So you’ve had a little lapse in your marketing efforts… What next?

You may have noticed that we at 11eleven Studio haven’t posted anything to our blog since October of last year (yikes!), which actually gave us a pretty solid idea for our next blog post: Unexpected Lapses in marketing. Anyone who owns a business can see how it’s possible to take an unexpected break from marketing efforts; whether it’s administrative efforts, the day-to-day chaos of running a company, or even simple procrastination – it’s likely to hit your firm at some point. How will you react?

First step: Get back on that horse.

So you fell off? so what? Depending on your industry, leads take time to generate, and once you have those leads, you’ll have to think about the time that it will take to close them, so in the words of a troubled hollywood ego – “just do it already”. That’s right, get back on that marketing horse are ride it as hard as you can. You may be behind where you should be, you may be worried about hitting your financial targets, take that sinking feeling in your stomach and focus it on getting more work.

Second step: Don’t let it happen again.

Depending on the length of your marketing cycle (often industry/company specific) it is important to set-up a system in which this marketing lapse will never happen again. If you’re worried about marketing right now, it probably means that you’re worried about the low-levels of work you have – which (probably) means that you have a bit of free time on your hands. You’ve got free time because you didn’t set-up a system that will keep your leads fresh, and keep your employees busy.

With advances in marketing technology, we (marketing professionals) have gotten pretty good at automating the day-to-day tasks, but please, don’t tell too many people or I might be out of a job. Use all of the tools at your disposal, including: apps that automate your social media posting, optimize and automate your ad-words campaigns, establish content creation plans and guidelines so that you have something to keep you busy during those rainy days, but most importantly – create a plan so that this lapse never happens again!