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I left my paying job for digital marketing because I was fed-up of been told what to do. I wanted a lifestyle where I could organize myself and not be ordered around. I found this in digital marketing, and I am fulfilled. But something else came up; I became busier than I used to be.
There was too much for me to attend to, and many times I got confused. It pointed to the need for me to get organized. Thus, I needed to learn how to essential time management tips for digital marketers. The schedule of a digital marketer has lots of tasks to accomplish and also distractions.
The distractions come from all angles, from the launch of a new product, an essential guide that is highly irrelevant to social media updates that pops up by the minute. It is easy to get overwhelmed with events, while your actual productivity is next to zero.
To achieve maximum success, you must understand time management and focus on things that matter. To help out, I have compiled seven time management tips that have helped me succeed as a digital marketer.
Layout your Plan:
Planning is an essential tool. Before starting any task at all, even this post I am writing, the first thing I did was to draw out my plans.
Draw out your schedule and apportion time to each task. You may not be exact, but it puts you on a watch, increases your efficiency, and overall productivity.
In doing this, you should have it at the back of your mind that your plan must be SMART.
It must be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. It does not mean you cannot change as need demand.
There might be a need to change; you must be flexible to accommodate need adjustment. It is your business, and your overall objective is profitability. Your plan has outlined your action course, evaluate it and make the necessary adjustment when needed.
Define Your Target Audience:
As a digital marketer, your product is not the best fit for the whole world. You must identify your target audience; use customer persona to create a model of your exact customer. It will help you define their needs, pain, desire, and other essentials.
Creating a buyer persona is not difficult. You can make it fun for yourself by using cartoon characters. Give your character a name; next is to identify traits or demographics like age, gender, occupation and so on. Next is to try attaché goals and challenges that can be associated with your chosen character.
Having a brief idea of your ideal customer will help your marketing effort. Placing yourself in their shoes will help you produce content that is the best fit for them. So doing you will be targeting customers that will buy from you repeatedly. Also, your buyer's persona will go a long way to guide you and know when and why things are not working.
Create EverGreen content:
Bear in mind that you are creating content for a long time purpose. Do not create content on a short term basis, focusing on immediate reward. Create content that will be relevant in years to come. It will go a long way to reduce your workload in the latter time to come.
Another advantage to long time content is re-purposing. You can easily re-purpose your content after some while, and change the formats. You can convert them into a podcast, video content, e-books and lots more. A good example is a series of related articles you can transform them into an e-book, online course or even a series of target emails.
Use a content schedule to Plan Your content
Planning your content helps you produce quality content consistently. You can do this using a content schedule or calendar. With it, you can plan your content, avoid duplicated content, and monitor your performance.
With a content schedule, you are sure to save time, resource and be much more productive. Learning to create a content schedule is not difficult. Your content schedule should highlight the content topic, days you want to post, events like public holidays and festivals, meeting s, and promotions.
Select important Platforms
Getting it straight, you cannot be on all platforms. You should select platforms that matter most to your brand and that you are conversant with their outlook and format. It does not rule out the fact that you will need to study and understand these platforms better.
Learn and understanding how to use a specific platform will help you manage your time and effort properly. Also, I would like to remind you that each platform has a unique characteristic. Content created for Facebook will not be a good fit for Pinterest. You will need different types of images, content description and lots more on Pinterest.
While Twitter is known for a short piece of content like breaking news, LinkedIn is a business-focused platform targeted at businesses.
A proper understanding of these platforms will save you from wasting time planning content for them.
Outsource Tasks
Delegating tasks is one of those practices you should get used to. You cannot do it all alone. Depending on the volume of your work, you can employ virtual assistance or an admin. Also, you can hire a freelancer to help in creating content or graphic design. It may not be as expensive as you thought.
Create Saved Replies
Replying to comments, messages and other forms of engagement is very important to building a responsive brand. This event may look simple but it takes a significant part of your time. The good thing here is that a lot of the request is to know more about your brand or product. You can create message templates or use save replies.
When using saved replies, try as much as possible to make your responses genuine and authentic.
Take Breaks
Relaxation is needful for the body, and one must take a break for a short period to relax the nerves. The human body has not been made to work without rest. We perform better when we take a break from work. Some school of thought recommends we take 15 mins to break after 75 mins of work. Others recommend 10 mins after 60 mins of work.
The most important thing you should bear in mind is that your concentration diminishes when you work without a break, just like with the muscle. You do not need to overwork it, give time for relaxing of your nerves and you will perform better.
Final Thoughts
As a digital marketer, these outlined tips will be of importance to help save time and effort. If you are new to digital marketing, you can begin with these tips, and it will help you save time and effort. If you have been here for some while, you can review your practices align them with the above tips.