Embrace your strengths and personality when planning your launch

No matter what kind of business you run, if you have multiple offers, you have an active marketing calendar. And that can make it feel like no matter how well you plan a launch, you never really get a break from promotional crunch time. Even with a great team, solid routines, and knowing what’s coming down the pipe, getting your work out into the world can mean you’re locked into late nights and working last minute.

Didn’t you want to work for yourself, so you had more freedom, not less?

Make it Sunday dinner, not Super Bowl Sunday

Over time, most of us develop some simple routines for promoting our businesses that are pretty strong. (Yes, even if our inner Type A personality is sure we could be doing more.) These are what I’d call Sunday dinner style marketing routines because they’re the ones you’ve managed to commit to and stick with over time.

Maybe you:

• Batch your time and schedule Instagram to create a feed your audience loves.
• Diligently and regularly write to your newsletter subscribers.
• Create branded images for each and every blog posts.
• Reply to all comments on your favorite social media site.
• Make time to measure what is and isn’t working for you.

Sunday dinner style marketing is different for every business, but everyone has it. The key to its success is that you’ve found a way to make it a regular, reliable part of your business.

Then you have live event style marketing: product and course launches, webinars, live streaming and “cart closing in X days!”

These often feel more like planning Super Bowl Sunday instead of Sunday dinner. You set huge goals. Try a million new things. Invest what always feels like too much money (and then afterward, not enough) and end up in stressful conversations with ourselves that feel like the small business equivalent of:

“QUICK! WHERE CAN I GET INSURANCE FOR 1200 DRONES IN THE NEXT 3 HOURS?!? NO, I DO NOT WANT TO SPEAK TO YOUR MANAGER! DON’T YOU DARE PUT ME ON HOLD!”

Having a live launch, or you have an upcoming real-time sales deadline for your business can be very tense and high-stakes.

There’s money involved, a very clear pass / fail metric that we set up for ourselves, and often we haven’t made a plan that makes success inevitable for us.

Is it any wonder that so many of us hate this kind of marketing?

The alternative? Ramp down Super Bowl Sunday marketing and make it into Sunday dinner, through self-knowledge.

How to plan a launch on your strengths and personality:

• Consider what already works for you, and what doesn’t. Self-knowledge is free and worth its weight in gold. Get honest with yourself, and list out your strengths and opportunities (places where things aren’t working) when it comes to sharing your work and attracting customers. Ask yourself:
  – What kind of work is the most time-consuming for you?
  – Which parts require your unique insight?
  – What doesn’t?
  – What would take the most work off your plate if you outsourced it? Then do something about it. You get no points for knowing, only for acting on that knowledge. Delegate. Ask for freelancer recommendations. Even better? Design your plans, so you don’t have to use your least valuable skills. Just because Michael Jordan can mow his lawn, that doesn’t mean he should.
• Don’t wait until a huge business goal is on the line before you start sharing your work. Build routines you can stick with now. If you want to do more blog or podcast interviews for your launch, start building relationships and pitching now. If you want to have more subscribers for your launch, start learning how to write guest posts and create lead magnets now. This gives you time to learn how your chosen tactic works, get your feet underneath you and give yourself time to adjust and fine tune before you add huge stakes to the mix. When it really counts, you can now draw on your experience, strengths, and self-knowledge to knock it out of the park.
• Build a bare minimum marketing plan and a full throttle marketing plan. When my clients sit down to write a plan for how they’ll market their business on a month to month basis, most of them come back with big, elaborate plans. Plans that would be hard to execute if they had nothing else on the schedule for three weeks. They have great ideas, but they’re often not based on their actual available time and resources. So write that plan! Get all your ideas out, and call it your full throttle plan. Then write a version you or your team can absolutely move forward on if you only had 5 hours a week. Start working that bare minimum marketing plan first, and add in elements of your full throttle plan once you have the minimum handled.
• Edit, edit, edit. Take everything off your list that’s there because you see other people doing it, or feel like you probably should be doing but aren’t familiar. Leave at most one of these items on if you can’t help yourself. Then add in anything you can do that leverages your business’ promotion personality instead. (You’ll actually do these things!)
• Make a repeatable plan, not a one-time blowout. Instead of marketing for upcoming events one by one, make one plan for the style and size of marketing campaign you’re working on. (Is it a small, evergreen sales funnel? A big, live launch for a course that’s available for a limited time?) First create a checklist or plan for how you market that kind of thing in your business, then make it specific to your offer. Now you never have to start from scratch on this kind of project again, just use your checklist. Bonus points if you reflect afterward on making sure your plans are sustainable and don’t leave you feeling bottomed out.

It’s tempting to look for listical posts packed with tactics that promise to vault you ahead of the competition. (Surprise! They often just land you in tech support hell or sounding like an infomercial.) It is much easier to win with a strategy based on knowing who you are, who your customers are and what lights you up!

Want to identify your best traits for your next campaign? Need to build your marketing plan? Let me help! The Indie Business Intensive is a 90-day one-on-one strategy program that makes your business irresistible, more profitable & simpler to run.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by 310,538+ people.

Subscribe to receive our top stories here.