The BaSiC Marketing System: The Secret to Consistency and Growth in Business
Entrepreneurs and freelancers often struggle to find the time to market their businesses when their day already feels full with client work. You know you need to keep a flow of new clients if you want to keep growing your businesses, but you also don’t want to have to work long hours and sacrifice your sanity and free time!
The answer is simple: Systems. You need to develop effective systems for both time management and marketing. Systems create consistency, which allows your efforts to compound over time. It also helps you make sure that you are covering all of your marketing bases so you are less likely to be affected by sudden changes in traffic patterns, algorithms, and all the other factors that are out of your direct control.
This article will cover my BSC (or “BaSiC” marketing system. I’m going to walk you through all the foundational things you need before you even set up your marketing system, and will then will help you create your own BaSiC marketing system so you can build and promote your business as efficiently as possible.
Time is Money
First, you need to make some decisions about your time. Many people would tell you to look at all the work you do in a day and try to see how much time you have left over for marketing. I look at it a different way, however.
You only want to work a certain number of hours on your business every day, right? Sure, you might not be able to pull a Tim Ferriss and condense down to a 4-Hour Workweek, but you also don’t want to add in a lot of extra marketing time on top of your already busy schedule.
So the trick is to decide how much time and effort you need to spend on your business, then work backward from there.
You may have heard of Parkinson’s Law, which states that work will expand to fit the time allotted to it, or, in other words, a task will take the amount of time that you give it to take. So by creating a schedule with a predetermined number of marketing hours assigned to yourself, you will be forced to compress the client work into the remaining time.
You will probably find that you don’t even need to work that much harder during your reduced client work time. You will just need to stay more focused, and perhaps develop a few systems or efficiencies to help.
How Much Time Do I Need to Market My Business?
If you are just getting started out, you have a lot more time than clients, so you have a lot more time to dedicate to self-promotion. I would recommend dedicating 2-3 hours every day, using the systems I will describe below.
But if you are already busy, then you may need to consider making a few changes to better divide your time between client work and marketing. I would recommend that you start with at least one hour of marketing per day, and then make adjustments to both your client work schedule and your marketing time once you see how your efforts begin to pay off.
Organic vs Paid Marketing?
Keep in mind that most free or cheap marketing takes time and consistency to gain traction. You need to decide to devote at least a few months to the system you will create before you even get started, then you need to consistently follow it every day. It will be tough to keep penciling in an hour or more per day, so you need to commit from the beginning to stick with it.
Paid marketing can bring instant traffic, so if you have the money, you can use it, but keep in mind that, unless you have a good system for capturing people’s email addresses, the majority of visitors that come via ads will likely not return, so once you stop advertising, your traffic will dry up.
The slower, organic, content-related traffic takes a while to gain momentum. but if you do it right, it can grow over time with minimal extra effort.
Systems: The Key To Long-Term Growth
Just having time set aside for marketing is not enough, however. It is so easy to think you will just jump over to Instagram to post something, only to find yourself sucked into the endless scroll.
It is also far too easy to focus on the “fun” marketing activities and neglect the ones that actually move the needle for your business.
So before you get started developing the marketing system that will keep you consistent and focused, you need to figure out what to consistently focus on.
The Components of Your Marketing System
If you have been in business for a while, you should have a good idea of how your customers heard about you, and what the “nurture sequence” was that moved them through the awareness > consideration > purchase phases of the customer journey. Unless you had to do something crazy or extremely time consuming to acquire those customers, you should incorporate those activities into your marketing system.
If you don’t know how people found you, try asking some of your favorite customers how they found you and why they chose you. You should also start collecting this information from new customers from here on out.
Either way, I recommend including at least one marketing activity from each of the following four categories every single week:
Start doing high-touch, in-person, or cold-calling marketing. If getting more clients quickly is important to you, then you are going to have to get out from behind the keyboard and start interacting with real people in real ways.
Options include: In-person networking events, going door to door, cold-calling, DMing people on social networks
Choose one of the following social media platforms to focus on: YouTube, Instagram, or Twitter. Or, if your business is primarily B2B, you can opt for LinkedIn. You may choose TikTok, but if you are just getting started, I wouldn’t put all your eggs in the TikTok basket, as its future is a bit uncertain (at least in the United States). So if you wanted to use TikTok, I would also post the same (or at least similar) videos on one of the other three platforms mentioned earlier.
Create evergreen, highly optimized content. You should be building an asset that can be discovered by new customers with little or no ongoing effort on your part.
Options include: Blogging, posting on Medium, guest-posting on other blogs, building a YouTube channel, writing a book, creating webinars or workshops, starting a podcast
Build your email list. You’ve heard it a million times: “The money is in the list!” But if you haven’t started building your email list, you are leaving money on the table. Once you have a tool in place to collect email addresses, start creating lead magnets, launch a newsletter, or offer a discount or promotion in exchange for your visitors’ email addresses.
