5 Time-Saving Tips For Your Next Marketing Campaign

Time is undoubtedly a valuable asset in marketing, but is the average marketer really spending their time as efficiently as they could be? A recent study suggests not, finding that marketers waste close to 7 hours each week (around 18% of a typical 37.5-hour working week) on duplication of work alone.

With competition continually increasing and consumer demands perennially shifting, marketers can seldom afford to misuse this precious time on needless or perfunctory tasks. They need to make every second count: time squandered might lead to an inability to keep up with more agile competitors or react quickly enough to ‘here-today-gone-tomorrow’ trends.

If you’re planning your next big marketing campaign, how can you claw back some of those valuable hours, ensuring you’re spending your time efficiently and maximizing output across your team? Let’s explore 5 essential time-saving tips for marketers.

Create an Elevator Pitch

An elevator pitch is a simple concept because it should be short and to-the-point enough to relay to someone you’re sharing an elevator with (the idea is that you may only have 30 seconds to grab someone’s attention and sell them on your idea). Once you’ve conceptualized your marketing campaign and mapped out your strategy, construct a snappy, impossible-to-ignore description that encapsulates your campaign’s theme, USP, and primary aim and that you can reel off in 30 seconds or less.

What does a good elevator pitch entail? Well, here are a few good examples, but to create an effective elevator pitch, ask yourself these questions: What problem are you trying to solve? How can you provide a solution to that problem? What are the primary benefits of your solution? What makes it different? Why should anybody care?

A good elevator pitch is also a great time-saving technique. Why? For one thing, narrowing your campaign’s various touch-points down into one concise paragraph or two will help you stay laser-focused on your primary goal, meaning you’re less likely to be sidetracked by nonessential tasks and you’ll operate as efficiently as possible.

It also means, of course, that you’ll be able to manage stakeholder communication more effectively; whether you’re an agency building a campaign for a discerning client or an in-house marketer with a particularly exacting marketing director, being able to communicate your aims and your deliverables clearly and concisely will mean more clarity and fewer questions.

Repurpose Existing Content

Sure, you don’t want to be known as the brand that constantly repeats itself, but there’s plenty of value in leveraging and reworking some of your existing content assets. This is not only a great time-saver, but it can increase the amount of content you’re able to produce, ensure you’re getting maximum value out of your content, and reinforce your brand’s overall message — which is important, particularly as marketing’s ‘rule of 7s’ states that a consumer must see a message at least 7 times before they’re likely to take action.

This is where ‘evergreen’ content comes in — content that never loses relevance and is always likely to retain interest. And while it’s important to be reactive to industry developments and news stories (content that’s attached to a trending topic is likely to create spikes in engagement), having a series of evergreen campaigns that you can revisit and repurpose is an effective (and time-efficient) tactic that can offer long-term benefits.

For example, say you’ve written a blog post on the benefits of working remotely (a concept that’s unlikely to lose relevance anytime soon); you could recycle the content in other formats — such as a podcast or a short-form video — to maximize its value, save you time looking for new content angles, and help you reach audiences that might be uninterested in your blog.

Alternatively, if you’ve recently published the survey results, re-review the data, and perhaps you’ll find other, previously overlooked nuggets of information you can call out. You may even find alternative ways to spin the data to give it a new angle. Perhaps the survey has gained new relevance in light of recent developments in the news, and you can use this as a catalyst to repurpose your content as part of a hyper-relevant ‘new’ campaign.

Leverage Pre-Built Templates

Sure, creating campaign content from scratch (whether that’s emails, landing pages, videos, and so on) will mean it retains your unique stamp, but it’s also an arduous and complex task. Therefore, you shouldn’t be afraid to leverage pre-built templates as a time-saving device. Whether you create your own templates for future use (which can save ample time versus crafting completely new designs every time) or use some of the various software tools available, you can use your template as your starting point and build your content around it.

If you opt for the latter option (and there’s no reason you shouldn’t, outside of budgetary limitations), most design software — such as Visme, for example — includes pre-built templates to work from. Similarly, an email marketing tool like Mailjet offers responsive newsletter templates that you can customize to your needs, while if you’re creating video content for your campaign, you can use in-built templates from a tool such as PlayPlay to craft compelling, professional-looking intro videos.

Schedule Your Social Posts

One of the best time-saving strategies for marketers is creating a content calendar: this is where you document and plan out all your upcoming content, outlining when you’ll publish and post content, what channels you’ll publish it through, who you’ll target, and what the primary messaging will be. You can think ahead to important milestones — product launches, events, awareness days, etc. — and enhance your efficiency by being pre-prepared (scrambling around last minute rarely constitutes time spent productively).

When creating a specific marketing campaign, an extension of the content calendar concept is maintaining a schedule for your social media activity. If you’re running a large campaign intending to reach a broad audience, you’ll likely want to post across multiple social channels and do so often to keep your content front and center — you may even be able to angle your campaign content in several ways to make it appeal to different platforms and demographics (users on TikTok and LinkedIn are going to have very different expectations, for example).

Rather than posting as and when (which is not only inefficient but may also mean you’re posting at nonoptimal times), you can save time and think more carefully about when you’re posting content by using a social media scheduler to plan what and when to post. Once your content is scheduled, it will automatically go live at the predetermined time, and in the meantime you can work on other campaign elements or start building concepts for future content.

Streamline Your Reporting

Once your campaign is out in the world, it’s essential to keep track of its progress and measure its success — the insights you gather can help you spot weak points and infer learnings that you can apply to future marketing campaigns (and no doubt you’ll have a marketing director in your ear demanding updates on performance). But while effective data analysis is an essential part of any marketing campaign, you can easily get lost among reports and end up spending your time inefficiently if you don’t know what metrics you should be tracking.

To ensure you’re only spending time reporting on what matters, outline your key performance indicators (KPIs) before launching your campaign. Which factors will determine the success (or failure) of your campaign? What are you ultimately trying to achieve through running it? It may be that you want to boost subscriber numbers, for example, or increase the conversion rate of a particular product. Either way, knowing what metrics you need to keep a close eye on will enable you to narrow your focus, avoid wasting time analyzing redundant data, and provide a clear and concise picture of your campaign’s performance.

Detail is great, but it’s possible to delve unnecessarily deeply into your analytics. Think about presenting your findings to your company director or CEO: these are people whose time is limited and who may not understand the complex nuances of your marketing strategy, so they’ll likely want easily-digestible information over detailed reports and a set of key, actionable insights over a spreadsheet containing reams of data. Think about what information really matters: is the information telling you anything meaningful? Can you learn anything from it? If not, it’s not worth spending any time reporting on it.

Conclusion

An effective marketing campaign takes time to get right (we’re not advocating cutting corners here), but it’s important to ensure your time is spent efficiently and productively. If you’re squandering hours by duplicating tasks or manually scheduling content, look for ways to cut out unnecessary work and optimize your processes. Speed up your campaign turnaround time, and you’ll be able to deliver highly relevant, reactive campaigns ahead of your competitors.