productivity (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)
Everyone worries about wasting time because we can't make more of it. We all get the same amount and its never enough. Productivity is on almost everyone's list of things to improve.
Wasting marketing time is especially worrisome. To completely butcher John Wanamaker's (famous clothing retailer at the turn of the century,) budget quote, "We know that half of our marketing time is wasted, we just don't know which half."
That's why when clients tell me they don't have time to do Social Media Marketing or some other key activity, I want to look at how they currently spend their time. If you own an online business, its likely that you should be spending some of your time on social media.
So here's what I usually find out. My client is envisioning adding social media activities to their already impossible schedule. That can't be right! Something has to be eliminated so that something of a higher priority can be added. Productivity doesn't mean just doing more things, it means doing the right things.
Don't continually think about adding tasks without removing some others. That's just common sense.
Ok, so I've stated the problem--you want to increase your productivity. So, what can you do? If you want a quick way to analyze your productivity, I find the following activity to be helpful.
Begin by categorizing all your marketing activities into one of these four buckets:
1. Planning or analyzing: This includes creating campaigns, analyzing personas, diving deeper into your niche(s)
2. Creating content: Writing, finding visuals, doing SEO, etc.
3. Presenting your content to your customer in some format: Putting it on a social platform, showing a video, selling an ebook.
4. Listening to feedback and revising your content.
If your marketing activity doesn't fall into one of these four categories you should strongly think about dropping if from your repertoire.