I confess. I’m a marketing junkie. I am a ravenous consumer of marketing news, stats, and tips. I also love tracking results and analytics. The result of this: frequent information overload and occasional loss of focus.
If this sounds even remotely familiar to how you live your professional marketing life, I hope sharing my five favorite productivity hacks will help. See what I use every day to help control my marketing chaos:
Productivity Hack #1: Manage Tasks.
Who doesn’t have a to-do list a mile long? While everyone has their own preferred way to manage their task list(s), I prefer Workflowy. What this simple site may lack in flair, it makes up for in ease. As a web-based tool it’s accessible from anywhere you can get online, and it combines the best parts of keeping a written list with a few digital advantages.
- It’s simple. Just type in your to-do items in an outline format.
- You still get the satisfaction of physically crossing things off your list.
- Like hashtagging on social media? You can hashtag items on your list. I use this to tag my items by month or urgency to create an instant filtered list.
Productivity Hack #2: Tame Information Overload.
It’s important as a marketer to keep up on your industry and trends, especially if you need to use current knowledge to create your own content. Enter Evernote. You’re probably familiar with this app/website but if not, take this opportunity to meet your new online notebook organizer. Use it to capture ideas before they fly the coop and to organize articles and other sources for easy access when you need them.
Productivity Hack #3: Master the Email Jungle.
I won’t rehash all the tips you’ve probably already heard about email – like using folders and trying to maintain inbox zero, but I will say this about newsletters and promotional email: Click “Unsubscribe” liberally. While Hack #2 will help you manage some of the information you receive in the many email newsletters you probably receive, be honest with yourself about how useful all the outside emails you receive really are. The onus is on the sender (another marketer like you!) to make sure they are sending useful and relevant content. If it’s not relevant to you, it doesn’t help either one of you to stay on the list. (Shameless plug: If you are reading this, chances are you find OUR content useful, so be sure you receive our newsletters.)
Productivity Hack #4: Keep Social Sane.
Especially if you don’t have the luxury of a full time social media manager, maintaining an active social presence can be hard to fit in. Two tips here, and both concern investing upfront planning time: first, setup an editorial calendar. Plan out what topics and posts you’d like to cover in a given period of time. Then, use Hootsuite to schedule posts ahead of time on multiple social media channels. You might need to monitor and post additional things in between but at least you will rest easier knowing that your company posts will be happening, even if YOU are not right there.
Productivity Hack #5: Track as You Go.
Now what about tracking your results? The most important part of our jobs as marketers is to generate results. But with so many balls in the air, sometimes tracking and reporting tasks back up and we find ourselves scrambling at the end of the month or quarter (or year!). My solution? Keep a journal. It may seem old school, but it’s easy to have one go-to place to log the activity and numbers that matter to you. Then when the time comes, you know where to go to tally it all up.
We’ve done the legwork for you on this one – we’ve put together an easy-to-use Monthly Marketing Tracker. You can download it for free now and start filling in all your marketing activity. [Note the monthly tracker is no longer available for the current year.]
