3 Time-Saving Tips for Sleep-Deprived Digital Marketers

Your boss calls you into her office on Monday morning. She’s excited, maybe a little irrational. ‘Have you seen this new digital network? They’re saying it’s groundbreaking. We need to get on it.’You sigh, look at your sprawling to-do list and wonder how you’ll ever carve out the time to create a presence on yet another network.

Digital marketing moves at a frightening speed. Each day brings a new technology, a new announcement, a new digital channel for you to worry about. You can easily feel overwhelmed. We get it – keeping track can be tough, keeping up can prove tricky and keeping sane – well, that’s often a task of its own.

We’ve created this time-saving list for you to show your boss and help you say no in the most reasonable manner possible. Learn the importance of being selective, how to streamline your daily activities and discover the sanity-saving tools that can transform your productivity.

1. Only Select the Best

Your motto should be to select the best digital marketing channels and forget the rest, regardless of how much time you have. Why? Because every marketer should be concerned with the return on investment (ROI) of their digital marketing efforts. And every company should focus solely on the channels their customers are actively on and participating in.

Don’t worry too much about the emergence of new shiny technologies or social media networks like Elllo. Instead, get clever. That means keeping an eye on the hype and tracking the results other brands are achieving. Only then can you decide whether it’s a good fit for your audience and your goals. You see, your mission isn’t to be the first. It’s to be the best, the cleverest, the most relevant and the most customer-focused. You can do that.

Here’s a Guide to Selecting Your Perfect Digital Channels:

• Define your digital marketing goals and only choose the digital channels that can deliver the results you desire.
• Read digital marketing surveys and audience insights (example below) to identify the core demographics leading the way for your chosen channel.
• Define your budget and identify your available talent before investing in digital marketing activities you can’t afford.
• Let other brands test the waters for new digital networks and learn from their results.
• Keep track of the ROI (take into account both the time and money spent) you generate from each platform, then decide if it’s worth keeping.

Example Customer Insight Breakdown: Twitter Audience Information

2. Streamline Your Daily Tasks

You know better than anyone else how your daily digital marketing tasks can build up and become a little daunting. It’s the battle digital marketers have faced since the emergence of the first social media network. However, it’s important to keep control, stay level headed and get organised. When creating your digital marketing plan you need to ask and answer these pressing and can’t-be-ignored questions: How can you prevent your regular duties from zapping all of your valuable energy? How can you create more time for new tasks that can generate real results?

A social media dashboard can help you organise and schedule all of your social media posts from the one platform. Not only will you save time jumping from one social media channel to the next, you can also monitor multiple social streams from the one space. Hootsuite is one of the best platforms you can use, allowing you to manage, monitor and update multiple social media networks with ease. A huge timesaver!

How Hootsuite Can Save You Time:

Implementing a social media dashboard like Hootsuite can save you lot of time. Here’s how:

• Schedule all of your social media posts in the morning so you don’t have to remember to update them throughout the day. Hootlet auto schedules your posts for you, delivering them at the best engagement-grabbing times for your brand.
• Track all of the users who have shared your article in one single stream so you can thank them later. You can do this by creating a search term with your blog post’s URL.
• Take advantage of the recently launched Hootsuite Labs which helps you discover and share great content quickly and with ease. Your ‘Suggested Content’ is derived from data built up from the types of posts you’ve shared previously – you’ll therefore get the most relevant results possible.
• Improve your social listening, response and customer service by monitoring all of your brand mentions on Hootsuite. You can do so by setting up mention and keyword streams.
• Check your streams at scheduled intervals throughout the day to save extra time.

3. Generate Ideas Quicker

Your blog post is due in the next hour and you have to think of an idea – fast! Sound familiar? Generating ideas for blog posts and landing pages can be time consuming. Unfortunately, in a busy office environment you won’t always have the luxury of endless hours to work on your next inspired creative campaign. In the absence of time the best solution is to look at what has worked best for brands similar to yours.

Impending deadlines can take the fun out of creativity but they shouldn’t stop you from coming up with ideas that work. An idea generator like HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator and Content Ideatorcan ease some of the strain of coming up with new topics fast. However, our favorite tool of the moment is a content management platform called BuzzSumo as it allows you to make calculated and measured decisions about the kind of content you should be creating.

How BuzzSumo Can Save You Time:

Using a tool like BuzzSumo can save you time with your content marketing management and idea generation. Here’s how:

• Generate ideas for your next blog posts by using the ‘Top Content’ tool. Simply enter in a domain name or topic to find the most popular content by shares. The results can inspire ideas for similar blog posts of your own.
• Search for and identify key influencers for your inbound marketing. Simply click on the ‘Influencers’ section and type in your desired topic or username to find relevant results.
• Identify who has shared an article (either yours or a popular article of a competitor). If the article has been shared by influential people you can keep note of them and approach them for your own inbound strategy.
• Create a ‘Content Alert’ to track a key topic or the content activity of a competitor. This will ensure you’re always one step ahead without having to invest a lot of time into competitor analysis.

The great thing about digital marketing is that it allows us to get smarter about the choices we make. Sure, it can be time consuming keeping up to date with new trends but there are plenty of time-saving and sanity-inducing tools and tactics you can take advantage of.

The most important thing? Get smarter with the little time you have available in order to reap the biggest rewards your business. Keep tracking that ROI. If a channel simply isn’t working? Ditch it. You might want to show this list to your boss first though.

If you can spare one evening a week for 10 weeks you can get fully qualified. The course is taught by leading industry experts and you’ll learn the best practices for Social Media, Email, Search, Strategy and Planning and Mobile Marketing.