Time Management is important to small businesses.  Is Digital Marketing something your business should keep in house or outsource? Time is the ultimate opportunity cost for small business.  We all joke that there “Only so many hours in a day.”  But in reality it is the most finite of resources.  There are ways to acquire knowledge, skills, and even money. But there is no way to add more time.  You can only multiply manpower.  This is why time management is so important to small businesses.

As I  come up on the first birthday of owning and running my own small business, I am becoming very aware of the distractions and inefficiencies that exist in any business environment.  Things that leach away attention or make the work being done less effective.

Back when I started this adventure of my own business, I saw an interesting article on Huffington Post that stated that many business owners put as much as $500 on the value of having just 1 more hour in their day.  The infographic asked how much the owners enjoyed being involved in every day activities such as marketing, accounting, sales, and office management.

Ultimately all of these things are a drain on time.  Time that I could be investing in a business in ways that could reap greater rewards.  More time to focus on client acquisition strategies.  More time to focus on brand development.  More time to focus on new products/services.  More time…

The goal of Time Management is really optimization.  Getting the most out of each moment.  Part of the optimization should be determining what tasks need to be done personally and which tasks can really be handed off.  Cash flow is always a concern for any small business.  But the question that should be asked in deciding what tasks to hold on to is whether or not the time that can be gained by farming out a task can be put to use in such a way as to provide more value to the business than the cost of farming out the task.

Digital marketing has the potential to really help grow and market a business.  But it requires certain skills and time to do it effectively and efficiently.  Tools can be utilized to magnify the skills and efficiency of work.  But this only takes the businesses as far as the creativity and communication skills of the individual doing the work can take things.

Email and social media can be composed and scheduled.  Tools are available to handle the monitoring needs to maximize the efforts of identity and reputation management.  Dashboards can be created to help you monitor your analytics and impacts of your digital marketing so you can make informed decisions about how to utilize resources.

At the end of the day, a lot of the busy work can be pulled out of digital marketing allowing someone to focus on the message, the medium, and the audience.  The question is, does your business have the talent and skills in its manpower to really be effective at these things.  If you do, then it is important to utilize the tools to optimize the individual’s time.  If you don’t, then the return on your efforts is being blunted. Even with the best tools, the results could have been better.

Can you put these people (possibly even yourself) to work on other tasks that will provide higher value to your business than the cost of having somebody else do the work?  To answer that question, you have to know the value of time in your business.  You also have to know the value of the opportunities that you have not been able to pursue.

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If you are interested in learning how digital marketing tools could be put to work to optimize time in your business, contact MS Digital Solutions today for a free consultation.  We work on a “Do It With you” or “Do It For You” model.