In my career both as an in-house designer and as an entrepreneur I’ve been given the opportunity to design a variety of things. From brochures to building signs, it seems like I’ve done close to all of it. One of my favorite things to design is an email.

Many people say that email marketing is a dead medium. Try telling that to my clients for whom I design more emails than you probably get in your inbox. Not only is it still alive, it’s thriving. Recently my favorite email marketing provider, Mailchimp, had their one millionth user.

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Over the course of this series we’ve found a way to narrow down that massive to-do list into some actionable items that just might help you to get things done for a change. We’ve identified the key characteristics of both short and long-term marketing tasks and we should now have an understanding of the 2-1 marketing strategy and why it can be effective.

Below is a list of common marketing tasks that may be on your list. Please note that this is not, in any way, a comprehensive list. However these examples combined with your understanding of the short and long-term should lead you down the right path. If I’ve missed some very important tasks in my examples please feel free to leave them in the comments. I’d love to hear what you have to say.

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In this series we’ve been discussing why marketing sucks for small business owners and we’ve been working on a way to get you out of that rut. We’ve gone over the idea of combining three small, manageable tasks that can be completed on a daily or weekly basis in a 2-1 ratio of long-term to short-term tasks.

Today I’d like to discuss the common traits of both task categories in order to help you classify your tasks and narrow things down into an actionable list.

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.This is the first episode in an ongoing video series we’re trying out.

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In the previous post of this series we discussed narrowing our marketing plan down to a few small and manageable tasks that we can complete daily. I know, it’s not as sexy as a huge marketing plan. But get this through your head; a huge marketing plan that sits on your shelf is not a plan. It’s a book. You need to execute something in order to get your business moving. A couple small things that are actually completed will move you much farther than that thick document you just spill coffee on. Get it?

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Let’s come out with it right at the beginning here – the biggest excuse people have for not marketing effectively is not that they don’t have the money. It’s not that they don’t know what they’re doing. For small business owners, it can be boiled down to this.

“there’s too much to do and not enough time to do it so we just don’t do it at all.”

Think about it. When you boil down all of the excuses, the reason why it hurts so much to market our businesses is because that list of things that “we should be doing” is overwhelming.

Stop by a blog, follow a marketer on Twitter or pick up a business magazine and you’re going to get hit with a long list of things you need to be doing to market your business successfully. Soon after that, you’re going to be hit with the depression or hopelessness that comes from not being able to see that new idea become a completed task.

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A better title: Why Small Business Marketing Sucks Blows

To sum it up small business marketing is horrible because, as a small business owner, marketing is just one more task on an already overwhelming task list.

You’ve got to fulfill your product/service for your existing customers, deal with payroll, handle accounting, close some sales, follow-up, follow-up, follow-up, return that call, reply to all those emails and then you’ve got the marketing to-do list some time around 6pm.

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Marketing sucks. No…wait…it bloooooows. There’s a chauvinist saying that goes something like “show me a really hot woman and I’ll show you a man who’s tired of *dating* her.” I’m not a chauvinist and I can see the offensive nature of that statement. However it does, crudely, illustrate my point here. The only people who think marketing a business is “cool” are the people who aren’t marketing a business.

Outsiders see marketing as Super Bowl ad spots and Budweiser Frogs. The reality is that marketing is a data-driven, uphill marathon that you never stop running. I had lunch with a friend the other week who said “SEO (search engine optimization) sucks because you’re never done with it.” “You have to keep doing it. There’s no end.” The same goes for all marketing. If you want to keep making money there sport then you better keep marketing.

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