The tool you use isn’t as important as just getting started. Choose something easy like MailChimp or FloDesk, or, if you have a bit more expertise, you can choose a more advanced platform like Constant Contact or Active Campaign. Site builders like Squarespace and Wix even have built-in tools that you can use. You can always export your list to a different platform later.
Building Your Marketing System: The BSC System
Now that you know what your marketing system will include, it is time to figure out how to execute your plan in the most efficient way possible. This is where my BSC (or, “BaSiC”) system comes in.
The BaSiC system consists of 3 core components:
Batching
Scheduling
Consistency
If you miss any of these three components, your marketing system won’t work very well. Fortunately, each of the components is very simple to implement.
Batching Creates Efficiency
One of the ways we will increase efficiency is through batching. Batching your content creation will help you develop more consistent, thoughtful content, and also help you get more done in less time because you won’t have to deal with time-drains like setup, context switching, “blank page syndrome,” and more.
This approach allows you to create multiple pieces of content in one sitting, which you can then use across various platforms over time.
For filming videos, this might look like:
Day 1: Decide what content you will produce for the next 5-10 videos. Script/outline the videos. If you are using cue cards or a teleprompter, get this set up today,
Day 2: Record all 5-10 videos. If you are using multiple locations or multiple outfits, schedule your day out so that you record all 5-10 videos’ content at each location or in each outfit before switching to the next. As you record each video, note when you say something “clip-worthy” or “quote-worthy.” This info will make Day 3 go a lot smoother.
Day 3: Today is editing day. As you are editing each video, pull out the clips and write down the quotes so you can turn them into shorts and social media posts on Day 4. In most cases, I would encourage you not to design your thumbnails today, as switching out to your graphic design tools is too much of a context switch. You can save stills for thumbnails today, or think about the best way to convey the content visually, but stay in your video editing tool today.
Day 4: Today is graphic design and posting day. We will discuss Scheduling later on in this article, but for now, just know that this is the day when you will be using your graphic design tools to create the thumbnails and social images that you will be sharing across the internet that will tie back to your videos. Once you have all your graphics, add your thumbnails to your videos, and schedule all your posts using your scheduling tool(s).
You can use similar day-by-day batching breakdowns for any other task you do in your business, like writing newsletters, blogging, or finding new leads.
Scheduling Gives You Your Time Back
The next part of the BaSiC system is Scheduling. We talked about one kind of Scheduling during the Batching section, where you schedule out various tasks over different days. This kind of scheduling allows you to get into flow states and reduces time lost by context switching.
The other kind of Scheduling involves using tools to auto-post your content over time. These tools will take away the need to remember to post every day, remove the temptation of the scroll that inevitably happens when you go to a social media platform to post, and ensure that your audience sees you frequently.
There are a wide variety of tools that you can use for this. Some of the most popular ones are (affiliate links):
Buffer - Allows you to post to all the biggest platforms. The cool thing about Buffer is that you only pay for the channels you use, which could save you a lot of money if you only post to 1-2 platforms.
Later - Has several time-saving tools, like Caption Writer, that allow you to use AI to your advantage.
SocialBee - In addition to scheduling, this platform helps you curate content from your industry to share, which helps you to stand out as an expert in your industry.
AppSumo - This is not a tool, but instead is a website that offers “LTDs” or Life Time Deals on various software. They usually have a social scheduling tool available to purchase, and paying once is so much nicer than paying every month!
Consistency is Key
You can create the best content in the world and offer the best products and services, but unless you are consistent in your marketing efforts, you won’t be able to reach new customers and grow.
Once you set up your system, you need to commit to following it for at least 3 months before you start to change anything, especially if you are just getting started out.
To make an educated decision, you need to have enough data points. If you aren’t getting much traffic yet, you need to let the system run for a bit before you can determine how effective it is. Statistically, you need at least 30 data points to start seeing statistical significance.
So decide that you are going to show up to follow your schedule, and treat it like it is your job. Your future depends on it!
Finalizing Your BaSiC Marketing System
Now that you understand each component of the basic system, develop a schedule that incorporates each of the 4 Categories of your Marketing Strategy (in-person, social, content, and list-building).
Sometimes, you can multitask by combining categories into one activity. For instance, you could host an in-person workshop that you could record. For the event, you could make a worksheet. After the event, share the video on YouTube. Create some clips and quotes to share on your social. Create a blog post that includes the worksheet available for download as a lead magnet. This one big activity gave you all the rest of the content you needed to check all the boxes for the week.
In Conclusion
The key to successfully balancing client work and marketing is to develop systems that work for you personally. Identify which marketing activities are most effective for your business and focus on those. Most importantly, schedule dedicated blocks of time for marketing activities in your calendar. Treat these appointments with yourself as seriously as you would client work.
By implementing these strategies, you can create a consistent approach to both client work and marketing, ensuring a steady income stream for your freelance business. Remember, the goal is to make marketing an integral part of your work routine, not an afterthought. With practice and persistence, you'll find the right balance that allows your business to thrive and grow.
