If you are thinking about starting a side hustle or have already taken the plunge and are looking to find the time to do your side hustle marketing, then we might have the answer for you - your work commute.
Immediate warning, this is for people who get a bus, tram, or train to work. If you are driving (or riding a bike) then the following might be a little dangerous - but for those people, jump to the bottom for our bonus tip for people commuting in cars!
Schedule Like a Professional
For most, social media will be a critical part of the marketing mix. Which exact channels you use will depend on your target audience, but let’s assume that at least a couple of the usual suspects are in your marketing mix.
This means that for some of your commuting time, you should be writing and scheduling posts. To make the absolute most of your time, then we’d like to recommend you use a scheduling tool rather than try and natively schedule posts on the platforms themselves.
The reason for this is simple, it will be faster if you do them all in one place. You won’t waste time flicking between them and have less chance of making a mistake. Much of the content will be the same across the platforms, so create the base post and then adjust it within the scheduling tool so it’s right for each platform you use.
For example - if you are putting out a post about a new product you are launching, build a post with details about why the audience will like it and a nice image. Maybe you’ll shorten the text for Instagram and add more images (maybe a video!) but on Facebook, you can go into a little more detail and possibly link directly to a preview page. All completed within the scheduling tool and done on the commute to work.
Fresh Web Content
One of the tricks to side hustle marketing is getting free traffic/eyeballs via content people are searching for. It needs to be relevant to your business and of benefit to the prospect but if you get that right, you’ll have people visiting your website and then you have the chance to convert them.
This requires frequent new content on the website, so it’s time to exploit the power of AI. Firstly, you need to ensure you have a good understanding of the topics that matter to your customer, then it’s time to enter the world of ChatGTP.
On your route to work, you could be typing in article ideas, giving ChatGTP lots of clues and information to build a great first draft. Once it creates an article, you have the time on your commute to review and improve it.
You might change some of the wording, you’ll add some extras or make it more relatable to the business - but it’s all faster with a ChatGTP head start, making it another thing you could do on your commute. Develop a draft on the way in, refine it on the way home - bang, you’ve got a fresh piece of content on the website. Do that twice a month and you are flying.
Networking Ninja
The secret to many businesses' side hustle marketing is networking and whilst you might think it’s unlikely to be doing this on the way to work, you’d be wrong.
Let’s start with the easy one - LinkedIn. If you spend just 15 minutes every morning on the way to work going through LinkedIn, I promise you that your network will increase and you’ll meet potential new clients.
Spend this time going through your feed and responding to a minimum of 3 posts a day. This isn’t saying ‘Hi’ or ‘That sounds good’. It’s not liking 50 posts but saying nothing. We are talking about intelligent comments that inspire the author or others in their network to read and respond to your comment.
Another good example could be Facebook groups or forums - wherever your potential audience hangs out. Find these places and spend time engaging within them. Be a trusted member of the community and avoid selling. Focus your time on the commute to helping people, offering useful ideas and generally being someone that people like.
Ultimately this time spent converts into good relationships and the opportunity over time to talk a little more about what you offer, but by restricting your commute to non-sales engagement, you resist the temptation to become ‘that guy’ who no one wants to listen to!
Engaging Email Marketing
The majority of email platforms have a mobile app that you can utilise to create and send emails on the go. That’s right, we see no reason you couldn’t create and send an email in the time it takes you to get on the train and alight 25 minutes later at your destination.
The best way of achieving this is via templates. Create them in advance, and have a bank of templates that you like to utilise for different types of emails. Create these at the weekend or in the evening. It’s maybe a couple of hours of time investment that will pay back handsomely.
With these templates in place, you’ll simply need to pick the ideal one, write the content you want to distribute, select some images and pick the segments it will go to. Done. If you prep those templates, it really is about deciding what to write and scheduling everything to go out.
Imagine that, twice a month you’ll spend your commute to work writing and sending emails and suddenly you are engaging frequently with your customer base.
Customer Service
You might be thinking ‘customer service is not marketing’ but we respectfully disagree. Every single time you communicate with your customers, you are marketing. It’s a common fact that it is 5 times cheaper to get an order from an existing customer than find a new one, so good customer service is marketing gold.
Use your route to work or the trip home as a chance to stay on top of any questions they might have, a fast and helpful response can lead to a good feeling and the chance of a follow-up order.
Checking the status of orders and spotting any delays before the customer does can do wonders for your customer relationships. The same goes for any supplier contacts, the better and faster the response, the better service they will deliver - it’s the perfect way to avoid looking like a side hustle and acting like a full-time business.
Social Media Engagement
We started the article with an example of how to do your social posts on the commute, we end it talking about how to use that time to engage with your social audience because posting on social media is only half the job.
It is just as important (if not more so) to be social and talk to your audience. Respond to any comments they make. Connect with people who like your posts. Find prospects in other places and engage with their posts - basically, make the time to talk to your customers and prospects.
It’s potentially the most useful thing you can do on your commute to drive your business forward. Social media accounts grow faster through engaging with people online than they do through just posting and sitting on your journey to work is the perfect time to do this form of marketing.
So there we have it, 6 ways you can be doing your side hustle marketing on your commute to work, to maximise the time you spend outside of normal work hours on developing and growing your business. Good luck and let us know how it goes.
Sorry, forgot, we promised a tip for people who drive to work - learn! Listen to audiobooks, download podcasts, do whatever you can to learn about marketing, understand how someone else succeeded and think about how you can apply that to your business. Your drive to work is time to invest in your side hustle, so learn, learn and learn.
