For today’s marketers, it’s no longer a question of whether or not they can do something, but rather if they have the time to.
Marketing automation, data analytics, and the cloud-based tools that exist today have empowered marketers with the means to do more tasks in significantly less time.
Yet, even with these sophisticated tools, for some marketers, finding the time to conduct other tasks is their biggest challenge. Marketers are constantly bombarded with a series of things to do – including incessant distractions and multiple campaigns, preventing them from getting more done on a regular basis. So how can marketers be more productive during the work day? We share our top marketing productivity tips for busy or ‘time poor’ marketers.
Improve productivity with customised reporting and dashboards
Sure, you’ve got your analytics set up and it’s capturing data for you, but what about compiling reports? If you need to regularly go into your analytics platform, set filters and extract the data you need – you’re wasting time.
Instead of manually doing this process, most marketing automation tools and analytics platforms offer you the ability to customise your view and interface. This means you can set the parameters of the interface or view so that it only shows the metrics and values that you are interested in. Not only is this more beneficial for your team as they can quickly see how campaigns are performing against benchmarks, but it also makes reporting simple, accessible and straightforward.
Of course, depending on your reporting cycle, be it once a week or a month, having your analytics set up this way will make it easy for anyone to extract information as and when they need it.
Embrace marketing automation and do more in less time
Marketing automation is more than just the automatic execution of more tedious tasks – it’s a cost-effective solution that enables businesses of every size to scale up their activities, be more efficient and boost productivity. With marketing automation, smaller marketing teams can access tools that reduce the complexity of marketing functions, minimise errors and manage activities across multiple campaigns.
Social media and email, for example, can be automated at scale but more crucially, marketing teams can access rich analytics and data to assess how their activities are performing and quickly refine their approach based on that information. The result is a more streamlined way of working; a process that is agile, flexible and scalable.
Enhance your lead management and nurturing through automation
For a small business, start-up or busy marketing team, interacting with and managing every individual lead manually is an ineffective and time-consuming way to nurture. It’s also important to acknowledge the fact that not every lead will be ready to engage with your business and must, therefore, be nurtured until they are ready to. Rather than do this process manually, marketing automation tools can support the process.
With marketing automation, your marketing team can create and automate comprehensive workflows, ensuring that your marketing efforts and messages reach the right leads at the right time. It also helps your marketing team to identify the leads most ready to make a purchase through lead scoring and to keep in touch with those who require a little more nurturing.
As a result, automated lead nurturing can help your marketing and sales team to generate better quality leads through a more intricate and personalised process. This way, marketers and salespeople can make the most of their time and resource, and spend more time interacting with leads who show the signs of being ready to buy, whilst nurturing other leads at the same time.
Utilise scheduling tools
Marketers spend around 16 hours a week on routine tasks, according to a survey by HubSpot.
Assuming a 45-hour workweek, the average marketer spends almost a third of their time completing repetitive tasks.
Things such as: collecting, organising and analysing data, email, landing pages, and social media are the most ‘time-consuming’ routine tasks, according to the survey.
However, with marketing automation tools, most (if not all) of these activities can be done automatically, saving you most of those 16 hours. For example, with scheduling tools, marketers can schedule social media activity, emails and blog content. Furthermore, most scheduling tools come with reporting software, allowing marketers to access rich analytics and create custom reports to pull the most important data!
Don’t schedule your content, emails or web pages manually – automate it! But remember, every activity must be carefully considered and applied, just because you can automate social media posting and blog posting does not mean that you should spam!
Adopt collaborative communication software
Instead of sending emails back and forth, shouting across the office, or saving files everywhere and anywhere, get everyone to use a communication app!
Communication apps, such as Slack, bring all your communication together in one place. Most apps – alongside providing real-time messaging – also allow you to archive documents/messages, search, share and download files, call people, and much more.
Slack has quickly become a cost-effective and viable alternative to the more costly communications solutions available on the marketplace and is certainly worth considering.
Ideally, you should try to find a similar solution, something which houses all the necessary applications your team needs for its internal communication and collaboration.
If implemented correctly, these marketing productivity tips should help to reduce the time your marketing team spends on routine activities and help to improve them. Ultimately, it’s not about working harder but about working smarter. Embrace marketing automation today and enhance the productivity of your marketing team.
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