful in the decision process.

Think you can’t be effective in 60 short minutes?

Think again.

Here, for example, is one of our videos on rebranding failures and what you can learn from them. The content from the video started as a popular article in our blog on rebranding failures.

Your viewers are busy, keeping videos short and sweet is the answer.

2 minutes seems to be the sweet spot for engagement (but experiment a bit here and see what works best for your audience).

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8. Batch post social media posts

One key to ensuring your businesses successful social media presence is to be, well… present.

You do not need to be a slave to social media, to have active accounts with excellent interaction.

What you need is batch posting.

Batch posting is the best-kept secret of scheduling posts ahead of time.

Grab your laptop and get to work!

Scheduling posts for a week (or longer) saves time and ensures you are “always online”. Knowing your posts are scheduled and taken care of eliminates any stress about what to post, and how often.

Popular batch posting tools include Buffer and HootSuite.

9. Share 3 industry-relevant posts of others

You can’t only share the content you create. To keep people interested, it’s important to share content created by others.

In fact, the vast majority of the content you share should be content created by other people!

Curating others’ content is an important part of the marketing process on social media.

Perks of content curation include:

• industry authority (solidify yourself as s a credible source of expertise)
• more content (the more content you have, the more reason for viewers to continue visiting your site)
• customer retention (keeping customers up-to-date can help retain them as repeat clients)
• cost-efficient (the only cost of content curation is time)

Self-promotion is great — but there certainly are benefits to curating and sharing high-quality content from others with your audience.

Curata has an awesome guide to curate effectively.

10. Analyze your top competitors

60 minutes is enough time to check out what your competition is up to.

Identify a couple of your biggest competitors and take notes.

Areas to review:

• content
• website
• customer satisfaction
• new products or services

Big Commerce has an excellent guide on analyzing competitors.

One tool we love is SemRush – it’ll help you get the 411 on your biggest competition. Another great option is Moz.

11. Submit your business to business directories

Did you know that Yelp has over 185 million reviews?

And that’s just one of many business directories.

If your business isn’t listed on Yelp or other business directories, you are missing out on some major exposure.

Already on Yelp, but wonder what else is out there? Check this out: this ultimate list from HubSpot highlights 50 of the best directories for local marketing.

And don’t forget to leverage local SEO and register your business with search engines like Google.

12. Check for Dead Links

Completed a couple of tasks above, but have room for one more?  I have the perfect (and necessary!) task for you!

There are few things more annoying on the internet then clicking on a dead link. They are disruptive, annoying, and give off an unprofessional vibe.

Make a note on your calendar to check for dead links every other month.

Conclusion

Changing your marketing game doesn’t require you to invest a lot of time. And it doesn’t require a dedicated marketing team.

Take small steps and execute some of the tactics we’ve shared above to improve your marketing and your business.