How are you filling your time? During this time of covid, where the inquiries don’t come as often as they have in the past, it’s very easy to get swept up in the “busy” work.
Are you spending endless hours working on your social posts? Are you spending days or weeks getting your email sequence just right? I get it, it’s easy to focus on these tasks. Why? Because they give us a sense of accomplishment. They give us a feeling that we’ve checked something off of a list. Mostly because there is a flood of “business coaches” that don’t know how to actually help so they are giving you tactics that will keep you busy.
“Keeping you busy makes them feel like they’re helping. ”
Yes you need to market, yes you need to post on social, create a lead magnet and have an email list, but what you need more than that is an overall strategy, not an endless inventory of things to have on a To-Do list.
What’s the difference between Strategy and Tactics?
A strategy is the full vision of your plan. Tactics are the individual pieces of activities that may or may not move you towards that vision. Creating a comprehensive marketing plan, where you account for all of the messaging and execution is a strategy. Learning and doing the latest social gimmick is simply a tactic. Yes, learning Instagram reels is a popular tactic and can even possibly move you towards the vision, it more often than not is simply a tactic that is sucking up your time. Creating a strategy also means that you have the entire vision, not just the here and now.
Having an effective strategy allows you to start with the end in mind
When you can start with the end in mind, it creates a much more effective campaign. You will be able to control all of the messaging from start to finish. You will create a more cohesive and professional campaign plus you will be more efficient, aka more productive.
Busy work makes us feel good in the moment. We can sit at our desk for hours ‘working’. But just working isn’t enough. We need to protect our time. Habits form bit by bit, and if we don’t protect our productivity in the quiet times, we won’t be able to recapture it in the busy times.
So what should you be working on? Revenue generating tasks. When looking at your task list, you need to mark them in one of three colors. Things that are going to help you to bring in sales, such as sending a Joint Venture letter or reaching out to your past clients to see how you can serve them each day, place a green dot beside them. If it’s a task that will bring in revenues eventually such as building your lead magnet or posting on social place a yellow dot beside them. Finally the tasks that don’t directly contribute to revenues such as choosing new colors for your website or designing a logo place a red dot beside it. Additionally if you have a task that is not in your skill set it should also be added to the red dot pile.
We all have certain times during the day that we are the most productive. That’s when we need to accomplish the green dot tasks. These are the things that generate the most revenue in our business. The yellow dots are the things that don’t take priority yet for some reason before we split up our lists we tend to do first - unless we chose to do the red dot tasks. Rarely do the green dot actually make it to the top of the list. By creating our priority lists based on revenue generating tasks we are able to better grow our businesses. I’ve heard other travel coaches refer to the “epidemic of the travel industry” as being bad logos and business cards, I can assure you that is not going to make or break your business.
As we face the future of the travel industry, it’s time to stop focussing on things that don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things and get busy serving our customers again.
Clients are getting ready to travel, if you aren’t reaching out to them to let them know you’re there to serve, someone else will. Choose the activities you invest your time in wisely.