How you spend your time can greatly impact the success or failure of your marketing campaigns. While many tasks require more time commitment than others, neglecting to give certain stages their proper attention can have a negative impact on the overall success your campaign sees.
A recent report from Econsultancy and Oracle Marketing Cloud looked at where marketers are spending their time, along with their top 3 priorities in terms of time spent. What they found is interesting and may show where some have their priorities a bit mixed up.
Top In Terms Of Time
The survey asked the question, “For a typical digital marketing campaign, please rank the top five areas in order of amount of time spent on each (from most time to least time).” As you can see from the results below, most marketers spent the vast majority of their time on strategy and planning. This is interesting, as the same survey found that the lack of a clearly defined strategy was the top reason preventing respondents from delivering orchestrated cross-channel marketing activities. Just 5% said their organizations are ‘very much’ set up to deliver effective cross-channel marketing. Even with all of that time spent planning, it’s still very difficult for most marketers to develop cross-channel strategies.
Strategy and planning along with design/content took up 87% of the time, leaving just 13% for everything else. Preparing data, testing, evaluating/learning, reviewing, optimization, and reporting made up the remaining time spent on digital marketing campaigns. With so little time devoted to looking at campaign performance, optimizing and testing, then learning from the outcome, it’s no wonder that many struggle to see improvements campaign to campaign. If you don’t devote time to trying to improve your program along the way and learning from mistakes, it’s hard to know what did and didn’t work this time and avoid repeating the same problems next time.
Another source of concern is that 28% of respondents say their organizations don’t have a strategy for integrating mobile into boarder marketing campaigns. That number has risen from 24% last year. It would seem that even with many more stressing the importance of mobile this year, an increasing number of marketers are struggling to figure out how it fits into their marketing strategy.
How Do You Spend Your Time?
Seeing the way most marketers are spending their time provides insight into both what most see as their largest priorities and also where they might be missing. Take a look at your own time allocation and see where you’re spending most of it. Is the time being put to best-use? Are there places you should be spending more, but aren’t?
By evaluating our own time use, we can find places we may be able to get better value for our efforts, plus opportunities to increase both productivity and outcome. How are you spending your time? How might you better manage it?
