Time is cash. And the extra time your workforce spends on shopper campaigns and company development, the extra money will are available in.
Sadly, there are a whole lot of duties that may eat up the day and scale back your company’s productiveness.
On this article, we present you get rid of the duties which might be costing your company useful hours and holding again your workforce.
Eliminating Your Company’s Largest Time Wasters
In accordance with a report by HubSpot, the common marketer spends 16 hours per week on routine and repetitive duties. That equates to over 1/3 of their time on non-billable work. The largest offenders primarily based on this report? Sending emails and gathering information:
- Sending out emails takes entrepreneurs a mean of three.48 hours per week. This consists of firm emails in addition to shopper marketing campaign emails.
- Gathering, organizing, and analyzing advertising information from totally different sources take a mean of three.55 hours per week.
Prime 12 Issues Advertising and marketing Businesses Spend Time Working On
In case you’re questioning the place to search for these time wasters, check out the next time-consuming actions:
- Consumer Communication & Administration
- Billing & Invoicing
- Prospecting/New Enterprise
- Accounting/Finance
- Analysis
- Inventive Improvement
- Marketing campaign Technique
- Executing & Optimizing Applications
- Conferences
- Administrative Duties
- Expertise and Firm Tradition
- Consumer Reporting
Though needed, most of those actions aren’t billable. Businesses which might be making an attempt to scale have to free themselves from a few of these issues that could possibly be inflicting a development bottleneck.
Refocus Your Time On Income-generating Actions
Unlock extra time to concentrate on revenue-generating actions equivalent to shopper campaigns and enterprise development, together with:
- Prospecting for brand spanking new shoppers to extend income.
- Optimizing marketing campaign efficiency to show shoppers into evangelists.
- Bettering your workforce’s work/life stability, which aids in morale and expertise retention.
- Specializing in the enjoyable stuff, like artistic growth and marketing campaign technique.
- Decreasing stress, which might result in a decrease stage of workers burnout for company workers and house owners.
Prime 8 Time-Losing Actions Your Company Ought to Streamline Immediately
Though there are all the time methods to seek out enhancements in enterprise processes, activity administration, and shopper reporting, listed here are a number of the most typical time-wasters we’ve seen hamper advertising businesses.
1. Inefficient Communication
Always sending emails backwards and forwards, having lengthy conferences to debate issues, and switching between a number of modes of communication eats up a whole lot of your time. As a substitute, attempt to streamline communication and scale back the notification noise utilizing a venture administration software like Asana, ClickUp, Trello, or the AgencyAnalytics activity administration software. It will provide help to keep organized and on monitor and scale back the time spent going backwards and forwards to maintain tabs on a specific activity.
2. Administrative Duties
Issues like scheduling appointments, bookkeeping, and submitting paperwork can take up a whole lot of time if you happen to’re not cautious. Attempt to automate as many of those duties as attainable with easy-to-use accounting or time administration software program.
3. Multitasking
There may be a whole lot of debate over whether or not multitasking is certainly extra environment friendly. Over the previous few many years, a number of research have proven that multitasking can result in decreased productiveness and elevated errors.
Nevertheless, different research have proven that in case you are good at multitasking, it may be extra environment friendly than doing one activity at a time. The underside line is that if somebody will not be good at multitasking, they need to concentrate on one activity at a time and provides it their full consideration. It will assist them work extra effectively and get issues carried out quicker.
4. Attempting to find Knowledge
In in the present day’s digital advertising world, information is all over the place. Typically, this results in information overload and wasted time making an attempt to find particular information factors from a wide range of sources.
Leaders within the advertising subject are feeling overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of knowledge at their disposal. With a lot data to attract from, it may be troublesome to find out which information is most essential and use it to enhance marketing campaign efficiency.
Moreover, as know-how advances and extra information turns into out there, leaders are struggling to maintain up with the newest developments and adjustments. How acquainted are you with GA-4 (Google Analytics 4), for instance? This may make it troublesome to make knowledgeable selections about the place to allocate assets and which campaigns to concentrate on.
As entrepreneurs, we are likely to stay and breathe the info that’s out there. However the abundance of knowledge will be each a blessing and a curse for advertising leaders and company house owners. On one hand, it supplies them with an countless quantity of alternatives to enhance shopper campaigns. However, it may be troublesome to find out what information is most related, use it successfully, and the place to seek out it.
This can be a enormous time waster for advertising businesses!
As a substitute, with a central shopper reporting software like AgencyAnalytics, your workforce simply pulls information from all of your shopper’s advertising platforms into one centralized location. What used to take hours to collate is now carried out routinely in minutes.
It’s additionally essential to prioritize the info that’s most essential to your shoppers and could have the most important affect on their enterprise.
Tip: Prioritization can be essential in the case of duties. Implement a prioritization protocol, such because the Eisenhower Matrix, to assist your workforce prioritize duties primarily based on their urgency and significance.
5. Conferences
Everyone knows the ache of getting unproductive conferences. In case you’re having too many conferences or conferences that aren’t well-organized, it might suck a whole lot of time and power out of the day. Restrict the variety of conferences you will have and ensure they’re productive through the use of an agenda and sticking to it.
Different tricks to make conferences extra environment friendly embody:
- Solely embody the individuals in conferences who must be there. There’s little or no worth to having 12 individuals sitting at a gathering whereas solely 3 of them are discussing the subject at hand, equivalent to a shopper’s social media audit.
