This crisis has created the need to do much more with fewer resources.
Marketers in particular are under great pressure wave their strategy and ensure that your brand remains relevant in difficult times.
Although quality makes a difference, marketing is currently playing with strategy and scalability. Ultimately, only a small percentage of the people who are reached by a brand will actually convert.
That means the more people reach marketers – and the more contact points are involved – the better. If you already feel thin, don’t worry. Reaching more people doesn’t necessarily mean doing more. In fact, there are some circumstances in which it actually is better do less.
Let’s dive into five areas of marketing here where you can use the “less is more” approach to ensure greater efficiency and less wasted time.
Less stress, more productivity
If you take a closer look at marketing tactics, you will find that there are actually many ways to generate and convert more leads with less work. Let’s dive into five areas of marketing where you may waste your time – and instead create more efficient processes.
1. Management
Management has two meanings in marketing: the management of employees and the management of campaigns. Both offer many opportunities to do more with less.
Campaigns
Every tool in your marketing stack should make your life easier. In most cases, however, it is just another window or tool that you can use to keep an overview. Despite the fact that the typical Martech stack contains dozens of tools, Gartner research suggests that marketers barely use half of them to their full extent. That is the thinking behind HubSpots “Hub” approach: All-in-one tools are a better investment because they are more efficient. Employees not only actually use them, they also spend much less time changing windows and exporting data.
People
When I learn about management, trust and autonomy are key. Nothing creates more retreat than micromanagement.
Micromanagement is a double hit for productivity because it takes more time for managers while reducing employee performance. And as someone who co-founded a content marketing company, trust me when I say that micromanagement also affects the quality of content.
The best managers are not practical, but far from being practical. Instead of worrying about details, good managers focus on creating the right work environment. Your direct employees should feel confident in making their own decisions, but should also be happy to come to you with questions.
2. Plan your calendar
A “less is more” mentality works both with how you plan your time and how other people schedule meetings with you. In a previous company we used the so-called “Big Rocks” system. Each morning, the team members shared the three or four most important things they had expected that day.
Although they did all sorts of minor tasks in between, no one has ever listed “answer emails” or “create Facebook posts.”
Why not? Because it is a waste of time to plan every single task every day. Appointments fail. Things come up. It is more efficient to be flexible and do additional work when it makes sense than to rearrange the calendar every hour.
Also think about how you plan things. I spend a lot of my days in meetings so I can easily go back and forth in emails for hours to set them all up. I use instead Workflow automation Let people choose a time that works for both of us.
3. Creation of content
I may not be a professional writer, but I have one do Knowledge is short, biting writing is usually better than long, complex copying. Search engines prefer shorter sentences and paragraphs. And more anecdotal: Stephen King, one of my favorite authors, warns writers against excessive use of adjectives and adverbs.
The point is this: concise writing is usually strong writing. Be natural, instead of trying to sound like the next Shakespeare in your blog content. A down-to-earth style is easier for both you and your reader.
4. Conduct meetings
There are only a few selected situations in which I would ever hold a one-hour meeting. Not only are they expensive – a one-hour meeting with a dozen employees costs 12 hours of company time – but they simply don’t make sense from a productivity standpoint.
Don’t get me wrong: meetings can be valuable opportunities to get to the same page. But they can also be a huge waste of time. Actually, Research published in Harvard Business Review 71% of executives consider meetings to be unproductive and inefficient. and 65% of respondents said meetings prevented them from doing their own work.
Take a “only when necessary and only as long as Necessary “approach to meetings. If a message can be delivered in an email just as well, don’t pull people away from their desks. If a meeting is needed, send the agenda in advance and explain how long you expect it to be When it’s done after five minutes, great – let people get back to work.
5. Team brainstorming sessions
Marketing is an industry of ideas. Every strategy, campaign and content begins with ideas. Even though I like the cerebral side of marketing, I can’t see how many teams are brainstorming.
Almost 60 years ago a Yale study showed that individuals find twice as many creative puzzle solving solutions as those who work in groups. However, team brainstorming remains a staple of most agencies I know.
Just as much time is wasted after brainstorming. Marketing is based on experiments. The only way to really assess the performance of a campaign, title, or image is to test it. During the time when some teams were discussing different ideas, they could have collected real data and rotated if the original idea hadn’t worked.
Practice withdrawing
Doing less may not sound like something that takes practice to get right. But I’ve found that marketing is full of Type A personalities: people who adhere to high standards and therefore tend to give their all in every task that concerns them.
When I see members of my team exaggerating, I tell them this: Perfection is not performance. I understand the urge to do it right, but remember marketing is a question of scale. Doing less is the smartest way to squeeze more.
