Note: This is a repost from a guest post on Zapier's blog.
Efficiency as a marketer is key in the age where content is king and the need for quick iteration is paramount. We as marketers are always spread a bit too thin—churning out blog posts, enacting retargeting campaigns, making demo videos, and meeting with our sales team to go over SLA’s are all in a day'shour's work. And further, since so much of being a marketer is a creative pursuit, we need to be more guarded with our time than most to ensure we have enough energy left to churn out that new sexy infographic.
We take productivity very seriously at HubSpot—so much so that our informal company motto is "Get Sh*t Done." Everyone has their own hacks for how to eek out that extra mile from our day, but there are some methods that are tried and true for certain efficiency challenges marketers face.
Hold Office Hours
One consistent constraint on all marketers is how many meetings we're expected to attend. The marketing team sits between many facets of any business, making demand for our time very high. If you let it, your calendar can spiral out of control, filling up with meeting after meeting. Holding office hours is a great way to make yourself available on your own schedule, by blocking off a few hours a week that members of your organization can book with you. They also gives you the ability to dictate how your day is structured, and allow you to timebox your day for the bigger, more creative deliverables that you just need to get done.
Internally, a few of us use Ohours to manage our office hours, but I've also heard great things about YouCanBook.me and Google Calendar Appointment Slots. The important thing is to make sure your team adheres to your office hours whatever you pick.
Use a News Aggregator
The accelerated rate of change in the digital marketing space poses an interesting conundrum—we thrive off of the changing landscape of our field, but keeping up with all of the latest news can be exhausting, and consume a lot of our day. Remember when native advertising was just a cute little channel in it's infancy? Remember when black hat SEO was just the cost of doing business to get found through organic search? These things really didn't happen that long ago, but it certainly feels like it—such is life as a marketer in the digital age.
The best way to stay on top of all of these changes is to bring all of them into one place. News aggregators are out there in droves, but the best of the bunch is feedly, who's omnipresence amongst all of your devices means that you'll be able to catch up on the latest news and thought leadership wherever and whenever you want. I mean, who wouldn't want Rand Fishkin, Seth Godin, and David Meerman Scott all in one place?
Write with Focus
When it comes time to write a blog post, you've got to make sure that you are laser-focused. It's important to approach content creation not only in terms of the problem that you are trying to solve for the reader, but also who they are and what they'll find the most engaging. Without that holistic focus, you'll feel lost and disconnected from your audience, which is far from a recipe for delivering great content.
Some of this focus comes from preparation, but a lot of that it can be made easier with tooling. Draft and Editorially are great writing tools that shift the attention from all of the bells and whistles of word processing to the simplicity in order to let your words flow. These tools are great for giving you the bare essentials you need to get your blog post done, and as a bonus, they allow you to collaborate effectively on what you've written with your team. Leave your Google Spreadsheet or Evernote for brainstorming blog topics, and use one of these two for the actual content creation.
Limit Jumping Around from Tool to Tool
There are a lot of great marketing tools out there, many of which were just featured on this blog. All of these tools are extremely valuable for a marketer but there is one important caveat to them: switching between them can be costly and time-consuming. It's ambitious to leverage the best of what's out there, and in many cases doing so is a productivity killer. Think about how many times you've moved into your inbox to grab a quick attachment and spent the next half hour going down a rabbit hole of email chains and hipster dog memes. This problem is even more pronounced for marketers given the complexity of each of our tools.
That is why services like Zapier, which makes the legwork of moving back and forth between your disparate marketing systems automated, and HubSpot, which integrates many of your marketing tools under a single roof, are so valuable. Your software stack should be working for you, not the other way around.
That's why today we're proud to announce our partnership with our friends at Zapier to bring the Zapier service into HubSpot at no cost to our customers. If you're a HubSpot customer, you can find Zapier in your account here. If you're not, feel free to hop over to the HubSpot blog to learn more. The ultimate goal of the partnership is to make our mutual customers the most productive they can be by tying together all of the tools that they use without ever having to leave HubSpot.
If you've been around marketing for long enough, you know that the old adage "less is more" is true for your audience. Why say in ten words what you could say in 3? Why send 5 drip emails if 2 will suffice? But we're slower to realize that this is true for our productivity as well. The less we have to worry about, the more we're able to produce the quality content and campaigns that really move the needle forward on our businesses. And the quicker we can do that, the more we'll be able to hone our craft. And watch kitty videos.
