If you’re like most young businesses, marketing is one of many items on your to do list. And every item on that list feels like a high priority. But when it comes to marketing, I promise you, it really is important.

Marketing is the strategic business function that helps you create and sustain demand for your products and services. There are all kinds of tactics that you can use to build demand. Tactics like:

• Email marketing

• Social media

• Blogging

• Videos

• Advertising

And so much more. The thing is, tactics aren’t strategy. And it can be a lot harder to come up with ideas for tactics when you don’t have a strategy and action plan to work from. The reason is simple: your strategy defines what you want to do and a plan outlines how you’re going to do it.

Tactics flow pretty easily from a plan, usually. But it helps if you have processes, too.

Formalize marketing for better results

It’s really common for marketing to be done when there’s time to fit it in. The early days of a business are filled with business development efforts so you can ramp up revenue as fast as possible. Often, without that revenue, you can’t afford to get the help you need to expand your marketing efforts.

But here’s the thing: Business development without marketing means you’re not creating demand and you can’t easily create demand without streamlined processes.

Formalizing marketing doesn’t have to be huge effort, though. It’s all about laying out what you want to do and the steps to get it done. And while it can feel like a painful process, especially if you've never managed marketing projects before, the short-term pain is worth the long-term gain.

What does a plan look like?

Let’s say you want to double your email list over the next year. Here are some actions you might take to accomplish this goal:

• Add email signup forms to prominent pages on your website.

• Create valuable downloadable assets to entice subscribers - two over the next year.

• Include a call to action to subscribe at the end of 50% of blog posts.

• Invite followers to subscribe to your email list on social channels bi-weekly.

• Produce regular emails for subscribers.

How do you formalize the processes?

There are a number of repeatable processes in the activities listed above, including website updates, content creation, email writing and distribution, and social media promotion.

Repeatable tasks are the reason you want to formalize processes. Doing the same steps each time from a documented list helps ensure you don’t forget any critical details. It can also help you capture niggly little steps that need to be done that are easy to forget if it’s not an everyday task.

It’s a delicate balance between being too detailed and not detailed enough, though. If you don’t have all the necessary steps documented, you’ll miss something. If you have too much documented, you’re going to want to toss out the list because it’s annoying.

Sample content creation process

When you’re producing content like a digital asset (lead magnet, ebook, etc.), there are 8 high-level steps you go through every time:

1. Brief - document the purpose, goals, audience, and key messages for this content

2. Research - outline what you want to say, research supporting information sources

3. Write - draft content based on purpose and research

4. Edit - review and revise content

5. Finalize - make the last refining edits

6. Production - create an on-brand layout

7. Publish - upload the content for visitors to download

8. Promote - create social posts or other promotional content

I could break down some of these steps even further, especially production, publish, and promote. But you get the idea. Every time you create a digital asset, these are the steps you need to plan for and carry out.

Going through the process of outlining the steps you need to take in your business and using a tool to manage each step is a way to save time and energy.

Improve your productivity with clear expectations

When you start to formalize processes to make your marketing efforts more efficient, you’ll also have a better idea of exactly how long it takes to do the work. (Hint: it’s almost always longer than most people realize.) Here’s a 3-step process that will get you started:

1) Document your repeatable work

Marketing is all about repetition. Every time you publish a blog post, video, podcast, ebook, etc., the process is the same (with few exceptions). What are all repeatable multi-step processes you have in your business? Make a list!

2) Outline the steps to complete each process

Write out the steps, who’s responsible, and about how long it takes to do the work. For this part, even if you’re a team of one, put your name down as the person responsible. It will give you a better sense of how much time and effort you’re putting into this work so you can make a solid case for outsourcing when that time comes.

Hot tip: One way to simplify the list of tasks is by using templates. (I love templates!) Including some of the work in a template helps you avoid getting too granular in the task list. For example, having a template for blog posts, videos, and podcasts helps you easily remember to include information you need every time (like meta data, tags, etc.).

3) Gut check your process documentation

The first time you list it all out probably won’t be the optimal process. It’s good to test and re-evaluate regularly to find efficiencies. But start with a gut check before you ever put your process into a tool.

Is everything captured? Is it too much? Are the right people doing the right things? Is it necessary to track everything you’ve laid out?

Don’t forget to document decision-makers/approvers if you’re working in a larger team. It should be clear on each project who has the final word. In larger marketing teams I’ve worked on, the requestor was also the approver.

Create right-sized processes for your business

The point of formalizing your marketing isn’t to create more work for you or anyone else. This process is meant to streamline the work you’re doing so it gets done more efficiently. It’s expected that you’ll need to revisit the processes and refine them as you go. It should make you more agile and organized, not more bureaucratic.

As your team grows, you’ll find it’s easier to get new folks trained on what’s going on if you’ve already got the steps documented.

When the processes are laid out clearly, you’ll have better insights into what to expect for delivery times on every marketing project you do.