You are wasting a lot of time at work

In our day-to-day lives as marketers, we usually spend too much time working, and still, we don’t manage to meet some of our deadlines. Those 7 or 8 hours in front of the computer are not enough, and we don’t know why. So you ask yourself: where do we lose time on our workday?

However, in Digital Marketing, there are some tasks that we can’t avoid and that make us lose immense time:

• Reporting: this is the main activity that we, Digital Marketing professionals, SEOs, and Community Managers have. If you are a freelancer, you probably send reports to your clients. If you are part of an agency team, you have to create reports for everything. There are as many reports to deliver as there are social platforms: TikTok, Google Analytics, Meta, etc.
• Email management: according to the McKinsey Global Institute analysis, a worker spends an estimated 28% of the workweek managing email. And unfortunately, most of the e-mails received are either junk, or not relevant. On the other hand, checking for new messages takes our focus away from the task at hand, and this lowers our work productivity.
• Customer Onboarding: this is simply tedious. Many of our customers need personalized assistance for onboarding. This requires not only patience, but also time. Valuable time.

• Calls and meetings: whether with customers or even between colleagues in the marketing team, calls sometimes take longer than they should – which is normal, as they are not always “straight to the point”. According to statistics from Tameday, 15% of a company’s time is spent on meetings and similar activities.

Unfortunately, these tasks are as necessary as they are unproductive and represent 65% of our time (RRHH Digital). We cannot avoid them, but we can optimize them. The solution for time optimization is to take effective CRM into your hands.

How to optimize time using a CRM

Despite being popular among sales teams, implementing a CRM in digital marketing has a myriad of benefits. Today, they are a necessary tool for optimizing our time.

When you get to take advantage of its functionalities, it will help you to be more productive. Here are 3 ways to save time with a CRM for digital marketing:

1. Automate all repetitive tasks
2. Set up specific actions and rules
3. Avoid meaningless meetings

1) Automate all repetitive tasks

Automation saves time and, fortunately, most CRMs allow us to automate some tasks:

Reporting: there are CRMs that generate reports automatically, according to the parameters that we specify. These can be error reports, or simply reports that highlight the progress of a specific campaign. This saves us a lot of time, as not only will we be aware of any problems, but we can also send interim reports to our clients.

Automated payment collection: you’re a digital marketer, but you still need to handle your own accounting. A CRM designed for marketers has the functionality to automatically collect payments and create invoices. Like Meta’s platform, for example, the CRM allows you to view month-to-month billing, letting you download invoices automatically. A CRM can help you avoid missing invoices or, better still, send them directly to customers on the date you set.

2) Set up specific actions and rules

Another way to save time on tasks is to instruct your CRM on what actions to take based on the parameters you specify:

Optimize email communication: create rules to allocate incoming messages to the most accurate person for that situation. Imagine that a client has just hired a social media service. You can associate it with the community manager who is running their account. 

Set up important notifications: many alerts take our focus away from what we are doing at the moment, and most of the time these notifications are not important. A complete CRM allows you to create specific rules so that you are alerted only to the things that matter to you:

• Know when a client’s campaign isn’t running
• Notice when a keyword is not working
• Be notified when a client is running out of budget

3) Avoid meaningless meetings

Unnecessary meetings are a silent evil, both among team members and with customers. But even worse are those meetings that are necessary, but unproductive. Using a CRM, you can save yourself from these 5-minute calls, which eventually consume an hour of your time:

Assign tasks and track time spent: many team leads love to have DAILY meetings to see the progress of the team. This is a huge waste of time. A CRM designed especially for marketers will give the advantage of assigning tasks, clarifying priorities and above all: tracking the progress of each member of the team.

Fast onboarding: forget about time-consuming customer meetings just for the sake of onboarding. Take advantage of CRMs like Octoki, which simplifies the process by reducing the time to a 5-minute onboarding. 

Summing up

You work a lot, but it does not mean you are getting your work done. Take advantage of the benefits of a CRM to make your freelance work easier or to get the best out of your team and stop wasting time on tasks.

You don’t need to spend a lot of money to buy a CRM. There are cheaper alternatives to Pipedrive, or alternatives that are more complete than HubSpot and that were created specifically for those who work in Digital Marketing (and not just sales )