A marketer’s life is easy, isn’t it?
At a certain stage, a company may rely on only one or a handful of individuals to manage their blog and other website copy/design and SEO, their social media content and community management, their regular email newsletters and communications, and their paid media / advertising budgets. Throw in some PR, a trade show, and some lead-gen or other sales support. For a savvy marketing generalist, any given day may look drastically different from the last. It is a delicate balancing act to dive in and out of these areas with grace.
When your team gets big enough, your generalists can become specialists, and you can collectively divide and conquer those efforts and go deeper in any given area. You may even augment your team with the support of consultants or develop a relationship with an agency. All good things.
Whatever the case, the reality is that with ever-increasing sophistication in marketing tactics comes ever-increasing complexity in how to arrive at insightful conclusions about those tactics. Knowing what is going on across all of your efforts and knowing what and where to optimize is a challenge. Easily sharing this information with other stakeholders, who may care less about an individual tactic but more about how everything fits within a holistic business strategy, is another challenge.
Time well spent
When you look practically at how your marketing team is spending their time, where might you see the best value for that time?
- Is it in the work of collecting and consolidating data from disparate platforms in use?
- Is it in making sure that data is clean and accurate?
- Is it in preparing that data in a way that is easier to consume than a bunch of rows in Excel?
- Is it in comparing that data and looking for trends or changes of interest?
- Is it in uncovering those nuggets that allow you to take a particular action?
Would you consider all of those things as time well spent? Perhaps, but I would argue that maximizing an individual’s or team’s efforts requires replacing time spent doing certain busy and repeatable activities with time spent leveraging their unique ability to think critically, think creatively, and to take action. That’s not necessarily unique to marketers, but they’re in a discipline exceedingly at the intersection of art and science, so it’s pretty important.
Urgency
So, would you rather have someone who is busy or productive? It seems like an easy answer, but amazingly many companies seem content with the former. When a pain point is identified, maybe it’s just easier to ignore and stick with the status quo. Maybe its cost isn’t quantified or well understood. Maybe the fix is too disruptive.
Alternatively, those companies who recognize areas to optimize and choose to continuously evolve are those that I find most exciting to work with. Always adapting, always finding new ways to test, learn, and improve. Striving to always take action now and not at some indeterminate point in the future. Using data to do it.
Markets evolve, buyer behaviors change, technologies emerge. It’s hard enough keeping up with it all. But for a marketer, it is indeed possible to be less busy and more productive – to spend less time guessing and more time optimizing.
We can help.