Reduce frustration. Get your marketing done in half the time with our marketing tips.

No matter how good your marketing strategy is, you get nowhere fast if it doesn’t get done. In marketing, just like in the rest of business, time is money, so what is lack of efficiency costing you?

Five marketing tips to help you burn through your work.

Here are five marketing hacks to help you do double the work in half the time. 

1. Create a marketing plan

Let’s start with the basics. The mere fact that you have a plan means you are 538% more likely to achieve your goals. If taking writing your strategy is a task that you’ve been procrastinating, then now is the time to block out time in the diary to get it done. Do it now before you read on. 

A strong plan will define what you do and, by definition, what you don’t. So when your plan is in place, you’ll be focusing all your efforts in the right areas. This means you won’t be wasting time on distractions that don’t move the dial on your business growth. Time and money saved. 

Top tip: Break your annual plan into 90-day ones. This gives you the perfect amount of time to get things done without letting key tasks drift, helping you to stay on target throughout the year.

2. Block out time in your days

Multitasking and switching between one task and another isn’t the most productive way to get things done. It’s inevitable that you’re going to lose time or quality of work as your brain switches between one task and the next. So productivity hack from Neil Patel is to batch work together on specific days. An example of this could be to use Mondays for social media, Tuesdays for blog posts etc, etc.

When you block out time in your days, you get work done without distraction. It’s also easier to realistically set goals about how much you can achieve and set yourself up for success.

3. Eat the frog!

“If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And if you have to eat TWO frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first!” – Mark Twain

This well-known productivity principle guides you to do your most difficult task first while your energy levels are highest. Getting that out of the way stops you from procrastinating so you can move on, knowing the most challenging part of the day has already been achieved.

4. Make the most of what you do: repurposing content.

The truth is, most of the content churned out by marketing departments is never used to its’ full potential, and that’s criminal. But there is another way. Splintering content and repurposing content allows us to make the best return out of and work we do. 

So here’s a new rule…

For every blog post/video you create,  splinter that content into at least seven different smaller pieces of content which you use for social media. 

Here’s how it works: 

Take a blog post as an example:

1. Firstly read through your blog post and see if you can spot any important quotes or phrases.

2. Now read through to see if there are any interesting statistics for important numbers that you can use in future communications.

3. Now take the snippets you chose in point 2 and turn them into social media images using software like Adobe spark or Canva.

Now you have a single blog post that’s created a week’s worth of social media to post on all your channels and promote through your email list. This means you create better quality content with less work. 

4. Final and easy step: schedule your content pieces using calendar software such as HootSuite, Buffer or Later.com so you can spread your content delivery over the coming weeks and months, and maximise the benefit of every piece of collateral you create.

5. Use productivity tools

There are plenty of productivity tools out there. This is not the place to list them all. Here are two of my favourites:

Dictation tool

Don’t type it. Speak it. This is a new one for me and is rapidly becoming one of my favourite productivity hacks. I have my friends at the Tech Dept to thank for this one.

Here’s a fact…

A good typist will type it around 50 words per minute. But the average person speaks at about 150 to 200 words a minute. So imagine how much more quickly you can write that blog or email if you simply dictate it. I know what you’re thinking… this really isn’t for you. I thought that too. But trust me. You won’t believe the difference that it makes to the speed that you work… and the more you practice, the quicker you get. 

A couple of tips here to help you on your way. When dictating, it’s essential just to keep talking. Speak slowly, so you think about your words – but keep talking. Before you know it, you’ll have a page full of text that’s quick and easy to edit. 

The great news is that dictation tools are now better than ever and available as standard on your Mac or PC. No fancy apps needed. (Yes, this blog post is written using my Mac’s dictation tool.)

Meeting scheduling tools

My second favourite time-saving hack is using meeting scheduling tools.

Organising diaries is the bane of most busy marketers’ lives,  calendar scheduling apps makes it easy. There are a great many scheduling apps, out there. Calendly, MeetingBird, CalendarHero to name a few. (I use CalendarHero.)

So, no more playing diary ping-pong, simply send an invite and your meeting invitee can see when you’re free, they can book a time and get an automated zoom link. What can be simpler than that? Each day my automated calendar assistant emails me to let me know what’s in the diary. My app then tells me how much time I’ve saved by using the app rather than the old-fashioned back and forth method of diary arrangement. Three hours saved this month… that’s time I can devote back into my marketing.

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