Beyond Core Creative Work: How To Get Marketing Done

Keep your core creative work front and center

Making things often involves a very specific setup and a little routine that pulls you into the work.

When it comes to productivity, your surroundings, your mindset, and any number of other details might affect your output. If you’ve been in business for any amount of time, you’ve managed to figure out what works for you and if you have a setup in place that works for you and makes you productive, you want to preserve it.

In Productivity for Creative People, author Mark McGuinness talks about the idea of putting a fence around the work that only you can do, and that its place on your schedule should be protected.

It’s a way of making sure your core work is prioritized since that’s where you create the most value. Your next priority is making the time to do the work that will allow you to sell what you’ve made.

Leave some time for the marketing activities that will allow you to make sales

Recognizing the importance of online marketing is not as much of a problem as actually getting it done, since it requires showing up consistently. That’s the whole key to online marketing: consistent and regular content.

Digital marketing is not about just one campaign at a time. Whether you use organic content alone or paid advertising alongside it, content creation is a long-term, ongoing effort that involves a bunch of different things happening on a regular basis.

When those things don’t get done, little by little your online presence disappears and you slowly fade away from the memories of your fans and customers.

Without a plan, marketing tasks get done randomly whenever you have a spare ten minutes, or they get overlooked and forgotten, and you don’t even notice until your sales numbers start to dry up because you haven’t paid attention to nurturing your customers. Either that or you are fully aware of the neglect and it creates a constant sense of low-level anxiety.

How to set yourself up to get marketing done

Get into the right mindset

Put on your planning hat. Step outside of your resistance and enjoy the process. That’s easier to do once you understand that marketing is just another word for finding and communicating with all those people who are most likely to like you and to want to buy from you. To do that, you have to be you. You don’t have to put on a whole new persona to sell your products.

Avoid the creative trap

Don’t fall into the trap of using your creativity as a distraction, of giving yourself permission to not focus on the task at hand.

When you don’t feel like doing the thing in front of you, in the name of being creative you may start thinking about something else and before you know it you’ve gone down a rabbit hole. By the time you resurface the time you’ve allotted for marketing is gone.

Actively chasing new ideas at the wrong time can actually distract you from what you’re trying to do – which is to regularly publish content that connects with the people who are most likely to want your work.

Simple is fine

Complex project management apps and tools are not necessary. Especially if you don’t already have a lot of planning set up, you want something that’s easy to understand with a very small learning curve.

There are plenty of apps out there that are free or cost very little for light users. Most have upgraded versions that let you expand the features as you’re ready.

At first, it’s fine to stick with what you already use to organize your other work, whether you like hands-on or digital.

Here’s the bare minimum

• A calendar where you can note each work session and deadline
• A document where you can flesh out the details

If you want to get a little fancier and use a Kanban board, try Ora project management software. Make a list of tasks and schedule them on a calendar. Each task (called a card) can be as simple or as detailed as you’d like, including images, attachments, and labels. As each task is complete it gets moved to the next step of your process. Kanban boards were originally designed for manufacturing but work well for creatives because of their visual nature.

Find the time

I really wish I could give you a quick, easy shortcut, but there just isn’t one. Finding the time for marketing is like finding the time for anything else. What gets prioritized gets done.

Plan your marketing, set aside chunks of time for it, and show up for the appointment – just like you do for your core creative work.

Otherwise, there is a very human thing that happens. In the absence of a plan that tells us what to do, we pay attention only to the most urgent things. All those little marketing tasks don’t seem as urgent as finishing your latest project or developing new ideas.

That means your products get created but maybe don’t sell as well as they could. Or perhaps they sell really well at shows where you’re a vendor, but you’re having trouble getting traction online.

Set appointments

However you usually schedule dentist appointments or meetings or other events that involve showing up on time, is how you’ll schedule your appointment to do your marketing. So whether you use a calendar app or a paper calendar, schedule it in. Think of it as an appointment apart from your core creative work.

Try to find a time where you can show up regularly, whether that’s in hour chunks here and there or a half day once or twice a week.

For example, if you already spend time on social media, can you expand that by an hour or use some of that time on creating content? If you really can’t imagine where you’ll find the time for content planning, creation, and distribution, you may need to consider finding someone to help.

Show up and do the work

Commit to not getting distracted and get as much done as you can during the time allotted.

A plan and a system help you get past excuses and distractions

When there’s a good solid system in place, you don’t have to think about what you’re going to do. Instead of dithering for half an hour over which blog to write or which product to show in your video, you already know because it’s right there in front of you. All you have to do is execute.