8 Ways to Save Time Marketing
June 18, 2018
Kelly Veilleux, Digital Marketing Specialist, PSA
Working in a small department can be both rewarding and challenging. A small department is agile and always moving quickly to keep the ball rolling but with less hands on deck it’s important to prioritize your time. Check out these tips and tools to help you save time on your daily tasks so you can focus on the big picture!
- Schedule Ahead on Social Media
Planning your social media schedule can be time consuming but daily, routine posting doesn’t have to be. Using a social scheduling tool like HootSuite, CoSchedule, or Sprout Social allows you to schedule out posts throughout the day, week, month, or even year in one sitting. Look for a tool that allows you to duplicate posts and create campaigns to track how your posts are doing over time without extra analysis. Some platforms, like Facebook, allow you to schedule your posts on pages. If you only have a Facebook page for your company, this is an option, however the scheduling tools give you the opportunity to repurpose posts across multiple platforms eliminating the need to re-create content for each social media outlet.
- Quick Graphic Editors
Photoshop and the full Adobe Creative Suite are fantastic tools for creating professional looking graphics, but sometimes you just need something done FAST! Tools like Canva, PicMonkey and Adobe Spark allow you to make quick and easy graphics with layout templates and ideas that take the guess work out of design.Pro Tip: Make your graphics consistent with your brand. Take a few moments to set up your brand elements, like color, font and logo, within these editors to save even more time.
- Keep it Simple
In a creative field like marketing, it’s so easy to overthink even basic projects and a simple task can take on a life of its own once you’ve added your creative spin. When starting a project be sure to keep the impact in mind and prioritize your time accordingly. Try placing caps on the amount of time spent on less impactful projects so you can stay on track.
- Video Review Tools
Have you ever sent out a video for review and got a mess of timestamps and notes back from your team that took tons of time to unravel and implement? Sounds like you need a video review tool! At PSA we use Vimeo’s built-in review page which allows our reviewers both inside and outside of our organization to place time-stamped comments directly on the video itself. If you do a simple online search for “video review tools”, you will find a good list of options that best fit your company and needs.
- Home Base for Collateral
Collateral management can be tricky with endless updates across potentially hundreds of documents. How do you make sure your team is using the most up to date materials without managing each and every request yourself? I recommend creating a home base for your collateral so your team always knows where to find the current version. You may consider doing this on a shared network drive or a cloud platform like Dropbox, Google Drive, or Box.com.Pro Tip: Keep your team informed when collateral is updated with automatic emails if available within a third-party platform.
- Project Manage with Automatic Reminders
Managing group project deadlines down to the task level can be time consuming with endless to-do lists, check-in meetings and time spent just figuring out what needs to get done and when. Setting up projects in a project management platform like SmartSheet allows you to see a holistic view of the project with status updates for each team members, plus you can also set up automatic updates to help keep you on track. This might mean an email each morning with the day’s action items plus anything overdue or a weekly email with big picture status updates from your whole team – you can manage your alerts based on the project needs and your daily schedule.
- Brand Standards Guide
A brand standards guide should include the brand’s fonts, colors and logo usage requirements, plus any other elements that are important to your brand. You may considering including parameters for voice and copywriting, value propositions, or even sample imagery.For many marketers the top benefit of a brand guide is the easy hand off when you’re working with an outside party. Having a document with all of your company’s brand standards in one place will help create a consistent look and feel without your involvement every little step of the way. When an outside designer isn’t sure what font, color, or style to use they can reference the guide instead of asking you.Pro Tip: Have a “Third-party/Partners” folder ready, complete with the brand standards guide and logo image files, in a variety of formats. When someone requests your logo, you can save time by having everything already put together rather than searching around for the needed pieces.
- Rinse and Repeat
Don’t recreate the wheel! Get the most out of the great content you’ve already produced by changing the format. For example, you might have a case study that could be turned into an infographic or a quote block for social media, or maybe you wrote a blog post last month that would make a great animated video or PowerPoint style presentation. Everyone learns differently so presenting the information in various formats can be a real benefit for your sales team and customer base, in addition to your schedule.