Being responsible for your business’ marketing often means wearing many hats at once. Not only do you need to continue to organically promote your business in the real world, but you also need to be confident in the newer and usually more time-consuming realm of all things digital.
Marketing your business is all about finding as many effective ways to put yourself out there as possible, all within a limited amount of time. The more successful marketing campaigns you can run at once, the better your business will fair for it. But not everybody knows the fastest and most rewarding routes to business marketing success.
If you want to know how to improve the efficiency of your marketing habits, make a note of these top 9 key productivity lifehacks for marketers:
1. Use a scheduling tool for your social media posts
Not all of your social media posts across every platform should be the same, or you probably wouldn’t be making the most out of each platform’s key features. But if you have a message you want to share from Facebook to Twitter to LinkedIn, save yourself the time and schedule it in everywhere using a tool like Hootsuite or Hootsuite or Zoho. You can also use these tools to add in hashtags or keep an eye on other social media accounts.
2. Block out distractions – literally
We’re all lured into distraction at work from time to time, but in some ways, digital marketers have it worse, as their jobs involve spending a substantial amount of time on the internet and (gulp) social media. If you have a scheduling tool like the ones mentioned above, you won’t actually ever need to access your social accounts except perhaps once or twice to engage with followers and make sure everything’s as it should be. In the meantime, apps like OFFTIME should come in useful in helping you customise your connectivity and monitor your phone usage to enhance productivity.
3. Use templates… for everything
One easy timewaster is to not create templates for documents or graphics that you’re going to be using again and again. It’s usually easy enough to create a template on Word or other Microsoft platforms: just create the style of document you’re after, minus the specifics, and save it to your computer for easy revisiting. Creating templates for your graphics works in the same way, and we’d recommend using tools like Canva, which make it easy for anyone to create designs for social media and blog posts.
4. Reduce your meeting hours
Marketing can be a lonely task, and it’s all too tempting to schedule in an excess of meetings every week, just for socialisation’s sake. It’s worth asking yourself whether you really have anything important to say that’s worth a meeting, or whether it can be said via the likes of email or a quick phone call. The occasional catch-up meeting is essential to seeing where everybody’s at and boosting motivation, but when it’s considered that over half of meetings are a waste of time, it’s definitely an idea to re-evaluate your own.
5. Dedicate the first half an hour of your day to answering your emails
… and the first half an hour after your lunch break – and then that’s it. There’s no need to spend all day refreshing your inbox and answering things when they come in, especially when you’ll end up breaking your creative flow in whatever task you’re doing, which is going to make it so much harder to get back into it after. Make sure your email notifications are muted while you’re busy with other work, and get into the habit of only looking in your allotted email half-hours.
6. Take the task off your hands with marketing automation tools
The simple truth is, some of the tasks included in a marketing role are repetitive and boring. You can either waste time carrying them out yourself – or you can use an automation tool to do them for you, while you get on with the more interesting (and more important) stuff. There are plenty of automation tools to choose from, but we’d recommend Marketo for managing email campaigns, and Eloqua for lead management engagement.
7. Learn the common keyboard shortcuts
When you’re spending so much time on the computer, as a marketer does, one of the simplest ways to increase productivity is to be able to more quickly carry out tasks using keyboard shortcuts. Some of the most popular shortcuts worth getting to grips with are CTRL+S for saving work (handy if you’re a paranoid once-a-minute document saver, as you should be), SHIFT+DELETE for bypassing the recycling bin, CTRL+SHIFT+N for creating new folders for your documents, and CTRL+ALT+DELETE to open your task manager.
8. Delegate your tasks accordingly with a to-do list
Marketing is such an all-round job that you’re going to find yourself carrying out some very different tasks from one day to the next. What you need to work out is whether it works better for you to delegate all tasks under the same umbrella to be carried out at the same time, or whether you’re more productive when you split them up into different days. Once you’ve decided what’s the most beneficial to you, write out a to-do list for the next week – and whatever you do, stick to it. You’ll soon enjoy the satisfaction of ticking off your day’s jobs, and if you’re unable to finish something off, you can easily move it into the next day.
9. Set up Google Alerts for research
“One of the most time-consuming aspects of marketing is thinking up ideas for new campaigns” says J21 Coaching. There’s no need to spend hours and hours staring out of the window, lost in thought, though – you can set up Google Alerts for appropriate industry websites, which should drip-feed you all the up-to-date inspiration you could ask for. If you’re still struggling, there’s no rule that says you can’t check out what your biggest and most successful competitors are up to from time to time.
