Time is the most valuable resource in the world. Unlike other resources, time cannot be purchased, retrieved, or altered. Once you spend it, that moment is gone forever.
However, many people fail to assign time the value it deserves. They waste away the most valuable resource that they and their employees have when they could be leveraging resources to make better use of it.
An area of business that often becomes a massive time-suck is digital marketing. Digital marketing is a highly competitive area that is very unforgiving to those who have not already mastered its secrets. Therefore, many marketers and companies struggle with time management in marketing and spend years working on their digital marketing before seeing any results.
Even though digital marketing will always be difficult and time-consuming to execute correctly, there are ways to help you and your employees make better use of time. In this blog, learn about the five steps to increase ROIT (return on investment of time) to save you and your employees time while minimizing costs.
What is ROIT, and Why Does It Matter?
While most people think of a return on investment in terms of monetary outcomes, people should also consider the return on the investment of their time. After all, time is a scarce resource that can be invested better in some areas than others.
ROIT measures the benefits that you or your employees receive from investing x number of hours into a project or endeavor. For example, how many leads resulted from a blog that took 10 hours to create? Are there other projects in which those 10 hours could have resulted in a larger net benefit to your digital marketing?
The more you understand where your time goes and what goal it contributes to, the better you will manage your time. One way to get that in-depth understanding is through a comprehensive calendar application.
Calendar.com grants its users the ability to see exactly where their time goes. If they are spending way too much time on a relatively small and unimportant task, they can see that and adjust accordingly. In terms of enterprise usage, Calendar.com also allows managers to see where their employees’ time is going and send out adaptive meeting requests that automatically crawl calendars to find a time that works for all meeting participants.
Such a tool grants you time management insight that you can then use to calculate ROIT. If employees spend 12 hours on a new landing page from start to finish according to their calendars, track the benefit that page has on your lead retention.
As a business owner or manager, ROIT is an essential metric of your time management in marketing. The larger your ROIT, the greater your ratio of results over the amount of time spent. If employees spend too long on a project and it ends up going way over budget, its ROIT will reflect that.
Time Management in Marketing: 5 Steps to Improve Your ROIT
ROIT is an essential measure of a marketing department’s effectiveness regarding its time spent. But, how can you increase your marketing department’s ROIT? Namely, there are five ways to increase your ROIT, including:
- Resourcefulness
- Effort alignment
- Relationships and trust
- Task prioritization
- Mindfulness of ROIT for others
Be Resourceful
Your business is not the first to try its hand at digital marketing. The industry for digital marketing is so vast that a host of companies exist to make digital marketing easier.
They provide powerful tools and services that will save you time and effort if used to their potential. From SEO tools to communication platforms to content publishing services, there are ways to improve your marketing results while also saving you time..
Therefore, taking advantage of the right digital marketing tools for your business will vastly increase your ROIT.
Strategically Align Efforts
Behind every successful digital marketing campaign, there is a team of hardworking contributors. No one person can balance everything that a top-shelf digital marketing campaign demands. Therefore, you need to align your marketing efforts with those of the people around you.
That means communicating who needs to do what, why they need to do it, and when to have it done. Everyone on your marketing team should know how to contribute to the campaign in a meaningful way with excellent time management skills.
If everybody on the team knows where their colleagues are in their work and what project they are working on, it will prevent repeat tasks, avoid wasted time, and improve the cohesiveness of the department.
Build Relationships and Trust
Like in any business area, relationships can get you farther than you would have ever thought possible without them. Because digital marketing is so important and so popular, it is more than likely that you know someone who has already gone through the same digital marketing process as you have.
They may have best practices, lessons they learned, tools they recommend, and knowledge that you otherwise would have had to spend years of trial and error to discover by yourself. Therefore, leverage your relationships.
Prioritize Tasks
As a digital marketer, there are an endless number of tasks you could do. From writing content to redesigning a website to updating keywords, there is always something to do. However, not all jobs will produce the same ROIT.
Your experience may better tailor your skills to some tasks than others. If you can view a marketing campaign from a high level and delegate tasks, then the odds are that you should not spend the majority of your time perseverating on a word choice for a blog.
Take your strengths and the strengths of your coworkers into account when assigning or executing tasks. If you work to your team’s strengths, your ROIT will benefit.
Understand ROIT for Others
While considering how you can improve your time management in marketing is important, the culmination of your digital marketing’s ROIT is much more than just your own time investment. Instead, it is the sum of everyone’s time and everyone’s contributions.
Sometimes, a few minutes of your time could save somebody else hours of work and research. Therefore, search for ways that your time can improve the ROIT of others.
Getting the Most Out of Your Marketing Campaign
ROIT is an important measure of your marketing department’s effectiveness. It considers the net benefit that an action has on your marketing campaign as well as the time spent to earn that benefit. Therefore, a high ROIT signals that you are efficiently spending your time on high-value projects.
As you read in this blog, there are ways to increase your ROIT. But, the best way to get the most out of your marketing budget is to circumvent the need for a marketing department entirely. Without a marketing team, you will not have to go through the expensive and long learning process to produce successful digital marketing.
Instead of using an in-house marketing department, we advise you to use a team-based approach to your marketing. With a team-based approach, you hand your marketing over to a company that does digital marketing professionally. With that offloading comes the years of experience and successful marketing campaigns that would otherwise be extremely expensive or unattainable using in-house marketing.
If you want to look into partnering with a proven team-based marketing agency, click here to learn more. But, if you’re going to try digital marketing yourself, click here for a free ebook that will get you well on your way to building a successful digital marketing campaign.
