Time is money. It’s such a common expression that it’s almost a cliché.
But when it comes to marketing, it’s easy to spend time on things that don’t move you closer to your strategic objectives. And when you do, you’re losing money.
The routine, repetitive, or administrative tasks need to get done, but they don’t directly generate leads, build awareness, or reach new customers.
So in this article, we’ll show how you can reduce the burden on your marketing team so that they can spend their time more effectively.
How Do Marketers Spend Their Time?
Marketers often work in a fast-paced, changing environment. Time is in short supply and new requests are constantly coming in.
In 2013, Harvard Business Review showed that knowledge workers spend 41% of their time on discretionary activities. More recently, HubSpot found that marketers spend 16 hours a week on routine tasks.
Common tasks include creating and sending emails, collecting and organizing data, and generating reports. But a lot of time is spent on more mundane activities such as reviewing content, updating presentations and collateral, approving documents, adapting logo files, or ensuring brand standards.
Not only do these activities take marketers away from more strategic work, but they also reduce satisfaction, motivation, and performance. With so much time tied up on urgent but low-value tasks, marketers are constantly busy, but they are only sometimes productive.
Focus on What’s Most Important and Delegate the Rest
A 2020 report found that 45% of organizations operate without a clearly defined marketing strategy. As a result, it’s impossible to prioritize what’s most important.
The first step in freeing up your marketing team is ensuring that you are all working toward a common objective. You need to have a shared understanding of the platforms, budget, resources, and campaigns required to achieve your goals.
Once you’ve solidified your plan, map out how your team currently spends its time and look for tasks that could be delegated, outsourced, or automated.
For example, you may see that a key member of your marketing team spends a lot of time each week coordinating orders of promotional materials and branded items. They may be dealing with multiple vendors and trying to approve orders, control asset costs, manage image files, schedule delivery dates, pay invoices, and ensure quality control, all while they are supposed to be focused on a critical campaign launch.
In a case like this, you can simplify the process by working with a partner who offers a centralized marketing portal and order tracking across multiple vendors.
As you start to get a clear picture of how your team is allocating its time, you can identify the most valuable, strategic initiatives that your team should be focusing on. These are the activities that directly contribute to your goals.
Next, you can start to look for an alternative solution for everything else. A trusted business partner can help reduce the burden by handling tasks on your behalf, simplifying the workflow, or automating repetitive functions. Your partner may also have software or other tools that help employees in their day-to-day work.
Whether you’re a small marketing team or a large enterprise with specialized marketing groups across product lines and vertical markets, time will always be your most valuable resource. One company saved over 1,500 hours a month just by introducing automation to the review and approval process.
Don’t Let the Small Stuff Get in the Way of What’s Most Important
Your marketing team is responsible for a wide variety of activities, campaigns, and metrics. They play an important role throughout the sales process and the assets they produce will be used by prospects and customers when making important decisions about what product or service to choose.
Instead of handcuffing them with necessary but ultimately low-value tasks, free them up to do what they do best. By giving your marketing team more time to think and act strategically, you can get better results and find new ways to reach customers.
Coordinating and ordering can eat up your marketing team’s valuable time, so check out how they can go from sweating the small stuff to having no sweat at all with the help of Ontrack Workflow’s brand asset management software. No matter how many change requests or new orders you get, our system allows you to keep all your assets in one place. Create. Revise. Order. Done. But that’s not all. You can even allow access to end-users who can order and customize assets for themselves, freeing your team up and putting a whole lot of time back on their schedule. Welcome back, higher-value activities.
Experience the whole new state of efficiency for yourself with a demo of Ontrack Workflow
