Marketing More Productively: Time Management Tips
Marketing More Productively
There are so many opportunities to do exciting, creative things when you’re marketing a product, that you don’t have time to do everything, and it can sometimes mean that you don’t know where to start.
It can be easy to get carried away – but remember that Marketing without a conversion, sale or other indication of success isn’t actually marketing, it’s just busy noise.
I really enjoyed this presentation from Etienne Garbugli @egarbugli, it includes some great reminders about effective time management, and a lot of things that I hadn’t thought of.
Time Management Tips
Note: Tip Number 5 – If you’re in a Marketing role, avoiding multitasking will be particularly difficult for you!
Prioritise and plan
Life in general goes more smoothly when you have a plan, but I guess you can meander and enjoy your life without one. But to be effective at Marketing, it’s pretty vital to have some sort of goal (or goals), a way of achieving that goal, and something to refer to to keep you on track.
Marketing planning & tracking tools:
BaseCamp – A great project management and collaboration tool. To to do lists are fab, and allow you to schedule marketing activities and deliverables in the calendar, upload files to the to-do item, and keep the team up to date.
Microsoft Visio – great for website sitemaps, wireframes, and process flows.
Roboforms – keeps passwords safe for multiple accounts (super useful if you manage account for different brands). It also lets you fill forms in quickly for commonly asked for questions.
Buffer – helps you schedule social media posts for a later date.
Google Analytics -Free tool that allows you to see what’s happening on your website – how many visitors, what are they doing, where are they from, etc.
Moz Analytics – works with Google Analytics and gives some extra data on your progress in the search results and social media networks, and suggestions on how you can improve.
Leave room for flexibility
Oreo did this exceptionally well, when within four minutes of the Superbowl power failure they launched a Twitter campaign reminding people that:
“You can still dunk in the dark.”
Quick thinking and adaptability (and a good sense of humor!) resulted in massive exposure, lots of retweets, case studies and press releases after the event.
Via Campaignlive
Productivity and time management tools:
My absolute favourite tools that help me work productively and focus are:A physical paper to-do list next to my computer – it works as a mouse mat and a helpful, tangible reminder of my main priority.
Google Calendar – it works across devices so that I can see planned work, meetings, and social activities wherever I am.
Boomerang for Gmail – Lets you arrange for emails to come back to the top of your inbox at a more appropriate time – it’s like hitting snooze, and can help you get to the illusive ‘inbox zero’. It works in Gmail, and there’s also an Android app.
Mailbox – Similar to Boomerang but for iPhone and iPad.
Remember The Milk – a wonderful to-do list app – you can add locations to to-do’s, so you can view the items that are convenient to complete where you are. e.g. You arrive in the office and you see your work reminders, and you walk past the supermarket and you’re reminded to pick up milk.
Tasker – an automation application for Android – it lets you schedule programs to launch, settings to change, etc, depending on the time, your location or events on your phone. E.g. I schedule my to-do list app to launch at the end of the day so that I can prioritise for the next day.
Focus@Will – an application that plays music in the background to help you concentrate.
Stay Focussed – a Chrome application that blocks distracting websites as you wish.
Leechblock – similar to Stay Focussed, but for Mozilla Firefox.
Momentum – Chrome app that shows you your chosen focus for the day every time you open a new browser tab.
Sleep Genius – an Android app that plays music to help you fall asleep, and wakes you up gently. You can’t work productively if you’re overtired!
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