As busy entrepreneurs and business owners like to point out, time is money. The more time you make in your day, the more you can get done and the more successful you can become.
However, as pop culture likes to point out, we all have the same 24 hours at our disposal every day. Why are some people and some businesses more successful than others, though?
The key is in saving and managing time and utilizing the hours you have to achieve the most. In this post, we’ll take a look at six digital marketing tips that will help you secure more time in the bank and use it wisely.
Answer Common Questions Proactively
Nearly 60% of customers are frustrated by long wait times and consider them to be the worst part of a customer service experience. If you don’t have enough service reps on hand and need to make customers wait for an answer, you need to consider reducing the number of support calls and messages to give your staff more time to do their job better.
A simple yet very effective way to do that is to provide more information on your website and answer anticipated customer questions. You will naturally not be able to preempt every query, and customers will still get in touch just to check, but providing answers to the most common questions is a great place to start.
The more questions you answer, the fewer calls you can likely expect. That’s why it’s best to make valuable and informative content a part of your marketing strategy early on. This will not only serve to improve the user experience you offer, but it’s also a great way to build more authority among search engines.
Take a look at the Voices website and how they’ve handled this task. They’ve answered a lot of customer questions with their homepage copy. You get to know how big their talent pool is, what the process of hiring is like, and when you can expect a reply.
Image source: Voices.com
They’ve also gone a step further, including a great FAQ section that deals with just the type of questions most customers are likely to have. This one section alone can significantly reduce the workload for their customer service team, and it only requires a one-time effort. Plus, adding any additional questions will literally be less than an hour’s work.
Publish Guest Posts from Credible Thought Leaders
Planning, researching, and writing content for your blog will eat up a lot of your time. As you now need over four hours to create content that has the highest chance to rank and be useful to your audience, outsourcing this effort can free your calendar up significantly.
However, hiring a freelance content writer is not always the best choice. They will need time to familiarize themselves with your style and your brand, and not all of them will want to spend the time doing that. Plus, truly great content comes with a higher price tag.
The more effective way to publish quality content is to accept guest posts, albeit only from truly credible authors who are experts in their own field. This will reduce the load on your marketing team – all they’ll need to do is commission and edit incoming articles.
Additionally, exploring guest post sites can provide a wide pool of talented contributors ready to provide valuable content.
Start by creating your own guest posting guidelines. Answer these three key questions first:
- How many words are you looking for?
- Which topics are you looking to cover?
- What do the writers get from posting on your blog?
You can then either start reaching out to subject matter experts or promote your guidelines and advertise across social media and your newsletter that you are open for applications.
Make sure you only work with authors whose credentials you can check. Ask for portfolios and links to previously published work. Don’t work with aliases, and don’t work with people who are only looking to get a link to their own business or client.
Harness the Wisdom of the Crowd
Most sales funnels tend to be long and complex, taking up a lot of your time. As you need to find leads, qualify them, initiate communication, nurture and finally convert them, getting a single person to become a paying customer can take many, many hours. Sometimes, the time you spend on manual conversion coercion isn’t worth the actual ROI.
One way to reduce the length of a sale is to harness the power of social media. By creating a dedicated, knowledgeable community of users who all share the same passion, interests, or pain points, you can create an army of people who are ready to help new customers.
Of course, you’ll still need to be a part of the conversation, but you can rest assured there will be answers coming from people who are not on your payroll. It will reduce the time you need to spend onboarding new users, as well as the time your tech support spends answering questions.
Also remember that tools like VocalVideo can help with customer advocacy, giving you more ways to harness and distribute that all-important crowd-sourced wisdom and feedback to the benefit of your brand.
Monitor the activity in the community, and jump in whenever there is a need for your input. Thank those who are active and helpful, and always focus on the human touch rather than making a sale.
Aura has a Facebook group that does exactly that. They’ve grown a community of Amazon sellers who chat about all things FBA. Whether someone needs help using the brand’s repricer or wants to discuss more general Amazon questions, the members of this group are always ready to help each other.
They are also active themselves, and their company account is just as helpful as their users.
Image source: Goaura.com
Repurpose Existing Content
Most brands already have a content creation (and marketing) strategy in place. Most of these strategies will focus on creating new content in line with the brand’s goals and budget. However, as we already know just how expensive and time-consuming content creation can get, there’s a way to cut down on the time you spend coming up with something new.
Repurposing content allows you to turn something you already have into a fresh asset. As you’ve already done the research, all you need to do is repackage it and promote it through a different medium.
This can bring you plenty of new traffic and save you the time you would otherwise spend on a brand new piece. You can turn written content into a video or a series of slides utilizing a text to video generator, transcribe your video material and turn it into a post, or turn a conversation you’ve had on social media into an insightful article.
Copyblogger has done a great job in this regard: they have turned one of their blog posts into a slide deck, which has seen more traffic than the original article. This has certainly sent some valuable traffic their way, cutting down the time they would otherwise have needed to recruit the same level of interest.
Image source: Copyblogger.com
Make sure to carefully select the content you want to repurpose. It needs to both resonate with your audience and work well in the new format you intend to give it. Some topics will only work as a video – for example, if they are highly visual and require a step-by-step guide.
Enable Leads to Test Your Product Easily
Speaking of long sales cycles, you can leverage your website to shorten it in one more way. Make the entire sales process a lot more low-touch by allowing your users to test out the product without having to sign up for a free trial, arrange a live demo, or even place an order.
The shorter your funnel is, the easier it will be for you to convert your customers. The more time you need to demonstrate its value, the less time you will have for each individual customer.
Creating marketing materials that also include a demo of the product’s core functionality is a great way to save some sales and marketing time. The demo will help customers make an educated decision and understand why your offer is worth the price. As a result, you’ll definitely have a smaller influx of customer questions to answer.
Quetext has a functional product demo on their website, and they’re able to design their entire marketing strategy around it. They don’t need to focus on proving their point, as the demo does that for them. Instead, they can nurture their customer base and focus on product improvement and development rather than product demonstration.
Image source: Quetext.com
Automate as Many of Your Marketing Activities as Possible
Arguably the most straightforward way to save time on your digital marketing efforts is to automate as many of them as you possibly can. There are plenty of them that require minimal involvement on your part and will certainly benefit from an AI touch.
Drip campaigns, newsletters, cart abandonment emails, promotional messages, and email follow-ups can all be very easily automated. All you have to do is take the time to create the right kind of template and add as much personalization as you can to each individual message.
You can also automate your social media posting. While you will still need to respond to messages yourself, a clever tool can do the publishing for you. You can also set up alerts for all kinds of mentions and stay on top of the chatter on socials.
Performance marketing can also be automated to an extent through an ad management platform, these platforms help in managing all your Meta and Google campaigns from single dashboard.
Understanding the prevalence of click fraud in advertising campaigns is crucial to safeguarding your marketing budget. By incorporating DataDome into your marketing strategy allows for swift detection and fraud prevention on your campaigns. Keyword research and website audits can also be automated to a great extent, so your SEO will take up less time.
All you need to do is determine which tasks take up the most of your time and then find the right tool to automate them. Don’t try to automate anything that requires human decision-making or human creativity.
Final Thoughts
You don’t need to spend hours upon hours on digital marketing every day to see the kinds of results you’re looking for. With some clever time management, you can still have the time to invest in growth and expansion without neglecting a valuable marketing channel.
