There are a ton of things marketers have to manage. One second you’re communicating with your client, the next you’re researching a new campaign you’d like to run. Each day brings new challenges, with each challenge vying for limited bandwidth. Without an effective method for handling all the spinning plates that make up their day, marketers can easily find themselves losing track of everything that is required of them. They may even become completely disillusioned with their job.
Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be this way.
By incorporating the following principles into preparing and executing marketing tasks on a day-to-day basis, you’ll be able to:
- Effectively drive results by accomplishing more throughout the day.
- Feel more in control of your workload on a daily basis.
- Find more fulfillment in your job.
Define what success is for you
For any role in the marketing industry, a key component for driving results and finding fulfillment comes from understanding what drives value, both for your company and your client. Essentially, it’s asking: ‘how do you justify your employment at your current job?’ and ‘Why were you hired?’ Once you have these answers clearly defined, you then have the context for defining success. For instance, a company may hire a marketer to help clients meet contracted goals through implementing a specific strategy. In this case, success for the marketer means being able to effectively drive the results needed in order for their client to reach their goals.
After you’ve defined success, the following principles and action items will help align your time and work in a way that effectively drives results while still bringing you the fulfillment that comes from getting work done.
If you can’t tie what you’re doing back to results, don’t do it.
As marketers take care of the various day to day aspects of their job, it’s easy to get lost in the weeds. Often times, this leads to marketers going down rabbit holes of tasks that don’t actually help them reach their goals or provide the value they were hired to provide. It’s important to trim what you do down to the absolute essentials. If it’s not bringing value to your client or your company, it should be removed from your to-do list or at least considered only after the value-driving and necessary objectives are complete.
Plan out your week
Part of falling out of love with your job comes from feeling like your weeks are becoming monotonous. In order to keep yourself engaged and fulfilled while providing great results for your client or company, it’s important to plan out your week. To do this you must know what a successful week looks like. Whether that comes from you completing a specific amount of constant tasks (e.g. building five links in a week) or meeting a project deadline (e.g. launch the new company site by EOW), being able to conceptualize and nail down what will actually move the needle for your client or company will make each week more engaging and fulfilling. As you decipher the specific tasks are needed to complete every objective each week, you will find a clearer vision of all your day to day tasks. Being able to visualize the week in this way not only provides motivation to achieve but it also provides a level of personal accountability for what you’ll be doing throughout the week.
Split your work day into 30 minute increments and use your weekly plan to plan out your day
As the weekly plan is built out, it can be helpful to break down each subtask needed to complete the main weekly objectives into 30 minute increments. These 30 minute subtasks will be the building blocks of your day. This means that the weekly plan will be used as a guide when planning the day throughout the week. There are various tools out there that can help you do this but it’s important to use the tool that works best for you. (Here’s a tool you can use to plan out your week and day all at the same time.)
Breaking up the day into 30 minute increments not only provides a way for your to keep your day interesting but it also helps limit the scope of time you invest to complete a subtask. For example, if you have to perform research for a potential client or company campaign, plan on completing your research in 30 mins. If the topic or research takes more than 30 minutes, try to only increase the time you spend by increments of 30 minutes. By keeping tasks to increments of 30 minutes, it fosters a mindset that will look for ways to optimize and improve how tasks are completed. As the efficiency improves for each subtask accomplished, there will begin to be excess time in the day. We’ll address what to do with this excess time later in this article.
Front load your week
Frontloading is defined as follows: Distribute or allocate (costs, effort, etc.) unevenly, with the greater proportion at the beginning of the enterprise or process. When applied to planning your week, it’s the placing of a majority of your tasks at the front end of your weekly schedule. By completing a majority of the work at the beginning of the week, it allows for a more stress-free rest of the week. It also gives the assurance that the most important and urgent items are always done first. It’s also creates more flexibility in case something comes up at the beginning of the week and you need to move things around. Along with all these benefits, one of the most important is the opportunities it affords is to reinvest in the following areas of focus.
- Reinvest into next week’s tasks. By taking on next week’s tasks, you will be compounding the effects of frontloading your week. This can then lead to more time and opportunities to reinvest into the following weeks tasks which can be continued indefinitely.
- Reinvest into your processes. As your plan and execute in the manner prescribed, there will be plenty of processes that will be established in order to effectively and efficiently do your work. You can then use any additional free time to improve your processes you rely on so that it can give you a better return on your time. This time reinvestment method can also be repeated indefinitely.
- Reinvest into yourself. At the end of the day reinvesting in yourself can take on many forms but the basic overall ideas is to put time towards things that help you do your job better. This can be anything from completing HubSpot’s email marketing training course, working on side projects that help you refine your marketing skills or even just taking that extra time off to decompress from all the hard work you have done throughout the week. So long as the work gets done and results are achieved, this extra time is yours to do with as you please.
Each of these action items can be applied in various ways but the overall goal is to effectively drive results as you accomplish more throughout your day, find more fulfillment in your job from the growth you’ll experience, and feel more in control of your workload on a daily basis.
