Marketing Advice


Time is of the essence: Managing your time effectively


You could have the best marketing strategies in the world but if you don’t have the time to execute them, someone else will be grabbing your client’s attention. Colin Sinclair McDermott aka The Online Print Coach, gives his tips on how to best manage your time.


M


arketing is something, as businesses, we know we must do yet it continues to be the one element many push to the side when we get too busy.


The issue with this is that if we fail to be consistent with our marketing messaging, we run the risk of falling out of favour with our clients and remember, if we don’t stay top of mind with them, your competitors will be trying to steer them away from you.


This appears to be a recurring theme I’ve come across frequently this month and therefore I felt it poignant to make this month’s article around time management.


You could have the best marketing strategies in the world but if you don’t have the time to execute them, someone else will be grabbing your client’s attention. Here’s some tips I would suggest to ensure you have enough time to execute your marketing properly.


Time blocking: The Pomodoro Technique


Try and allow specific blocks of time to focus on the different elements of your marketing strategies.


You might have heard of something called The Pomodoro Technique. What this does is breaks your tasks down and gets you to focus on intervals of say 25 minutes followed by short breaks to maintain energy and productivity. It’s highly effective and something I practice daily. It’s important you take those short breaks to recharge.


| 34 | October 2024 The two-minute tasks


The chances are, many of the things you have on your to-do list each day are small tasks that will only take two minutes to complete, but collectively they all mount up and often lead to overwhelm. I recommend taking one of those time blocks and allocating it toward all of these little two-minute tasks.


It gets them all cleared off quickly and gives an enormous sense of achievement.


Use a task management system There are tonnes of great tools out there you can utilise to manage these tasks. I personally use one called Asana. It’s great for keeping me on task and being efficient with my time. You can also set repetition on the ones that appear frequently so you don’t need to continuously add them to your list. Some clients I work with use the likes of Trello, Monday or even the basic Google Task Manager.


Delegate more


For those of you with teams, identify the tasks that you can delegate to other people. We can all be guilty of holding on to certain tasks because it’s the way you’ve always done it but effective delegation to those who are capable of expediting the same task will free up your time to work on the higher priority tasks that require your expertise.


Get rid of distractions This is probably one of the biggest reasons for sapping up our time,


subsequently having a knock-on effect on our ability to market ourselves effectively. Staff walking into our office, the phone ringing, clients or suppliers turning up unannounced. Where possible, try and give yourself a focused work environment, switch your phone off, let your staff know you’re busy and set some boundaries so that you are left uninterrupted to work on your marketing tasks.


Limit meetings


Again, a challenge I see often and I’m sure you can resonate with, is there’s lots of time where people just want meetings for the sake of having meetings. Often, they go on for far too long and likely so, a one-hour meeting could have effectively been had in a 15-minute window, had a proper purpose and agenda been adhered to. I’m certainly not trying to discourage you from having them, just make sure there is a purpose to them, ensure they are necessary, plan what all parties want to get from them and keep them brief.


Review regularly


Take some time at the end of each week, review where you have spent your time, identify things you could have done better, quicker and ensure you make any necessary adjustments to how you approach your tasks the following week. As I mentioned, keeping on top of your marketing and being consistent with it is key to your company’s success and if you don’t master the art of time management, it will impact your overall success.


www.printwearandpromotion.co.uk


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