Megan Ingram
June 16, 2021
How can we be our most efficient selves? Limit those manual and repeatable activities that are just time-suckers into our days. Automation isn’t the only answer but it is one way you can offload tasks that can burn away your efficiency. Whether you are a freelancer or run a brand/agency marketing team, finding ways so that you can maximize $$ and reduce inefficiencies creates more revenue and time to do other things.
If you could shed two hours of your day from manual tasks what would you do? What would it improve?
In a recent Airtable survey, 86% of marketing leaders say that their current workload is causing stress for their team. Managing workloads and making sure your team isn’t overwhelmed is key to creating great marketing work and limiting lack of productivity as much as possible. Especially as a freelancer and your time means money, we tend to overwork ourselves to death and not manage and value our time. Not only is it important to be productive, but build timelines and projects that allow us to create our best work. They are not mutually exclusive.
As marketing managers and marketing leaders, our job is to create an environment where this is possible with well-distributed teams. Push back on clients with unrealistic timelines and check in frequently with your teams to make sure they aren’t feeling stressed with their current workload.
Create marketing workflows that are stored in one place and anyone in your team can find them. In order to make distributed work possible, you need to have a consistent way to organize and share information about your marketing activities and account management. You can’t be flexible and agile to changing needs if only one person can find it or knows what it means. How do you do this? It can be project management tools like Asana, Teamwork, or Trello, etc. Or an easily found filing system like Google Drive or Dropbox. Whatever it is, again, document it and make sure everyone knows how to find it and use it.
Project briefing and onboarding documents can also be helpful to provide context and limit the number of questions you get down the road with key information you need to know for all team members involved and new members that may enter the mix.
Marketing automation is definitely one way to help transition repeatable manual tasks into automated ones. But before you start automating away, evaluate your processes and find out where the deficiencies and time suckers exist. This will help you create automated processes that can truly be impactful to your organization and address inefficient workflows within your team. From no-code tools to synced spreadsheets there are many ways to create beneficial marketing automation. Here’s a great marketing automation list to get you started.
You will find no bigger tool geek than me and I love testing new ones, BUT don’t go so overboard with too many tools that they become a burden. It’s not only important that a tool has value and can solve a need but that your team knows how to use it and actually does. A tool is only as good as it is used and communicated by others within your organization. 60% of marketers are using 20+ tools on a regular basis. Review your tool roster frequently making sure they don’t overlap and people are using them. There is a point of diminishing returns with tools where they no longer create efficiencies but actually can create more work. Check in with your team and ask: do you use the tool? What do you like? What are the pain points?
Data is awesome and I geek out over interesting and compelling data points daily. That being said, don’t get so focused on the data that you forget the most important part - creating marketing insights and business intelligence. Now how does this make you more efficient? Because when you focus on using the right data then you’ll be able to save time and focus your energy on creating insights and finding information that will be impactful for your business.
46% of marketers say they lack timely data to make strategic decisions. The challenge isn’t that they don’t get data but they aren’t receiving and interpreting data in a way that allows them to affect decision making. This is where automation can play a part: by creating real-time dashboards, syncing your data sources, and creating automation rules you can get this information faster and be delivered in such a way that you can act quickly. OK, I’ll get off my data soapbox now.
June 16, 2021
