Time Saving Tips For The Busy Digital Marketer

As a digital marketer, there are dozens of demands for your time and attention and trying to be proactive by planning and reactive when things change or competition arises can throw you off your path or see you neglecting part of your workload especially when you're a startup or part of a small marketing team.

Between managing multiple platforms, scheduling tasks and delegating projects, it’s easy to find yourself having much more work to do at the end of the workday. Without proper time management, marketing tools and prioritization skills, it’s easy to find yourself overwhelmed and overworked.

So how do you avoid this fate and manage your time more efficiently? Here are 5 tips to optimise your daily routine to get the most out of your day.

1. Content plan or merchandising calendar

A content calendar is an incredible tool to prevent last-minute content scrambles and provide you with a selection of quality, pre-planned content far in advance. In addition to helping you stay organized and manage your time more efficiently, a content calendar also allows you to plan ahead for topics that may result in traffic spikes or change in visitor behaviour like special events, holidays and promotions, which in turn allows you to cater to your readers’ needs more effectively.

2. Prepare well in advance

Picking up on our previous point and to really make your planning effective it needs to be planned well in advance. It’s virtually impossible to create a schedule of subjects that hit on all of the important events and dates in a given industry. Without proper planning, a marketer who hasn't prepared adequately for blog posts in December may not take the time to consider that a post about how to improve sales during the holiday season will be more useful at that moment than a post about common marketing mistakes. Time management allows marketers to plan more thoroughly, which in turn creates better, more relevant content.

3. Scheduling tools

Social media can really be a time absorbing black hole and if you're not careful you can find yourself spending hours on these platforms without really getting larger returns. So probably the biggest time saver is using social media automation tools to help you post across multiple networks and to schedule posts in the future. Just be careful of is losing the personal touch by relying heavily on social media tools.

For more on Post-Management Systems check out our article on free tools to get you started.

4. Project management tools

It’s easy to agree to do something, but with so many things happening all the time, it can prove much harder to remember to do it and do it on time. Having a great plan and quality execution is often undone when it isn't done at the right time and that's where project management tools come in. Project management tools can keep tabs on tasks, team members and make sure all tasks are being completed on time without having to scroll through long email chains. This helps avoid costly delays and unnecessary frustrations.

For more on these tools check our article on Free Project Management Tools For Small Businesses

5. Marketing automation tools

Automation’s big payoff is that it will release us from routine tasks and usher in a new era of freedom and scalability. That way, marketers can devote their time to higher-level activities. Instead of spending time creating emails, building lists, segmenting data and contacting leads some of it can be handled with clever rules set up with marketing automation tools.

While we’re not quite at the point where robots and machine learning are doing all the heavy lifting, it’s possible to integrate it into your current system and take some tasks off your hands.

For more on these sorts of tools check out our article 8 Free Marketing Automation Tools For Small Businesses

6. Evaluate results

As a marketer, you should be asking yourself a couple of these questions regularly. What are channels bringing you results? What posts are the most popular? What are my customer/lead acquisition costs? All this data should be captured and monitored through internal social networks analytics and via your Google Analytics. Evaluating the performance of your marketing results can unearth new opportunities, give you better ideas on which channels to focus on and how to improve your messaging, user experience and more. Helping you get more out your efforts in the future.

For a more comprehensive list of tools to get you started check out our article Free Digital Tools For Small Businesses and Startups

Time saved is money well spent

Time definitely equals money, money well spent or money lost depending on how efficient you are with your time and efforts, so just as you're looking to constantly optimise your campaign performances, optimise the way you perform your daily tasks to improve your personal ROI. If you have any time-saving tips you think deserve a mention on this list feel free to share it with us in the comments below.

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Tags: Content Marketing, digital strategy, eCommerce, How to, Social Media, tips