Marketers and business owners: how organised is your marketing, really?

Do you feel as though you’re in control of your marketing, or has your marketing overgrown and gone rabid, wild, wont to its own desires?

Don’t panic, I’ll cover everything you need to get on top of your marketing.

Before I start, let’s dive into why keeping your marketing organised is so important.

Firstly, organising your marketing can give you peace of mind and security, so you’re safe in the knowledge that everything is going to plan, and that you know where everything you need is stored.

Keeping your mental health in check is fundamental to having a successful business -- if your headspace isn’t right, your work won’t be.

While it’s certainly not a miracle cure for mental health issues, organising your marketing can still reduce your stress levels, helping you to approach your marketing in more bitesize, easy-to-manage portions.

Secondly, when your marketing is organised, you can start to market more reactively.

Proactive marketing is organised marketing -- planning our your campaigns, scheduling your time and activities in advance.

Reactive marketing is a more ad hoc, spur-of-the-moment type of marketing, and some of the most successful and more memorable marketing activities are reactive, like this:

According to The Drum, Burger King UK’s “salty response” is the most-liked brand tweet ever.

Considering it took them 3 minutes to think of a response, that’s not bad!

This is the epitome of reactive marketing - making sure you keep your ear to the ground and striking while the iron is glowing white-hot.

Burger King UK has an internal marketing team (that is, they don’t outsource their marketing to an agency), and in order to score a perfect marketing goal like this, you know that they’re organised with their marketing.

Finally, organised marketing allows you to more effectively manage your time -- if you’re a solopreneur, for example, marketing is not everything that you do, so you need to make sure that you have time for everything else with your business: finances, sales, creating your product, customer service, admin… the list goes on, as I’m sure you know.

But organised marketing is not just for solopreneurs -- time management is imperative to all of us -- full-time marketers, creatives, agencies, brand ambassadors, startup owners, all of us can benefit from organised marketing.

While it’s true that there’s no ‘one way’ to organise your marketing, there are a few key concepts that you should follow -- and since I’ve been in the biz for a fair few years, I’ve picked up a few hints and tricks that I can’t wait to share with you.

So let’s get to it.

Schedule, schedule, schedule

You need to schedule.

I can’t stress it enough.

Scheduling is imperative to effective marketing, and to the growth of your brand.

Aim to schedule as much as possible at least a month in advance, even if it’s just the idea and not the actual written or produced piece of marketing.

Set yourself deadlines.

I know that the word ‘deadlines’ instills an instant fear in a lot of you, but it needn’t -- deadlines are our friends.

They help us to manage tasks more efficiently.

After all, there’s no such thing as absolute perfection, only the best at that moment -- and that’s a lot of what marketing is: a journey of constant improvement.

Deadlines and schedules keep us in check, and remind us that, as depressing as this sounds, time is finite.

Your marketing has to keep within the boundaries of time.

You cannot bend time to suit your marketing, you can only work within its restraints.

As a full-time marketer and Marketing Lead at NSC, I use schedules daily: for emails, social media posts, blog articles, keeping track of design assets, meetings, and my own daily, weekly and monthly tasks.

There’s no limit to what schedules you can have, either -- you can tweak your own schedules to suit you.

Don’t forget to embrace the deadlines.

Filing

I’m at something of an advantage here, because I love filing -- to me, it’s just an extension of stationery as a whole, and there’s nothing more I love in the world that stationery (sorry, Dean).

Filing everything away in a logical way means that I can easily find whatever I’m looking for 99% of the time -- the other 1% is usually because someone else has filed something in my folder and labelled it differently.

I use Google Drive for all of my filing, and I absolutely love it.

To clarify, I have no affiliation with Google at all, but because the Drive was so effective at what it was designed to do, I even ended up swapping my dependence on iPhones to my beloved Google Pixel.

Google Drive means that I can work from pretty much anywhere, as long as I have an internet connection to save my work.

Filing is something very personal, so what works for me may not work for you.

The only advice I can give you is to have a filing system and to stick to it.

And to use Google Drive.

Task management

The final part of the organised marketing trifecta is task management.

Task management is a term that’s thrown around a lot in business, but what does it actually mean?

According to ProjectManager.com, task management is “a process where one identifies, monitors and progresses the work that needs to be done during the day.”

However, I tend to take that further -- task management may not necessarily just be to monitor your work for the day, but for the week, month, year, project, campaign, product… however you work best.

Task management bottles down to time management.

You can’t manage tasks effectively if you can’t manage time effectively.

Personally, I love a good checklist -- the satisfaction of ticking off a task is incomparable.

My task and time management processes pretty much come down to three things:

• Emails
  I file my emails a certain way, flagging them when I need to action them, and allotting specific times during the day where I’ll look at my emails, and other specific times when I’ll actually go through them. 

  I understand the temptation to immediately respond to or action an email as soon as it comes through, but that’s just not efficient -- you’ll keep losing the flow of your work, and you’ll never get into the nitty-gritty details.

  I can’t recommend this approach enough: allocate time to go through your emails!

• Calendar
  I started a new way of using my calendar a couple of months ago, and I haven’t looked back.

  It sounds a tad on the extreme side, but it’s honestly helping me to get the most out of my time -- both personal and professional.

  I block out time for everything: exercise, getting ready for work, walking to work, checking my emails, campaign planning, writing campaign emails… all the way through to writing for this blog, reading, and sleeping.

  It sounds restrictive, but it’s oddly liberating; realising how much time I actually have in the day to get things done has made me so much more productive.

  Give it a go, and let me know how you get on.

• Google Drive

  It’s been barely five minutes since I hyped up Google Drive, so it’s time to sing its praises yet again.

  Google Drive is the ultimate task management tool -- sure, specific tools like Asana and Trello are great, but Google Drive can do everything that they do, and more.

  For example, I use schedules in Google Sheets to assign different tasks to members of the NSC team, so I know who’s working on what, and can easily keep track of their progress.

  I also use Google Docs to write everything -- blog articles, website copy, email drafts, social media posts, design briefs -- because I can tag people who need to have an input into what I’m writing, or who need to create design assets based on what I’m writing.

  Once more for the people at the back: get Google Drive!

Organising hints and tips

• Split tasks by individual campaigns, with checklists, so everything gets covered

• Use your previous figures to help plan campaigns

• Colour coding can be handy, but don’t let it take too much time -- it’s not actually worth it.

• Be honest with your schedule and your calendar -- there’s no shame in dedicating time just for you: you deserve it.

• Do your best to stick to your schedule. If you know something’s likely to take longer than you anticipated, shift things around. Or if something changes, make the change in your schedule.

• Use the same words to describe your processes and tasks, so you know exactly what each thing is. If you refer to something as a brochure, programme and guide, you’re going to cause confusion in your team. Agree on your terminology.

As creative legend and organisational superstar, Douglas Davis, says, in his book Creative Strategy and the Business of Design:

“Order leads to clarity.
Clarity leads to inspiration."
Inspiration leads to solution.”

Those are my basics on organising your marketing.
If you have any handy hints and tips, or organising techniques that you’ve tried, get in touch, I’d love to hear from you!