How are you going to increase your 28% today?

How are you going to increase your 28% today? I was reading a fascinating article recently in marketingmag.com.au, about how professionals in Australia and New Zealand spend on average 59 percent of their time doing low value tasks, and ultimately only 28 percent of their time doing the job they were hired to do. Amazingly, this is significantly better than the international average (way to go ANZ!), but still a colossal waste of time – just under 29 hours a week of relatively pointless activity (assuming any of us actually worked just 40 hours, of course).

What constitutes low value work though? It conjures up words like repetitive, laborious and meaningless. For us marketers though, that could cover anything that isn’t automated. We’ve all seen a campaign brief coming in at 4pm on a Friday (and with it a certain slump of our shoulders), meaning we’re going to have to work late, and more than just your weekend is going to be impacted, there’s a good chance the company’s reputation is going to suffer as well. Why could that be, you perhaps wonder? A friend of mine who is an excellent Campaign Manager did an analysis of a years’ worth of errors made within his team and found a surprising spike of problems found with marketing campaigns created or changed at the very end of a day. It’s easy to see why, 8+ hours of staring at screens results in tiredness, plain and simple, and fatigue leads to mistakes being made. We’re only human. The fix in their case was to ban any changes to a marketing campaign after 4pm. This new cut-off resulted in a 40% reduction in the error rate encountered.

Enter Marketing Automation, the ability to plan, execute, manage and measure your marketing activity as an up-front, strategic and scheduled activity. The beauty of Marketing Automation is, with a little bit of time invested up front to setup your marketing plans and strategy, your job changes from reactive to proactive, tactical to strategic. How great would it be for you to come into work and think to yourself “why don’t we target a new set of customers today”, work on it in the morning, and have it live in the afternoon? All more efficient, all leading to more profit and greater ROI for your company.

To make these dreams come true the industry leading tools on the market today (in alphabetical order) are Acoustic Campaign, Adobe Marketing Cloud, HCL Campaign, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Each have their pros and cons depending on what kind of organisation you are, what other technologies you already have. If you’re considering changing your marketing technology soon and want an honest assessment of what’s on the market, or if you’ve already chosen one and want a hand integrating or working with it, don’t hesitate to get in touch. Our expert consultants are ready to help, and what gets them out of bed in the morning is solving your problems.

If nothing else, consider this. How are you going to increase your 28% today?