Since overwhelm is a topic that comes up often with my clients in relation to building a private practice, I thought I would write a few tips that have worked for me when it has felt like it’s all too much to manage:
1. Review your goals. Are they realistic? Are they manageable? Are they still relevant?
Do they need to be more focused or fine tuned? It is easy to feel overwhelmed when you are lacking clarity around your goals or have not set them appropriately.
2. Plan your marketing days and times. Your marketing time should be scheduled into your appointment book just like you schedule in your clients. If you don’t treat marketing activities with the same importance as your clients, you will constantly find that you are struggling to get things done.
3. Find a structure for your marketing that you can follow. Set completion tasks for each day, week, month, etc. Develop or use systems and tools that will help you do this.
4. Know that you can’t and don’t have to do everything. Decide what is manageable given your time and energy and how quickly you want to achieve your goals. Choose a few marketing strategies that you can implement to the best of your abilities and act on them.
5. Remember to get help. Even the most experienced marketers need additional help and support from time to time. In fact, those that do best have regular input from others, whether it’s through professional consulting or coaching, a mastermind group, partnering with colleagues (joint ventures) or informal networking or gatherings tend to achieve greater success than those who try to do it all alone.