Why Marketers Struggle With Time Management
Juggling multiple tasks is no small feat. In the realm of marketing, professionals often find themselves trapped in a cycle of planning, executing, and analyzing without a moment’s pause.
Wait. Is that REALLY the cycle marketers get trapped in?
The Real Marketing Trap: Execute, Execute, Execute
Not in my experience. As a years-long marketer myself, plus all the work I do with businesses and continuing education organizations, I can tell you with some certainty that it’s not a cycle at all. Pressures to get more people into a list, or sold to, or enrolled in a class mean that the trap is this one:
Execute, execute, execute. The planning and the analyzing steps frequently fall by the wayside in the pressure to produce results.
Why ‘Throwing Spaghetti at the Wall’ Doesn’t Work
I hate to use such an over-used expression, but it’s one we hear, in some variation, from marketers every week – “I feel like I’m just throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks.”
How Wearing Too Many Marketing Hats Leads to Burnout
It can be overwhelming. Marketers wear many hats: strategists, analysts, creative thinkers, and sometimes, even firefighters putting out unexpected fires.
It’s easy to feel stretched thin, trying to balance the urgency of the day – register now! buy now! sign up now! – with the need to effectively guide those not ready to buy along their journey. This balancing act can lead to burnout, a decrease in efficiency, and ultimately, a dip in the effectiveness of our marketing efforts.
Too Many Tools, Too Little Focus
But why does this happen? Often, it’s not just the volume of tasks, but the nature of them. When we’re inundated with responsibilities, each task competes for our scarce time and attention. This challenge is compounded when managing multiple marketing tools becomes part of the equation.
This can lead to a lack of focus, where we try to do everything, but end up doing nothing exceptionally well. The quality of our work and the results we achieve can suffer as a result.
When Staffing and Resources Fall Short
Now, let’s delve deeper. Staffing and internal resources, in many organization, are simply insufficient to plan and execute effective longer-term marketing strategies. Without adequate support, it’s challenging to maintain the high standards we set for our campaigns and initiatives.
The pressure mounts, and the mission becomes even more daunting.
How to Transform Marketing Overwhelm Into Strategic Empowerment
So, how do we shift from this place of overwhelm to one of empowerment?
How do we make marketing easier?
The answer often lies in implementing a comprehensive marketing automation strategy that can handle repetitive tasks while you focus on high-impact activities.
How to Prioritize Marketing Tasks for Maximum Impact
Not all tasks are created equal. Learning to identify high-impact activities can vastly improve how your time is spent.
Focus on Your Highest-Value Targets First
I advocate organizing yourself around your highest value targets – whether those are specific tasks, specific products for which a buying audience needs to be nurtured, or specific courses in which you want more enrollments.
Ultimately, marketing is all about enabling sales, right? So what are the most important things you can do to enable sales?
If you sell multiple products, courses, or services, think about which will have the most value to your organization and prioritize the tasks and actions around those things before spending time on lesser tasks. For example, a $4,500 Project Management course will have a higher value if you can sell one more seat than if you sell 50 more seats into a $79 Pilates class.
Action Step: Prioritize Your Marketing Targets
List all responsibilities and targets and tag them based on impact. Focus on those that offer the highest returns, ensuring time and resources are allocated where they’ll make the most difference.
Learn From What Works: Marketing Best Practices Worth Emulating
In marketing, emulating successful strategies can save you time while increasing the likelihood of success (even if those successful strategies are not your own).
What Your Own Inbox Can Teach You About Marketing
To find campaigns you want to emulate, think about your own inbox and your own social media feed. What subject lines caught your attention? What emails did you open? What posts did you stop and read? How can you incorporate what you’ll learn from your own reactions into what you send out and what you post?
For example, are you more likely to read an email with the subject line: “Happy New Year from Company Name” or how about “10 Things to Not Mess Up in the New Year”? Every marketer can answer that question, yet every year we still get “Happy New Year from Company Name” emails, don’t we?
3 Proven Methods to Discover Effective Marketing Best Practices
Emulation aside, what best practices make sense to add into your marketing toolbox, and how can you find them?
3 Action Steps to Build Your Marketing Knowledge Network
- Network with your peers in other organizations to see what is working for them. What do they do to get their best results? What tips can they offer that you might not have thought of?
- Attend events where you can network with your peers AND hear from marketing experts about best practices, trends you’ll want to know about, and overall, how to get more results from your efforts without putting more time pressure on yourself.
- Subscribe to marketing leaders in your industry as well as marketing experts and resources on LinkedIn and possibly other social networks if relevant. We have found that LinkedIn works the best for learning from your peers, so we recommend starting there. Follow them, connect with them, and build your network. And of course, share your own experiences as you accumulate them. (You’re welcome to connect with me – https://linkedin.com/in/margaretjohnson99.)
Why Marketing Consistency Builds Trust and Engagement
Maintaining a reliable approach builds trust, which is a valuable commodity in marketing. Consistency leads to stronger connections and increased engagement.
This applies to both your brand voice and your marketing cadence. In my observation, brand voice is seldom an issue for marketers, though we do see variations between marketing emails and social posts. In some organizations, the voice is very different between the two. Achieving consistency between the two will lessen audience confusion and create a more cohesive presence in the market.
Consistent vs. Irrelevant Email Marketing: Why Relevance Matters
For marketing cadence, consider that a person who receives communication from you only sporadically is far less likely to engage with you than a person who receives communication from you regularly. The tough part is that marketers need to balance the need to communicate regularly with the need to communicate RELEVANTLY.
