How do I keep marketing going when I am flat out running the business?
The honest answer is you can't do it alone when you're flat out. Here's how I think about keeping marketing going when busy, without burning the few hours you have left in the week.
The short answer: stop trying to do marketing the way agencies and tools want you to do it. You don’t have time to sit in a content planner on a Sunday night. You have time to take a photo of the job you just finished, send a voice note in the ute, and approve something on your phone while the kettle boils. Build marketing around those moments and it keeps going. Try to carve out two focused hours a week and it dies the first time a job runs late.
I started a local marketing agency back in 2014 and I’ve watched this exact pattern for over a decade. The owners who keep marketing going when busy are not the disciplined ones. They are the ones who have made the act of marketing take less than five minutes a day.
Shrink the unit of work
Most marketing advice assumes you have an hour. You don’t. So the unit of work has to shrink to fit the gaps you actually have. A photo at the end of a job. A two-sentence voice note about why a customer called. A quick yes or no on something somebody else drafted.
That is the whole game. If your marketing requires you to sit down, open a laptop, and think, it will not happen in a busy week. If it requires you to tap your phone twice between jobs, it will.
A few things that actually fit into a busy tradie or operator’s day:
- Snap a before and after on every job, even the boring ones.
- Save the question a customer asked you this week. That is a blog post and a social post.
- Forward the nice email a client sent. That is a testimonial.
- Note the suburb you worked in today. That is local SEO fuel.
None of these take more than 30 seconds. The trick is having somewhere for them to go that turns them into actual published marketing.
Separate the doing from the deciding
This is the bit most owners get wrong. They think they need to do the marketing. What they actually need to do is decide on the marketing. Those are different jobs and they take very different amounts of time.
Deciding is fast. Looking at a draft post and saying ‘yep, send it’ or ‘no, the price is wrong’ takes 20 seconds. Writing the post, picking the image, scheduling it, checking it published, replying to a comment, that is the slow part. If you can get the slow part off your plate and keep only the deciding, you can keep marketing going when busy without it feeling like a second job.
That is either a person (a junior in-house marketer, a freelancer who actually executes, not just plans) or it is software that does the work rather than handing you a to-do list.
Pick a rhythm you can hit on your worst week
Don’t design your marketing for your best week. Design it for your worst. If your worst week is one post and one customer email, then that is the rhythm. Consistency at a low level beats a flurry once a quarter, every single time. Search engines, social platforms and your own audience all reward showing up steadily.
I’d rather see a business post twice a week for a year than 14 times in January and nothing until June.
Where this doesn’t work
If you genuinely have nothing to say, no jobs going out the door, no customers, no opinions about your industry, then no system will save you. Marketing amplifies a business that exists. It does not invent one. And if you refuse to delegate any of it, refuse to approve anything you didn’t write yourself, refuse to let a draft go out unless it’s perfect, you will keep stalling. Busy owners who insist on perfection produce nothing.
The honest closer
The reason I built In-House is that the two existing options both fail busy owners. Agencies are expensive and slow and need long briefings you don’t have time to give. Tools and dashboards are cheap but they hand you more work, not less. What busy owners need is something that does the work, shows you what it did, and lets you approve or correct in under a minute. Around $299 a month, no retainer, you own everything.
Whatever you choose, the principle holds: to keep marketing going when busy, shrink the unit of work and get the doing off your plate. Keep only the deciding. That is the only version that survives a flat-out month.
How much time per week should I spend on marketing as a busy owner?
Honestly, 15 to 30 minutes a week of your time is enough if the execution is off your plate. That is for approving drafts, sending photos, and answering a quick question or two. If you're spending three or four hours a week and still falling behind, the problem is the setup, not your discipline.
Should I just pause marketing when I'm slammed and pick it up later?
I'd avoid it if you can. The dip from going dark for a month or two takes about three months to claw back, in my experience. A small steady output during a busy stretch is much cheaper than a relaunch later. Even one post a week is enough to hold ground.
What's the minimum marketing I should keep going when flat out?
Keep the basics breathing: one social post a week, replying to reviews and enquiries within a day, and making sure your Google Business Profile is current. Everything else can pause for a few weeks without much damage. Those three cannot.
Is it worth hiring someone part-time just for marketing?
It can be, but most small businesses can't justify a full salary and a true part-timer often ends up planning rather than producing. I'd look at either a freelancer who executes (not just strategises) or software that actually does the work. The test is simple: at the end of the week, did something get published, or did you just get more to-dos?
Angus , Founder, In-House. I've spent the last ten years working in marketing alongside businesses from all walks of life. Want me to answer your specific question? Email me angus@use-ih.com
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