10 Ways to Save Time on Your Marketing Efforts

Look, I get it - you’re really busy. On top of all of your other responsibilities, it can be hard to find the time to market your managed services the way you really should be. Having said this, marketing is really the only way that you can be sure that you can continue your operations. That’s why I wanted to share a list of ten marketing activities and strategies for you to leverage. By adopting these various actions as habits, you will be able to give your business’ marketing a high-return, low-investment boost.

1. Identify How You Work Best

Or, when you work best. Are you a morning person, do you hit your stride in the early afternoon, or do you accomplish your best work while burning the midnight oil? Marketing properly takes a wide variety of circumstances into account. Therefore, you need to do a bit of self-examination so that you can identify what conditions are ideal for your circumstances, and your marketing efforts.

2. Establish and Commit to a Workflow

For the sake of consistency and in the interest of saving time, it always helps to have a set process to any activity… especially where marketing is concerned. This makes it easier to establish the most productive timetable possible, and from then on, it becomes that much easier to stick to it. Trying some A/B or split testing can help you to determine your most productive course of action. You should also make it a priority to establish who is responsible for what throughout your new process, as this will keep things running smoothly.

3. Leverage Automation Capabilities

The fastest way to get something done is to have it be done automatically. Automated solutions take the scheduling of a resource out of the equation, not to mention the potential for human error. As a result, repetitive processes can be completed faster and with more accuracy, leaving your team free to focus on other tasks.

4. Recycling Content

Who says that content has a one-use limit? However you procure your content, whether you write it yourself or have it written for you, it can have more influence than you might think.

Let’s say that you have a blog on your website that offers quite a bit of insight. With a little bit of editing, you could easily have a script for a talking head video, or a series of social media posts to share. You could have an infographic designed to use as a deliverable. Of course, this is also ignoring the obvious - printing out the blog and including it in a mailer.

While you need to make sure your content stays fresh, you don’t necessarily have to start from scratch each time.

5. Using Targeted Email Lists

How many email contacts do you have permission to reach out to? Do all of them have identical needs, each in the same stage of the buyer’s journey? If so, you need to go out and buy yourself a lottery ticket, because you’re quite a fortunate individual.

The fact of the matter is that your email list is never going to be so homogenous, so you need to figure out how to best divvy it up so that your email communications can be as effective as possible. Possible segmentations to target can cover an individual’s job title, the kind of organization they belong to, what content they have expressed interest in during the past, and many others. This can also help you keep your lists free of any wasted email addresses.

Want to learn some more best practices for leveraging email as a marketing tool? We have a few suggestions.

6. Batch Your Tasks

The human brain doesn’t cope with frequently switching between tasks very well, so it would suit you better to commit to a specific kind of task for a few hours. If you need to schedule out social media, don’t just take a few minutes to create the next week’s worth of posts. Instead, complete the entire month. It will take a little longer, but it’ll at least be done… and probably at a higher quality. Combining just about any of your tasks into similar batches will have equally positive end results.

7. Block Out Your Tasks

This method is fairly similar to batching, in that you are committing to completing a given task. If you need to write seven emails, set aside a block of time to ensure that they get done. Otherwise, you could find yourself without any time left, but with all seven emails left uncompleted. This can be made much easier by creating a recurring ticket in your PSA solution.

8. Don’t Multitask

Or, in actuality, don’t try to multitask. The reality is that the human brain isn’t built to be able to multitask. Rather than working on multiple tasks at once, your brain will just jump between them. The trouble with this approach is that the brain gets tired very easily by doing this, and won’t work as efficiently. Not the situation you want to find yourself in as you’re trying to market your services.

9. Use Email Autoresponders

Composing email after email can take a lot of time… and even if you have them pre-written, you still have to make sure that they are sent at the appropriate time. Autoresponders take the stress out of managing these messages, pushing pre-written correspondence based on a predetermined schedule. Of course, these automatic replies shouldn’t seem automatic - learn how to make your emails seem more personable by reading this blog!

10. Use Content Templates

A very simple way to save time producing your marketing materials is to design templates for each type of marketing collateral you distribute. This will help ensure that each piece of marketing material covers everything it is supposed to, while also keeping your branding and message uniform.

There you have it - 10 ways to reduce the amount of time you spend on your marketing activities. For more assistance with your marketing, don’t hesitate to reach out to us! Give us a call at 888-546-4384 today!