Let’s face it - marketing can be time consuming, and if you don’t have a team working 24/7 dedicated to marketing efforts, it can take a away big chunk of your day. However, if you’re not spending enough time on marketing then it could affect your business prospects and stall growth. It’s a Catch-22 and a tough question for many businesses: should you spend more time developing and improving your product or more time marketing and selling it?

To help you get out of this dilemma, here are four ways to save time on your marketing efforts:

Have a strategy

Having a mapped out plan that is effective can help you save heaps of time. Rather than randomly working on marketing approaches, having a strategy will help you know how much time you’ll be spending each week and on what marketing activity. The strategy should be focused on working on marketing activities that provide the best return on investment for your business. Once you’ve dabbled in different marketing approaches, you’ll be able to figure out what approach gets the best response, what kind of content creates the most engagement, and which marketing tools generate the most sales.

Your marketing strategy should incorporate knowledge about your business and your target audience to employ the most effective techniques that are most likely to result in sales or other positive outcomes. When you have a plan, you’ll get more results will less effort and you won’t be wasting time on things that don’t work.

Delegate or outsource

If marketing is taking up a bulk of your time and you want to be able to focus on other aspects of your business, then ask get your team and your customers on board. For example, ask your team to take photos throughout the day to post on instagram or motivate your customers to post pictures or videos of their experience with your product on social media. There’s also always the option of hiring a marketing firm or a freelance marketing professionals with experience in your industry.

Prioritize your platforms

Don’t feel the need to post and be active on every single social media platform. Find out which one works best for your company and which platform is your target audience more likely is engage with. If you are targeting baby boomers, Facebook and email is the way to go. For a millennial audience, focus on Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter, rather than other channels. By picking and choosing the platform that works best for you and your audience, you’ll spend less time on marketing and you’ll see better results.

Set aside a certain amount of time each day

First of all, find out what amount of time you are capable of spending on marketing without sacrificing other activities, then set aside a time every day for an X amount of time to dedicate solely to marketing. Let’s say, you’ve set aside thirty minutes every morning, then make sure to break up that time for specific activities - for example, ten minutes for writing blog posts, ten minutes for research and ten minutes for posting on social media.