Key Takeaways
- How long it takes to do various digital marketing tasks.
Full digital marketing tasks guide
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Hello and welcome to the small business sweet spot. I’m your host Barb Davids, and this show is dedicated to helping small business owners like you get more organic website traffic and also to help create and distribute content and analyzing the numbers so that we can make better informed marketing decisions. It is action oriented, direct and conversational.
And if you’ve been looking for SEO or content marketing help, please stick around to the very end where I share about the group coaching program, small business sweet spot. I’m so glad you’re here. Let’s go.
Okay. Let’s talk about how much time it takes to do the different digital marketing tasks for your business. A lot of the time we procrastinate because we don’t know what we’re doing, or we think it’s going to take so long and we only have like this many minutes, or we have started a project and then we’re like, Oh crap, this is going to take me a lot longer than I thought.
So what I did was I pulled together some general guidelines about how long things take. A lot of the times, these guidelines that people put out with timetables of course are relative, right? There’s so many variables that go into everything. And for me, I just think it’s helpful to kind of know about how long things take so that I could try to plan and manage my time just a little bit better.
And if you haven’t done a lot of digital marketing yet, this is helpful to know so that you can decide, okay, do I need to spend a whole day? Do I need to hire out for this or that kind of thing? And I would say that once you start diving into some of these things and you start working on them, you might find that you become faster at them. For example, when I was writing blog posts, I’ll just start with that one first writing blog blog posts took me like, I don’t know, eight hours to get out one draft. And then I would send it off to the copywriter and she would edit it.
And it was like just doing it all over. Cause I was so poor at writing my own blog posts. And for her, it probably takes her half the time in order to do the entire blog post.
And consider when you’re doing a blog post as well, it takes some time to do research, figure out how you’re going to publish it. Some of the technical bits, when you upload it, you’re adding images, you might have to do some infographics. So that’s just the writing portion.
And then you have, you know, all those other things that go with it. So that could be a eight hours total for all of the pieces. Now you’re not going to do that probably all in one day, write it and publish it and all of those things.
So what about other tasks? Let’s go into a keyword research. It could probably take roughly anywhere from, I’m going to give you a really wide range, eight to 16 hours for a decent size keyword research project. Again, this is going to be based off of a general assumption of small businesses and how many keywords that they’re choosing.
However, it could go days if you have a larger business, or even you could do something in a quick one to two hour thing. If you’re just trying to get surface level, really, what do you want to call it? Like foundational keywords to know what you’re going to be targeting with your homepage and some of your key pages. Where it gets to be longer is when you’re creating blog posts and things outside of your core services.
Okay. Planning content. I would say it takes about 10 to 12 hours to plan out a month’s worth of content.
Now that’s going to sound like a lot. And it’s because you have to research because you’re thinking about things and you’re giving it the time of day. Some of the people that you see on socials or different places that say, you can plan a month’s worth of content in 30 days is full of crap.
They’re looking at it from a completely different angle than many small businesses are. So for example, I’m not going to talk about a lot of the topics that some of these templates put out there. I guess I look at IG because that’s what I spend a lot of time on Instagram and LinkedIn.
And some of the templates that they give in terms of what topics to talk about are really just not even relevant to what I want to share for my audience. So I would say spend at least a full, good full day to plan out what angle. And then not only just the angle, but like how you’re going to do the visual, but you don’t have to do the visual.
That doesn’t include that. That’s a whole separate section. The, the idea behind the planning, the content is to strategically figure out what you’re going to do on what days, what it’s going to say, or the angle, even coming up with the captions, and then thinking about the visual that goes with that.
All right, for social media, this one can go anywhere from 45 to 90 minutes per social post. Again, some people are going to totally laugh at this and that’s totally fine. It’s going to vary depending on how in depth you’re going to get.
For example, it’s going to take about 15 to 20 minutes for the caption writing and researching and choosing what hashtags you want to use. And then you’re looking at anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes for the creative part of it. So that’s the IG Reels or the carousels.
So the piece that goes with the caption, and then you have another 10 to 15 minutes just for uploading and scheduling it, because you also have to put with it, image alt text, and then you have the scheduler part, and then you have the cover photo. So all of those equal to about, what was it? 45 to 90 minutes per social post. Now, of course this could vary because as you build out your content, you may find ways to template it, make it, um, be able to use existing content or use existing creatives, that kind of thing.
And hashtags, even you could build them out at the beginning and then reuse the set. So this is from the perspective of if you’re doing it new every single time. All right.
Now my favorite SEO, optimizing your website so that it can be found for search engines. I would say that you would want to spend at least three to four hours per month optimizing your website. And that is, there’s so many different ways that you can do it.
But if you focus on the tactical piece of SEO, three to four hours would be at the very minimum. But I always like to say it’s spend at least 10 hours per month. And that includes research, looking at the numbers, um, rewriting something.
So you, because you could go on forever and for days, I would say spend at least that much time on optimizing your website. Are you doing email marketing? Email marketing, probably about one to two hours for the writing of the newsletter. And then another 30 to 60 minutes for testing.
Obviously, if things are going well, and you don’t have a lot of like images or links or things inside the email, it probably won’t take that long for testing, maybe a couple of minutes, cause you’re going to send it to yourself and it’s going to work perfectly the first time, right? Designing and developing a website is anywhere from 20 to 60 hours, depending of course, on the size and the functionality that is part of that process. That one again is another industry and another tactic, another functionality that is completely all across the board, because it depends on so, so many variables. It depends on the person’s expertise, their whole workflow, what exactly you want in your website, how functioning do you want it? Is there extra stuff in there that’s not just like static sitting on a page, that kind of thing.
Okay. That works out to be about 40, 45 hours per month. And in 173 working hours, that works out to be 25, 26% of the time that you’re working on your digital marketing.
Again, those numbers can vary, but that gives you a rough idea of how long it takes to do some of those different digital marketing tasks. So there is a supporting blog post that goes with this. And so I will put a link to that in the show notes for you to check out.
And if you have any questions on this topic, please feel free to reach out. Have a great day. Cheers.
Thank you for sticking around. I hope you enjoyed the episode. If you’re looking for SEO and content marketing help, consider joining the small business sweet spot.
It’s a group coaching program where you can get answers to your questions about your business directly and clarity around the marketing strategies that you would like to implement in your business. You can find all kinds of information at compassdigitalstrategies.com. And if you liked the episode, please tell a friend. Cheers.
