As a digital marketer, your time is precious. However, it’s easy to lose valuable minutes and hours to unproductive tasks, some of which you do simply because that’s the way it’s always been done. If you’re determined that 2017 is the year you streamline efficiency and change your approach to digital and social media marketing, here are the first useless tasks and tactics that should be on your hit list…
Aiming for clicks rather than conversions
While no one is saying that it isn’t nice to see healthy figures for clicks, indicative of engagement with your content, this shouldn’t be one of your goals. The savvy digital marketer can look past clicks to the ultimate prize – lots of lovely conversions. If you have a goal for number of clicks set for this year, scrap it. Instead, focus on a longer term, more holistic approach which works towards boosting conversions.
Posting masses of dubious quality content
If your current strategy is quantity over quality, stop immediately and have a rethink. You may think that posting lots of content is a good strategy, but not if it’s dubious quality and contributes nothing to the user experience. It’s not even good for SEO, as it can seem spammy and can even be punishable. Focus on improving the quality of your digital marketing content in 2017 and providing users with a great experience. Give them value, boost the reputation of your brand and you’ll soon see results.
Posting on every social media platform around
Maintaining an active profile on lots of different platforms is not a good use of your time. It can cause you to spread your time and efforts too thinly. What are you really getting out of the time you spend posting on all of these different networks, when you could be concentrating on real results on the platforms where your customers actually are?
Obsessive checking in
It’s good to keep an eye on activity on your social media profiles, but it isn’t productive or an efficient way of working to hit refresh every two minutes. Schedule in regular time throughout your day – perhaps as a ‘break’ from other, longer tasks – to update, engage and interact. This will make the rest of your time more productive, a great strategy to take forward into 2017.
Trying to appeal to everyone, rather than targeting
This is by far the biggest waste of your working day – trying to reach out to every possible customer rather than personalising your content and campaigns to your ideal customer. It applies to everything from email to social media marketing. It all starts with creating a fully fleshed-out customer persona, then tailoring your content to appeal specifically to them. Emails can be personalised, blog topics chosen to pique their interests and ultimately you can turn your efforts into conversions.
What are your biggest digital marketing time drains and how have you cut them down to size? Please feel free to share your thoughts.