In other words, don’t fall into the trap of emailing everyone everything all the time. Irrelevant emails are actually worse than irregular emails – because irrelevant emails will get your emails ignored – even the ones that should be important to the receiver.
How Lead Nurturing Saves Time While Improving Results
This is where nurturing can play an important role in your marketing mix, with the added bonus that setting up a nurturing sequence is a “set it and forget it” activity. Once done, it will run until you tell it to stop, and YOU define what triggers the nurturing, the content, the timeframe, everything about it, one time. Set it up, make it active, and one more thing is done and running without you having to spend more time on it. The key is implementing adaptive email sequences that respond intelligently to recipient behavior rather than simply sending the same messages to everyone.
Haven’t done any lead nurturing? You can get a solid background in Lead Nurturing De-Mystified (Once and For All) and see how nurturing leads can make a huge difference in your results. We had one of our continuing education clients raving about their first nurturing sequence – they fired it up and filled two classes nearly immediately – and these two classes had never been filled completely before.
Content Repurposing: Create Once, Use Many Times
Any content you create can potentially serve you in several different ways.
Parts of an email can become a social media post. A blog post can be the inspiration for a video, or the reverse – a video can become the inspiration for a blog post. A testimonial collected can be on your website and utilized in a nurturing sequence email.
Graphics you create for social might be re-sizeable for use in an email, the featured image in a blog post, or as a thumbnail image for a video.
Think broadly about what you’re creating and the many ways it can be used.
How One Piece of Content Becomes Many
When we developed Campaign Coach, we developed it based on the idea that a single piece of content could give “birth,” if you will, to multiple other pieces of content. A video script, for example, becomes the video (obviously), a blog post, video clips that can be used for social media, social posts, and emails – all created and ready for the injection of your expertise. Whether you need a platform to help with that or can do it on your own, planning the progression of content and how you can use and re-use it is critical to maximizing your time.
How to Invest in Marketing Training That Delivers Measurable Results
Empower your team with the skills they need to succeed. A well-trained and well-informed team can take on complex tasks with confidence.
The three points we made above about staying on top of best practices also apply here.
Above all, look for the best values in workshops that can expand your team’s skill set. If you identify a high-value course but don’t have the budget to send the whole team, commit to an internal training program so the person who attends can pass on everything they learn.
Attend free webinars when offered by trusted parties. Look for events where the value is high while the expense is moderate and the takeaways are valuable. Watch out for events that are lecture after lecture without clear actionable steps coming out of it – those just go in a drawer while real life resumes, in my experience.
Prioritize training opportunities that offer substantial impact. Engage in workshops and courses that expand your team’s skill set.
How Cognitive Biases Sabotage Your Marketing Success
Awareness of biases, such as confirmation bias (which is a cognitive bias that favors information that confirms previously existing beliefs or biases), can make you a better marketer.
Why ‘The Way We’ve Always Done It’ No Longer Works
For example, sending emails to everyone about everything all the time will get you some results – which makes letting go of that practice difficult. “The way we’ve always done it” is a cognitive bias, and those few results that come in after doing it create a confirmation bias – “See, it still works, so it must be right.”
Except you could get far greater results by adopting today’s best practices.
Nothing stays the same. For marketers, the biggest change is in the audience – their interest level, their attention span, their overly-cluttered inboxes. Standing out and getting attention means letting go of what once worked and adapting to what works TODAY.
Why not encourage open discussions within your team, in which you can challenge existing assumptions and explore diverse viewpoints to enhance decision-making when it comes to your marketing.
Above all, commit to learning about today’s audiences and what they need to hear from you, and to learning about today’s best practices as we have outlined above.
Turn Marketing Time Constraints Into Opportunities
Embrace a strategic approach to turn time management constraints into opportunities for growth. Prioritizing effectively, leveraging proven strategies, and fostering a collaborative environment can transform your marketing efforts into a thriving success.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do marketers burn out even when they're working hard?
It's easy to feel stretched thin, trying to balance the urgency of the day – register now! buy now! sign up now! – with the need to effectively guide those not ready to buy along their journey. This balancing act can lead to burnout, a decrease in efficiency, and ultimately, a dip in the effectiveness of our marketing efforts.
How can I save time with email marketing while still staying relevant to my audience?
This is where nurturing can play an important role in your marketing mix, with the added bonus that setting up a nurturing sequence is a 'set it and forget it' activity. Once done, it will run until you tell it to stop, and YOU define what triggers the nurturing, the content, the timeframe, everything about it, one time. Set it up, make it active, and one more thing is done and running without you having to spend more time on it.
How do I repurpose content to get more out of what I create?
Parts of an email can become a social media post. A blog post can be the inspiration for a video, or the reverse – a video can become the inspiration for a blog post. A testimonial collected can be on your website and utilized in a nurturing sequence email. Graphics you create for social might be re-sizeable for use in an email, the featured image in a blog post, or as a thumbnail image for a video.
How should I decide which marketing tasks to focus on first?
I advocate organizing yourself around your highest value targets – whether those are specific tasks, specific products for which a buying audience needs to be nurtured, or specific courses in which you want more enrollments. If you sell multiple products, courses, or services, think about which will have the most value to your organization and prioritize the tasks and actions around those things before spending time on lesser tasks.
Why doesn't sending the same emails to everyone produce good marketing results?
Don't fall into the trap of emailing everyone everything all the time. Irrelevant emails are actually worse than irregular emails – because irrelevant emails will get your emails ignored – even the ones that should be important to the receiver.
