How routine tasks can kill a marketer’s career and the profits of his company. Plan for action

“Isn’t it too much time and money I’m losing on all of this?” Let's figure out what marketing people spend their time on and what tasks just keep them away from the main goal.

For marketers, this is not just a question. This is the main pain of the marketer, because spending time on trifles (which can be done much faster), we do not leave time to solve important, but not urgent tasks, and they are the main contribution to the growth of the specialist and his company.

To understand how effectively you spend your time, you should look at the Eisenhower matrix (urgency and importance of tasks).
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Usually, all marketers fall into the time-trap and spend their key time on Square 1 (urgent and important matters) and Square 3 (wasting time on not the most important tasks). If you had a day in square 1, you were tired, but it was nice. After all, you coped brilliantly with the worked hands and were at the height of a difficult moment. Having achieved success in square 1, you feel great, but there is a catch here. All this is routine, it almost does not bring you closer to key goals.

The most important is square 2, the tasks in which are not so urgent, but much more important than in square 1. You must take the time for them, but how can this be done if it takes all your time to solve the problems of square 1? How to free up your time for really important things?

For example, such as preparing a large advertising campaign, developing a content marketing strategy, preparing a publication plan, etc.





Sem Bolter, a HubSpot marketer, like all of us, always asked myself this question, “how much time do I spend on a routine?” He decided to conduct a study on how long the routine activities of a marketer take. For example, writing a letter, creating a list of users for distribution, data analysis, etc.

He made a simple survey in which he outlined the 5 main routine actions of marketers.

1. Forming a list for mailing;
2. Monitoring, tracking and analysis of social media;
3. Creation and distribution of letters;
4. Building Landing;
5. Collect, organize and analyze data.

Well, how much time does a marketer spend?

On average, the marketer spends about 16 hours a week on routine tasks, and this is 40% of work time. It turns out that almost each of us spends more than a third of his time on monotonous and repetitive tasks, the costs of which need to be minimized.

Let's see which tasks take the most time: creation and distribution of letters (almost 4 hours) + data collection and analysis (also almost 4 hours). As for the remaining tasks, they almost do not lag behind the leaders.





Time for routine:
1 - Data collection and analysis;
2 - Formation and sending letters;
3 - Working with landing pages;
4 - Social Media;
5 - Forming a list for distribution and segmentation.

Yes, routine work cannot be avoided, but it is worth trying to reduce the time spent on it. In other words, you can make the routine take up not 40% of your time, but only 20-25%.


The time saving formula will look something like this:
Saved Time in Year = [Time is on Routine Now - Time is on Routine Future] * 52
ASG = (16 hours - 10 hours) * 52
CSA = 262 hours per year

260 hours per year. 260 free hours to work on your key goals. 260 hours for something else: site redesign, learning new tools, new advertising campaign, training visits, etc. Saving time on a routine gives you more time for your initiatives and reflection on your work.

3 tips on how to save even more time

Every marketer is different. Working conditions, available technologies, team size, marketing structure in a company - everything is important if you want to save time. But if you focus on simplifying, delegating, and even getting rid of routine tasks, you can cheat and cut the road.

Since mailings and analytics take the most time, we will focus on them in more detail.

Tip # 1: Identify the most important metrics.

Want to reduce the amount of data collected for analytics? Just stop tracking those metrics that neither you nor your team need. As is usually the case, the marketer does not know what to focus on and keeps track of all the indicators.

Here is an article in the topic, about which metrics to use at different stages of project development .

If the “average time spent on the page” is monitored, then yes, this is undoubtedly very interesting statistics, but if it doesn’t make any difference to your decisions or strategy, then remove it from your weekly report. Keeping track of unnecessary metrics consumes time and energy that you could spend on something more important.

Tip # 2: Connect Efficient Services

Due to the large number of services for internet marketing, it is quite difficult to get reports on each of the metrics and in general to build internet marketing processes. The problem is that around us is a complete zoo of services, all of them need to spend time and somehow integrate them with each other (most often manually).

Here's what it looks like. In a separate service, the marketer maintains a user base along with the sales department (CRM system), in another it analyzes landing pages and visitors to them, in the third it monitors key performance indicators, exports data from the CRM user base and makes mailings, etc. . It is wasting our time to the maximum and does not allow us to do real marketing.

We didn’t want to put up with this, so we created the Carrot Quest service, which combined key Internet marketing tools. Only on this you can free up to 10 hours a week (once spent on setting 4-5 hours).

Tip # 3: Moderate your creativity.

The next pain of marketers is emails.

How to save time here? The whole problem is in fantasy and creativity when creating the look of the letter and its texts. Believe me, in the mailings super-duper design only reduces their effectiveness. As it turned out, the best read and convert letters with a simple design. Letters that look like letters from familiar people, colleagues and friends. Yes, it sounds unusual, but it is. Stop wasting time on the design of the letter, use the most simple and effective templates. Every day, users send spam to the mountains with “wow” design.

See for yourself when you start analyzing your newsletters in the Carrot Quest in detail. No, no, I’m not talking about letter openness (open rate) or clicking on links (click rate), but about more detailed metrics, when you know how the letter affected the user's target action.



Here is an example of such an analysis of email distribution:

We sent a newsletter with a Lesson " Personal trigger email marketing on the example of an abandoned order ." It makes no sense to assess the number of clicks on the link in the letter, because the user can decide now as well as after a week and not track it by standard metrics.

It is important to know whether the target action was taken after reading the letter (after all, the user can take it after 10 days, and the click-through rate is not an assistant here). The target action of this mailing is to create a trigger message in the service. Of the 86 who read 28% reached the target action. Good figure.



Appreciate your time and pay attention to which square of the Eisenhower matrix you fall into. Remember, square 2 is a contribution to your success, career and company profits.



Do you have any tasks devouring the most time? What would you do if you had 260 extra hours? Share your thoughts in the comments.

With pleasure, the team of Carrot Quest service that knows all the information about each user on your site and with this knowledge allows you to increase the conversion to the first and repeated sale (via chat, pop-up or email)



Part of the material is taken from hubspot.com