7 Fool-Proof Steps to Improve Your Marketing Productivity
Patience, investment and endurance are what’s needed for an effective marketing strategy.
However sometimes productivity can wane – especially if you (and your team) are suffering from burnout. This might be down to nothing other than working too hard, or it could be because you’re not taking the right steps to ensure you’re being as productive as possible.
If this sounds familiar, here are some tips you should take note of to ensure your marketing strategy is operating like a well-oiled machine all year round.
1. Set attainable daily goals
The first thing you should do to streamline your marketing strategy and up your productivity is set daily goals.
These should be task-specific and attainable within the time you have given– there’s no point pushing yourself as this will only result in the burnout that you experienced in the first place!
If you’re struggling to think of your first goal, try simply working on shortening the amount of time it takes you to reply to your emails. Or maybe try completing your given task before lunch – and allow yourself time to check it’s all correct afterwards.
2. Break up the work
Key to being able to meet these goals is working in the right way. Rather than powering through in order to rush to meet your deadline, you’ll produce better work (and help your own health) if you break up your workload.
Make sure you set yourself regular breaks throughout the day. Some find it more productive to set these after a certain amount of time spent on a task, for example with the use of the Pomodoro Timer.
This is a method of working by which you work solidly for 25 minutes and then allow yourself 5 minute breaks. After 4 ‘Pomodoros’ you then take a longer break – preferably getting out of the environment to hit reset and get some air. If you have a thought mid-Pomodoro you can simply jot it down on a post-it note and come back to it later.
3. Don’t let your inbox rule your time
It’s a little known fact that one of the biggest uses of time when you’re at work is emails. You might not think this when you’re replying to them – just one quick response and it’s back to the task at hand – but coming away from your task repeatedly to reply to people is detrimental to your overall productivity.
Rather than flitting through emails throughout the day and hindering your progress on tasks, you should instead set aside time specifically allocated for sorting and replying to messages. You can choose a time of day that works for you and allow yourself the indulgence of not instantly replying, instead focusing on the task at hand.
4. Automate where possible
One of the beauties of 21st century technology is that it’s constantly improving and helping us become more productive in the workplace.
They might not seem like huge technological advances, but they’re certainly worth making use of in order to help you get your marketing productivity on point.
While every workplace can automate the administrative tasks, as a marketing team you can go one step further and automate marketing processes such as social media posts. Using a scheduling tool can save you a ton of time and help you overlook how certain posts are performing – so you can tighten up your social platforms and create more of the posts you know people engage with.
5. Think up ideas as a team
Acting like a lone wolf in marketing will only get you so far. As the African proverb goes ‘If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.’ This can be applied to a myriad of scenarios, but for marketers it’s especially true.
Working on your marketing strategy should be a team effort. With the help of others you can avoid burnout thanks to the contribution of multiple skillsets – so you don’t need to work through the night to get that campaign on the go,
An important step of working as part of a marketing team is to think up new ideas for future projects. To do this effectively you should set an allocated time each week for coming up with new ideas. This will increase your productivity as you’ll be able to prepare ideas for the same time each week.
7. Create a process
Processes are important for your whole team’s productivity – not just yours.
That means you shouldn’t be focused on just streamlining your own processes for greater productivity, this is something the whole team can jump on board with.
Marketing any business works more effectively when you have a tried and tested method that everyone’s familiar with and that covers all the bases.
While you may have set aside time where everyone can think up ideas (see above) this isn’t where it should stop. Creating a weekly meeting that catches everyone up on the progress of what you’re working on and keep everyone in the loop.
This way you can share ideas and potentially solve an issue that you’d been stuck on for a while.
Within this you should include in an update on how social channels, SEO and your content is performing, alongside updates on any other campaigns you’re running.
What steps do you take to ensure you keep your marketing productivity at the top of its game? Drop a comment below or get in touch with us over on twitter at @MyDigitalWirral.
