Last updated on January 6th, 2016 at 12:57 pm
A new report suggests that marketers are focusing too much of their time on two tasks: data and emails. And this could be hurting their overall productivity.
Sam Balter of HubSpot conducted a survey of professional marketers and discovered that they spend one-third of their 45-hour week conducting repetitive tasks. That’s a lot of time that could be spent doing something else more productive.
Ostensibly, the two biggest time killers were collecting, organizing and analyzing marketing data from various sources (3.55 hours per week) and creating and sending emails (3.48 hours per week).
The three other offending tasks were spending time on landing pages (3.2 hours per week), social media (3.1 hours per week) and list management (2.6 hours per week).
Balter said that performing repetitive work is certainly unavoidable, but argued that everyone should actively work to reduce the amount of time spending on such tasks. For instance, according to the study’s author, if you cut back your time on routine tasks to just one-fourth then you could save about 247 hours in a year.
“Nearly 250 hours saved a year. Imagine what you could do with 250 additional hours,” Balter writes. “Whether that’s a website redesign, a new AdWords strategy, hosting an event, or just getting some R&R, a small reduction in time spent on a routine task can have a huge impact on your performance.”
In order to save time, Balter recommends doing three things:
- Identify the most important metrics first.
- Invest in reporting software.
- Become less creative.
Is Automation Adoption the Key?
Whether it’s social media marketing or B2B marketing, one thing professionals can empathize with one another is the time it takes to complete the same old tasks. Perhaps you should perform your own time audit.
This is one of the reasons why so many in the marketing industry are adopting automation technologies. Apparently, 2015 has been the year of automation as a majority of marketers or marketing firms have incorporated this type of technology into their business models.
For instance, one study found that there are close to 11 times more B2B organizations with marketing automation today than there were just four years ago. Moreover, an overwhelming majority (91 percent) say automation is very important to the success of a company.
Instead of allocating your precious time to redundant tasks and concentrating your mental efforts on simple chores, automating your email campaigns or data collection endeavors may be the best option to improve your time management.
Flickr photo via Creative Commons