- Set your default assembly size to 45 minutes as an alternative of the standard hour-long conferences. These further quarter-hour can add up shortly when you will have a whole lot of conferences. And ensure to begin and finish the conferences on time.
- Ensure conferences have a objective. In the event that they don’t, cancel them.
6. Emails
There are two sides to this explicit coin–firm emails and shopper marketing campaign emails.
In case you’re spending an excessive amount of time checking and responding to emails, it’s taking away from time that could possibly be spent on extra vital duties. And the distraction value of dropping what you’re engaged on each time you hear that little “ding” that signifies a brand new electronic mail has arrived is costing you far more than you assume.
On common, it takes 23 minutes to get again on monitor after you’ve allowed your self to get distracted. In case you’re checking your electronic mail each half-hour, that’s solely 7 minutes of totally productive time per hour.
To save lots of time, strive implementing a batching protocol in order that electronic mail is barely being checked a number of occasions day by day (with some exceptions, in fact).
When creating and sending marketing campaign emails for shoppers, don’t attempt to reinvent the wheel with each single electronic mail marketing campaign you create. Templates, reusable blocks, and confirmed topic line constructions can go a protracted strategy to streamlining the marketing campaign creation and distribution processes. After all, you will need to stability that towards working correct A/B exams to all the time search for new methods to enhance the marketing campaign efficiency.
7. Perfectionism
Spending an excessive amount of time making an attempt to make all the pieces good is taking away treasured time that could possibly be spent on extra revenue-generating duties. As a substitute of striving for perfection, attempt to concentrate on getting issues carried out and doing them properly.
There are a few outdated sayings that mirror this idea completely:
“Don’t let good be the enemy of excellent.” – Voltaire
“Higher a diamond with a flaw than a pebble with out.” – Confucius
For instance, you may spend 1 hour getting one thing 90% of the best way to good after which one other 10 hours fixing that final 10%. Will that 10% enchancment within the completed product drive sufficient outcomes to make that point funding worthwhile? Typically, the reply to that query is a powerful “No!” Typically it’s higher to get it carried out and iterate to make enhancements alongside the best way.
8. Consumer Reporting
A report from Search Engine Journal confirmed that the typical advertising company spends almost the identical period of time (73.7%) reporting on shopper campaigns as they do execute them.
The truth is, the typical advertising company spends as much as 3.5 hours on the handbook technique of gathering, collating, visualizing, and reporting information for every shopper.
Multiply that quantity by the variety of shoppers and the variety of weeks or months in a yr, and also you’ve bought an infinite period of time misplaced to non-billable duties.
Even businesses with a streamlined (however handbook) method to reporting point out that the minimal it will sometimes take them to create these stories manually is 90 minutes.
As a substitute of spending all that point logging out and in of promoting platforms to repeat and paste screenshots and information, choose a software that may do the heavy lifting for you.
On common, AgencyAnalytics clients report saving 75-80% of the time it used to take them to generate and ship shopper stories as soon as they switched to the platform.
What Is Your Company’s Time Price?
The problem that many businesses face is making an attempt to do all the pieces themselves. Particularly through the early days of company development, it’s all too frequent to pinch pennies trying to do all the pieces in-house and relying much less on freelancers and instruments that would streamline these processes.
Though each greenback certainly counts, too many company house owners assume their time–and their workers’s time–is “free.” However simply because it’s already coated by payroll doesn’t imply it’s free to waste. You will need to have a look at the worth of your time and the way it pertains to the opposite actions you would be doing to develop the company’s backside line.
If it takes you 3.5 hours to create a shopper report, and you would do the identical utilizing a shopper reporting software in half-hour, ask your self how you’d spend that further time and what affect it will have in your company’s productiveness and workers’ well-being.
Let’s have a look at one instance:
- Your company has 22 shoppers
- It takes 210 minutes per shopper to create month-to-month advertising stories
- Your common billable charge for shopper work is $150
22 x 2.5 Hours X $150 = $8,250 of Billable Hours wasted on handbook reporting processes
You may do the identical utilizing the AgencyAnalytics automated reporting software and win again these hours by creating shopper dashboards and stories in minutes as an alternative of hours.
The identical method will be utilized to many of those typical time wasters.
- Can you chop 4 hours per thirty days from workforce conferences? That’s $600 per thirty days for each particular person in these conferences.
- Are administrative duties taking over time with out offering any worth to the company’s backside line? Even half-hour per week per worker may shortly rack up 1000’s of additional {dollars} in billable hours.
- Is there software program that may streamline repetitive processes? Each hour you save will be higher spent on issues that drive the enterprise ahead.
An easy method to find out if a software is definitely worth the funding is to match it towards the time saved by the company. This may be carried out in two methods:
Time Saved Based mostly on Wage Prices:
Billable Hours Saved:
Whether or not you’re financial savings primarily based on the onerous value related to the individuals in your workforce, or the chance value of time that could possibly be spent on billable actions, the advantages are clear. Use the straightforward method to find out whether or not a platform or software is price including to your advertising company’s tech stack.
Time Is Your Company’s Most Invaluable Asset. Use It Correctly
Time is essentially the most useful asset for a advertising company as a result of it’s finite. An company has a sure variety of hours in a day, week, and month that may be spent on shopper work and looking for new shoppers. As soon as these hours are gone, they’re gone for good.
Businesses that save time utilizing automated reporting instruments, outsourcing administrative duties, and using software program that streamlines repetitive processes have extra time to concentrate on billable work and develop their enterprise. These businesses are higher positioned to scale and overtake their competitors. Are you one in all them?