The cliché business equation “time = money” is beyond relevant to the digital marketing realm. Digital marketing is a fast-paced field that demands near-real-time responses to trends in your niche. There are tools and measures you should be taking to manage your marketing projects and save invaluable time.
Good time management lets you build a better customer experience, and lets you deliver results that truly matter to your customers. In order to sustain controlled growth, we suggest following the 20-80% rule. This is a popular time management principle. It has been observed in many fields that 80% of your results comes from 20% of your efforts. Discovering and focusing on this core 20% is crucial to your overall success.
In this post, we will cover the basic best practices for maximizing time and project management while growing your agency so you can follow this principle.
Avoid wasting time and money on things that technology can help you solve
Make a list of the things that you spend the most time and money on. Are there things on your list that could be optimized using technology?
Let’s take creating landing pages for your customer’s lead generation campaigns as an example.
Typically, you will have spent time and money on hiring developers that know how to code and perhaps a designer that knows landing page principles. Using freelancers for your page development is not only costly, but freelancers also do not possess the loyalty of your engaged marketing team.
As you can see from the chart above, the best-designed landing pages yield the highest conversion rates. How can technology fill the gap so you can design a great landing page yourself without hiring a freelancer?
Nowadays, smart tools like Pagewiz are available, which make it easy for marketing agencies and designers to create slick, attractive and optimized landing pages in minutes. The drag-and-drop features of such tools are especially handy since they allow you (or anybody in a marketing agency) to create high-quality landing pages, without any programming knowledge whatsoever.
There are tools now for workflow management, project management, bookkeeping and almost every business task you can think of. Here are some examples:
- Tools such as Skype or Google Hangouts can save time wasted on traveling to meetings.
- Basecamp or Trello can help you manage your projects and time
- Freshbooks or Kashflow can help organize your book-keeping
The key thing is to zoom out and ask yourself what can be done to work in a more efficient way. Sometimes paying a small subscription fee to use a tool rather than hiring a freelancer is the best route to automate parts of your business that are necessary, but aren’t part of the 20% you need to focus on.
Focus on quality over quantity
There are two core aspects of your agencies success:
- Your personnel
- Your customers
You should be focusing on the quality of these rather than the quantity. This is the real purpose of the 20-80% rule. It’s not just that you get 80% of your benefit from 20% of your customers and personnel. You also get 80% of your problems from 20% of them as well.
Vetting your personnel is not only valuable but essential for time-saving and effective project management. When you spend time focusing on finding and training quality employees, your ROI is immediately enhanced.
[tweetthis]The key thing is to zoom out and ask yourself what can be done to work in a more efficient way.[/tweetthis]
Think of it this way: Some people are good at doing a job, but someone else might be great at it. Spending some time to find the great ones is a worthwhile investment of time. You may not even have to hire someone. Just shuffle job responsibilities around to match your current employee’s core competencies.
This frees up more time for yourself to develop new strategies, business directions, and to research into market trends and customer preferences. While you may need to pay high-quality personnel higher salaries, your ROI at the end will be well worth it if you have quality customers.
Let’s turn to them for a moment. If you are marketing for a company, what if (and we hope you already know how to avoid this) they simply have a lousy product? Taking the time and effort to market for a valueless company is a waste of your resources. Yes, they may indeed pay you up front for your marketing services, but think about your long-term business strategy: customers that have a novel in-demand product will benefit more from your time and devotion to their product, respect your efforts and keep coming back to your agency for their marketing services.
It is a symbiotic relationship. Working with high-quality customers further fosters income. If they are able to produce a desirable and efficient product, their own profit margins will afford them to pay you more for your marketing expertise.
You may be enticed to take on every lead that is converted into a potential customer, especially if you have recently launched your marketing agency . However, think about your long-term goals, like growing your agency in a controlled manner. By being selective about who you take on as a client, you can start with a better foundation for growth.
The fact of the matter is that most businesses fail, for whatever reason. Whether it is a lack of capital, lack of market savvy, or in-house operational complications, most businesses are doomed. Spend time to research the client’s product, whether it is viable, their reputation, how quick they are to communicate desires, and the level of coherency of their demands to see if it’s worth your time.
Also, sometimes, it may be better to cut a high-quality but problematic customer if they are sucking up too much of your employee’s bandwidth. Problem customers are problem customers, even if they pay very well. If you’re constantly putting out fires with a particular client, this may be something to think about.
It is far more valuable to have a small stable of high-quality customers that you share business success with, year after year, than spreading yourself thin by taking on every potential customer that elicits your services. You will have more time to do better work for better clients, and both you and your customers will share in the success of your marketing efforts.
When growing your marketing agency, it’s important to be efficient. Don’t just work for the sake of work and don’t spend where you could utilize technology. By avoiding wasting time and money on things that technology can help you solve and by focusing on quality over quantity with your customers and employees, you can boost your performance and stay in control.
If you’d like to learn more about best practices for growing your agency we invite you to download our FREE “how to stay in control while growing your digital marketing agency” report.
