4 Ways To Increase Productivity At Work

Whether you’re working in a big corporation, at an agency, or as a freelancer, sometimes being a digital marketer can feel devastating. The role demands you to be dynamic and flexible in how you approach each challenge, as well as a readiness to adjust to changing business concerns of the brands you work with.

Despite the huge responsibilities, we often find that digital marketing teams are under-strength and overworked which means we need to increase efficiency to complete the assignments at hand.

4 ways to maximize your efficiency

Efficiency is frequently used as an excuse for delivering substandard work, but that is not what we are focusing on here. Instead, it’s about finding ways to maximize the quality production of our work while still meeting the deadlines without feeling overwhelmed.

1) Do systematic research

Any kind of thorough and detailed research work is often laborious work. From keyword research to market reports, or even a competitor study, there’s a humongous amount of data available for mining. So how do we smartly complete these tasks?

• Set a scope of work: You need to establish how much research you need to do, where the best places to research your topic are, and how you collate that research so that it actually becomes an actionable insight. The defined scope will help you stay focused and make you more efficient. This also means setting expectations beforehand to bypass unnecessary re-work. By setting a realistic scope aligned with the time frame you have to finish the task accurately, you can avoid project hiccup and maintain efficiency throughout the life-cycle of your work.
  
  
• Effectively divide work in a team: Once you know the scope of the work, are now delivering it successfully. For that, if some help is needed from others, do not hesitate to ask for it, in fact, you should think about delegate some parts to others and then your job is to assemble the pieces to make it whole. Make sure, your team’s load of work has divided fairly among all.
  
  
• Leverage the power of paid tools: If you do have to work alone on the research, then you can employ a few tools. I’d recommend using even a few browser extensions, they can make your effort compact. Of course, paid tools have loads of features that essentially empower you to accomplish your goals with ease.
  
  
• Don't underestimate the free tools: In digital marketing, some research tasks are simply too extensive to carry out manually; keyword research is a prime example. There are free tools available online (besides their paid equivalents) that give you an initial list of topics, from where you have to find out the relevant keywords based on your understanding of users’ search intent.

Needless to say, paid tools offer a lot more (and reliable results too) than their free versions. But it’s okay to start with free tools.

2) Monitoring and performance checks

In digital marketing, and paid ads specifically, there’s a lot of elements that can change daily. Waiting a week to discover and get surprised is simply not viable for most online businesses. This means as marketers we need to be continually monitoring the accounts for negating the unintended aftereffects.

• Reporting: When it comes to measuring progress, automates the reporting process to look at the data independently can save a lot of time. This will also help the client to get updates in real-time.
  
  
• Monitoring: Keeping up to date with the campaigns’ key metrics, it’s also important to monitor the website’s health every day if possible. Carrying out regular/periodic site audits to identify errors and fix them instantly will have a positive impact on business’ ROI. By setting up automated alerts, you can find and fix important SEO issues. As a result, you can protect your team from any sudden backlash.
  
  
• Maintenance: It’s also vital to regularly check and maintain the technical aspects of a website. For this too, there are tools to automatically identifying issues. From updated XML sitemaps to soft 404s, with tools, you will instantly come to know where the problem is lying and how to fix it.

Finally, if something does go wrong and you are managing a large e-commerce site or in charge of multiple sites, you have to embrace automation a little bit to do your analysis.

3) Effective communication

In digital marketing, as it is in all aspects of life, effective communication is essential for efficiency and productivity every day. A lack of communication, too much communication, or poor communication often means an invitation to ambiguity which leads to non-productivity. There are various ways to set up a team to communicate better.

• Communicate with your team: How productive we are in the workplace is directly proportionate to the people we surround ourselves with, and how we are communicating with them. Learn the techniques and best practices for communication from the consistent performers around you. Understand how they organize themselves, their approach to doing work, and how they remove obstacles to achieve their goals. Studying them will help you discover how to be more efficient.
  
  
• Avoid over-communicating: Overusing tools like emails and chats can often hinder time management and efficiency. Also, block you to think rationally to a great extent. Over-communication can confuse your team, and affect their productivity. It is always great to communicate with all the stakeholders, to keep all are on the same page but make sure you don’t spend too much time on emailing and meetings.
  
  
• Written communication: Make sure you’re communicating in a way that reflects both yourself and the agency or brand you work for. It is absolutely vital for you (or your success) to communicate in the most appropriate, concise manner you can. Within corporate communication, written documentation is pivotal, helps you to be more efficient by removing ambiguity at the early stage of any project where many departments are working together.
  
  
• Constructive communication: In an agency, the routine processes can sometimes be stressful. A great way to avoid strain in the workplace is to stay calm and making sure this is briefed precisely to your peers. Panic is like infectious diseases, spread rapidly.

So with a clear mind, optimism and determination, create a better working environment and enhance productivity.

4) Design it like a pro

If you’re anything like me then the design is important to you too. I’m equally happy to write the content of any presentation and making it look professional aligned with a brand. This is an essential part of the marketing we do, as the look and feel of a proposal is often the stakeholder’s lasting impression about you and your work.

• Simplify your design processes: To save you time and money, there are a variety of tools that make designing a much simpler, more efficient task. Whether it is for internal communication, client presentation, or strategy document, both texts and the design together allow agencies and brands to avoid losing anything.
  
  
• Follow patterns when applicable: As an addendum to my last point, investing time in creating templates will save you valuable time when it matters. There may be a time when you need to submit a pitch deck quickly; having a visually appealing ready-made template allows you to focus more time on customizing content.

Similarly, having a standard reporting template for client work ensures consistency for all deliverables, and reduces time spent each time.

Conclusion

These are just a few easy ways that I have applied to improve my efficiency in the workplace and increase my output. Digital marketing can be a challenging industry to work in, and often it feels like the amount of work never decreases, but with careful planning, you can capitalize more on deliverable task time.

Below are three final points to consider:

• Take breaks only when you need them - remember, your creativity will be reduced if you’re overworked or stressed.
  
  
• Always look for automation - this does not mean producing lower quality work at a higher pace, it means leveraging the power of tools aptly.
  
  
• Ask for help - you are a human being, using everyone’s skills when needed. Avoid any needless stress in the workplace - instead share the knowledge and abilities of the people around you.

Good luck!