You’ve almost certainly heard the adage that says we become what we repeatedly do. To be good marketers, this means we must repeatedly do things that are meaningful and lead us to meet our goals. However, as creatures of habit, it can be difficult to pick up new habits and break the bad ones.
If your team is looking to change up the daily routine for the better, here are five of the most common marketing-related bad habits that you should consider dropping to get more out of your day.
1. Set it and forget it marketing campaigns
Like any other marketing team, you probably have a million pulls on your attention, and it’s unsurprising that a couple of things fall through the cracks. Maybe you’ve automated an email campaign, or let a paid social campaign coast on autopilot. But if you’re not checking up on your marketing campaigns and analyzing your results, you may be wasting the hard work you put in to set them up or publishing content without proper review.
Spend a little less time planning these campaigns, and make up for it by checking up on them throughout the week to make sure they are performing as expected. If not, assign someone to make time to review your content on a consistent basis and tweak materials occasionally to make sure you are getting the most out of your automated campaigns.
2. Checking your email every hour – and throughout the weekend
There is no email so urgent that it can’t wait a few hours. If you and your team members are often sitting with your email tab open on your computer, you are setting yourself up for distraction. Many professionals receive an average of 125 emails per day, and most of them don’t require an immediate response or any response at all.
Close your email tab and set aside specific times of day to catch up on email for 30 to 60 minutes at a time. Get in the habit of checking email only in the morning, at lunch, and at the end of the day to be more productive during your workday. During the weekend, if you absolutely can’t let go of your company email, just set an hour aside to check it each day, and then close it up and enjoy your time off.
3. Using Excel spreadsheets to organize your content
There are dozens of websites and applications out there to organize your web and marketing content for you. Apps like GAIN can help your team plan and release content automatically, leaving you with more time to work on other projects.
GAIN even allows you to set up an approval system that lets your clients, or your managers, check all the content posts before it is published. Excel is a great tool and should not be discounted, but it’s hardly an effective way to organize and gather feedback on visual content. There are much more effective ways to manage your content marketing strategy these days, and it’s time to start using them.
4. Always sticking with the same old marketing ‘toolbox’
This tip runs in the same vein as the last one. In this age, new marketing tools are constantly being released, and you never know when you will stumble across the one that forever changes how your team works together.
Still, it can sometimes be cumbersome to onboard your team to a new app every six months, so make sure you aren’t just changing for the sake of change. Test it out for yourself for a little while before introducing it slowly to your team. Stay up to date on the latest tools by reading marketing blogs and integrate them into your system every few months to get the most bang for your buck.
5. Replying-all to company email lists
Remember how most professionals receive an average of 125 emails per day? Don’t clutter up your colleagues’ inboxes with irrelevant emails. If an email was sent to your whole team, but only one person needs the follow-up, make sure you just hit reply and leave the others out of the dialogue. Otherwise, you risk losing your team’s attention because they have email fatigue.
Make sure you decide whether the email you are sending is relevant and important before you send it so that your team knows that if a message comes from you, it is worth a read.
New Year’s is just around the corner, so why not get your team started on their productivity resolutions now? You still have time to close up that email tab, review your social media campaigns, and test out a new app before 2017 is over. Drop these bad habits by 2018 and watch your concentration and productivity skyrocket.
