The owner and executives of your company are always after better results from the company’s marketing efforts. The bottom line is they want more sales and increased profits. The marketing department and the marketing you do is an integral part in generating more sales and increasing the profits.
Marketing Plays a Key Role in Generating More Sales and Increasing Profits for Your Company
This is great and you want to see it happen. However, there is one challenge. To accomplish it, you have to make sure you and your people have enough time to do the work necessary.
You have to have the time to create the best Content Marketing campaigns. You need to determine what your focus is in each one. You have to plan the marketing pieces (the emails, articles, white papers, case studies, video, etc.) you are going to use to move someone looking for what you offer through your marketing funnel to becoming a hot prospect ready to buy. You and your staff then have to write the best marketing pieces to accomplish this.
All of this takes time.
That’s where the problem comes in.
Do You and Everyone in Your Marketing Department Have Enough Time to Do Your Best Work?
The owner and executives of your company may think so but most probably you don’t.
Each of you work a specified number of hours each week. The norm is 40 for most American workers. However, it’s higher for marketers. Recently Workfront, a project management software company released the results of a study they did last year. They found marketers were working an average of 45.9 hours every week.
Everyone knows no employee works every single minute of every day doing the work they were hired for. At the same time, everyone believes that the average worker spends most of their time doing it.
That was not what the Workfront study revealed. It revealed that marketing people spent only 38% of their time working on marketing projects and marketing related things. That’s right – 38% of their time.
Were you surprised by that? Most people would be.
Here’s a breakdown of the tasks a marketer did during the week and the time spent on each.
Let’s look at that in hours.
What’s that? Although marketers are hired to do marketing work, . . .
. . . They Only Spend 17.4 Hours a Week Doing it.
The rest of their time is spent doing other things.
Check to see if this is true for those working in your marketing department. Over the next month, ask each one to track how they spend their time. Then analyze the results.
If the results for your marketing department are similar, it explains why the quality of your Content Marketing campaigns may not be as good as you desire. It’s time for you to start to look at ways you can free up time for each person on your staff so they can spend more time on marketing.
The first place to start is with emails.
Everyone, including you and I, have 2 problems here. First, we check our own personal emails during the work day. This costs your company time and money. Second, most of us check our emails frequently during the day. That interrupts our concentration on the projects we are working on.
Let your employees know they no longer can check personal emails during the day. Also have your IT people put blocks on your company’s system to prevent personal emails.
Next – get your employees to check their emails only three times during the day – at the start of the day, prior to or after lunch and then toward the end of the day.
By doing both of these, your employees should be able to free up at least 3.1 hours each week.
The second place to cut down is the amount of time they spend attending wasteful, unproductive meetings.
Most probably, you are not going to be able to eliminate all of these. If you get them down to 2 hours a week, you’d free up 2.1 hours more for your employees to spend on their marketing efforts.
Third, eliminate as many of the administrative tasks they have to do as possible.
This is not what they were hired for and should be handled by a lower level person. The objective here is to free up 2 hours a week.
Last, eliminate as many of the interruptions and non-essential work as you can.
Shoot to free up 2 hours here.
Over 9 Hours More Each Week to Focus on Marketing
Just making these 4 changes frees up 9.2 additional hours that they can spend on their marketing work. Your staff would now be spending 26.6 hours a week on their marketing. That is an increase of almost 53% over what they are spending now.
Just Imagine . . .
. . . how much more productive your staff they will be in creating your Content Marketing campaigns. Not only will they be able to produce more work but the quality of their work will also improve.
That will result in more sales and profit for your company.
