Digital marketing has undergone a significant transformation over the past few years. Somewhere along the way, technology has created both opportunities and challenges for professionals in this space. Learning to limit distractions while maximizing productivity is proving to be a critically important challenge – particularly when it comes to content marketing.
It’s easy for productivity to feel like an elusive challenge that’s outside of your grasp. However, it doesn’t have to be something you constantly swing and miss on. Whether your content strategy is small and isolated, or you’re charged with executing a massive campaign that pumps out thousands of words per day, there are opportunities to establish greater efficiency and output.
Saying you want to be more productive is like saying you want your business to be successful. What does this mean? Productivity, like success, is a pretty generic word. It means different things to different people. If you charge your content marketing team with being more productive, each individual will have a different idea of what you’re hoping to accomplish.
Before doing anything else, set some strategic goals that clearly articulate what you’re hoping to accomplish. Use specific numbers, timeframes, and key performance indicators. In doing so, you’ll provide some flesh to the productivity framework.
Examples of specific content marketing goals include: publishing one 1,500-word blog post per day; reaching out to 15 different bloggers about guest blogging opportunities each week; generating visual content for at least two Instagram posts per day; or collecting at least 100 email leads per week via targeted landing pages.
Within most content marketing departments, there are three or four time-wasters that stunt productivity and hold businesses back from accomplishing core objectives. Examples include:
It’s up to you to identify your biggest time-wasters so you can correct them and manage your time with greater purpose and intentionality. Content marketing is highly dependent on focus and attention to detail. Help your content writers by eliminating the distractions that hold them back (and remember that it’s different for every person).
In content marketing, maximum productivity is almost always directly correlated with having the right technology stack in place. If you give your team the right tools, they’ll save time and find their duties more enjoyable and fulfilling. Examples of productivity-boosting content marketing tools include BuzzSumo, Evernote, Kred, Trello, Canva, SEMRush, and MailChimp.
In addition to supplying the right tools, be sure to train employees on how to use them. Proper training goes a long way toward promoting efficiency and reducing user errors.
Communication will make or break content marketing productivity within your business. If you don’t prioritize it, you can’t expect to be efficient in this area. And, speaking of using the right tools, the right telecom/phone solution will help streamline communication and jumpstart your productivity. (This especially important when you have contractors and employees spread out across multiple locations.) Grasshopper PBX is one to consider. It allows your employees to integrate their business phone line with their personal device.
“By linking professional phone service to the mobile device, Grasshopper PBX can allow entrepreneurs to remain both organized and in communication wherever they may happen to be,” Blippr mentions.
It’s also helpful to have a chat/project management solution to avoid the distractions of email and allow every team member to be on the same page at all times. Slack is one of the best options.
In terms of your marketing tools, compatibility is vitally important. Too much fragmentation between tools will kill efficiency; you’ll be wasting time in transitioning from one solution to the next. Better yet, it’s preferred if you can find versatile tools that handle everything within the same platform.
With the right goals in place, you can track and measure progress to see how you’re doing in pursuit of accomplishing these productivity objectives. The more quantitative you can make these measurements, the better.
Every content strategy will have its own set of objectives, but keep an eye on key performance indicators like unique page visits, downloads, average time on page, inbound links, shares, comments, cost-per-click, and followers/subscribers.
Average, mediocre, and stagnant aren’t words that should describe your marketing department. In order to be successful, you must learn how to accelerate your productivity and do more with less. However, it’s also worth noting that productivity, in and of itself, won’t lead to success. There must be a compelling strategy to push things forward.
