Make the Time You Don’t Have Count: Smarter Marketing for the Overloaded Business Owner

There’s never a good time to work on your marketing. You know it needs attention—your email open rates are limping, your website still has “lorem ipsum” on the services page, and that half-finished brochure has been sitting in Dropbox for eight months. But when the day is already eaten up by client calls, invoices, and the dozen fires you didn’t see coming, who’s got the bandwidth to “refresh brand language”? Still, if you keep pushing it off, your business stays invisible to the people who actually need what you’re selling. And being good at what you do means nothing if no one sees you.

Start Where People Are Already Looking

You don’t need to reinvent your entire marketing ecosystem. You just need to start where people already go to check you out—your website, your LinkedIn page, the flyer you hand out at every trade show. If those things still sound like they were written by someone avoiding eye contact, you’ve got a problem. The goal isn’t to be flashy—it’s to be clear. When your materials tell people who you help, how, and what to do next, you’re doing more than marketing—you’re opening a door.

Stop Writing Like You’re in a Boardroom

No one reads the phrase “end-to-end solutions” and feels anything. Business owners fall into this trap all the time—trying to sound official instead of being understood. You wouldn’t talk to a customer at your shop that way, so why write like that in your brochure or on your homepage? Drop the jargon. Say what you mean. The simpler and more direct you are, the more human you sound—and people trust people, not slogans.

Repurpose, Don’t Rebuild

Think of your best-performing material—the social post that actually got comments, the testimonial that made you feel like a rockstar, the line in your elevator pitch that always gets a nod. That’s your gold. Instead of starting fresh every time, take what’s already working and build it into other places. That great quote from a client? Use it in a one-pager. The phrase that always lands in meetings? Put it on your website banner. You’re not lazy—you’re efficient. And repetition builds recognition.

Outdated Fonts Tell the Wrong Story

You might not think twice about the typeface on your brochures or signage, but your audience does—instantly and subconsciously. Fonts carry tone, and when yours feel like they belong to a dusty office from 2004, your message feels out of touch no matter how modern your offer is. This is a good one to examine if your materials seem flat or disconnected, because small typographic tweaks can shift perception fast. Simplifying the update is easier now, too, with intuitive online font-matching tools that help you identify and swap old fonts for ones that actually reflect your brand.

Let Other People Brag for You

Most people won’t believe you’re great because you say you are. But if a client says it? That lands. Put your social proof where people can see it—short quotes, screenshots, real names. If you’re not collecting testimonials yet, you’re missing out on the easiest, most credible way to show impact. Don’t wait until you have “a system” for it. Just ask your happiest clients how you helped and use their words, not yours.

Design for Skimming, Not Studying

Everyone’s tired. Your reader has 19 tabs open and three Slack pings waiting. That means they’re not going to study your sales sheet like it’s literature. They’ll scan it—and if something doesn’t jump out in five seconds, they’re gone. Break up the text. Use bullets. Put the most important thing at the top, and cut the rest. Your job isn’t to say everything. It’s to say just enough that they want to know more.

Pick a Platform—and Actually Use It

You don’t have to be on every social channel, in every inbox, and updating your blog weekly to be effective. What matters more is consistency. Pick the place where your audience already is—maybe it’s Instagram, maybe it’s your email list, maybe it’s a physical mailer—and commit to showing up there with content that’s useful or interesting. The sporadic “we should really post something” approach doesn’t build trust. Frequency beats perfection. Start with one channel and get good at it before you expand.

If It Looks Cheap, It Feels Cheap

This one hurts, but it’s real. If your materials look like they were thrown together in PowerPoint during lunch, that’s what people will assume about your business. You don’t need to hire a full-time designer, but you do need to care about layout, spacing, alignment, and the right visuals. A clean, easy-to-read flyer or one-pager can quietly do more selling than a 20-slide pitch deck. People judge fast. Give them something solid to land on.

You’re never going to “finish” your marketing. It’s not a checkbox you tick off between payroll and supplier calls. But you can make it part of the rhythm of running your business—a small, weekly investment in getting your message right and getting it in front of the right eyes. Think of it less like a giant strategy and more like good hygiene. Not flashy, but essential. And the better you get at it, the more you’ll wonder how you ever ran without it.