Planning and time management are critical for business owners, especially within the Marketing sector. Marketing trends and tactics, even analytics and ways to measure success, are constantly changing. Therefore, it’s necessary to be continuously innovative with strategies and promotions to engage an audience.
But what can be done to help improve those skills? Here are some handy techniques that make managing your time and planning easier.
Multiple tools can help with your planning and efficiency. Digital apps, such as Google Calendar, Trello, and Asana, offer the convenience of organizing which we will discuss further in the article. These digital options are excellent for staying on top of our tasks in a dynamic and interactive way. However, amidst this digital abundance, there's something uniquely satisfying about carrying a physical weekly planner in your bag. The act of jotting down tasks and appointments by hand provides a tangible sense of control over your week. However, it also allows for a quick, tech-free review of your plans at any moment. Whether it's a meticulously detailed agenda or a simple notebook, a handy physical planner can complement these digital tools. Thus, offering the best of both worlds in personal organization. Below are some quick digital tools you can explore and utilize for your campaigns and promotions.
Scheduling is an essential aspect of your marketing strategy. You will need to schedule multiple promotional dates and deadlines for things like social media posts, website landing pages, product launches, and more.
Calendar allows you to easily and efficiently schedule all your tasks, projects, and appointments in one central location. It also generates emails if you include other team members from the calendar without additional work.
If you’re a marketer or part of a team where note-taking is crucial, Evernote is a great organizational app. It can help you set up ideas and tasks. You can quickly capture and prioritize to-do’s, saving you time switching devices because it can sync your notes across all of them. Writing things down helps ensure you have a reference to recall specific ideas and enables you to excel in planning and productivity.
For marketing strategies and plans, you can save things like articles you find online, PDFs, pages, and more by using the web clipper function. It even can provide audio to your notes, so there’s nothing you can’t do to keep track of your plans!
Trello is an excellent planning tool for busy marketers. It utilizes a board technique to keep track of specific projects and can be shared across your entire marketing team.
Trello automates tasks and workflows so you can keep track of every task with checklists, deadlines, and time blocking. Transitions and functions that have to move between different divisions or teams are far more manageable to track and keep everybody on the same page.
Managing your time is crucial to ensuring that you get things done in marketing. Here are some helpful time management tools and techniques to ensure you don’t drop the ball on your campaigns.
Tracking time with a tool like Time Doctor can help you by creating new tasks so you can see how much time is spent on each part of a project. The automatic tracking runs silently in the background as you work so you can focus on one task at a time.
This tool also measures inactive time when no keyboard or mouse activity occurs. It can help give you an accurate picture of productivity levels so that you can improve.
Effective marketers understand the necessity of a daily master list to help achieve goals and accomplish tasks. Before beginning your day, have your teams write down each and every task with the intention of completion.
You can organize those tasks by priority so that you have a guided map to check off each task as needed. The key to maximizing and optimizing productivity is prioritizing functions that contribute to marketing success.
One last helpful tool for time management is the Eisenhower Matrix, which is a way to organize tasks in four separate blocks, from urgent to non-urgent.
As the blocks show, the urgent tasks need to be completed first. Important tasks that aren’t as urgent are scheduled; urgent but not necessary can be tasks that are delegated elsewhere, and then you can eliminate those that are non-important and non-urgent.
When you assess each task and decide what’s more important, you can quickly prioritize and delete unnecessary projects.
Finding the right tools and time management techniques ensures your business runs smoothly. If you use some of those mentioned above and combine those that seem the most proficient, you’ll notice a significant boost in your productivity and efficiency in your marketing.
