Productivity is the buzzword we hear every other day. Businesses find it challenging to be productive in the digital marketing space. Modern studies show that an average employee’s productivity lasts 2 hours and 53 minutes during his 8-hour shift. They face distractions that affect work efficiency and become barriers to meeting targets.
However, using the right tools and tricks, including productivity hacks, can land you in a better place and elevate your efficiency. This article is a guide to help you learn the 11 best productivity tips for your digital agency. These practical tips will focus on a specific area based on your digital marketing disciples.
As a digital marketer, you must encourage your team to get the work done more efficiently. With the high influx of data comes higher expectations and multiple channels. Hence digital marketers and agencies must remain updated with the internal and external conditions to keep things moving. As the competition strengthens, brands find it difficult to grab attention.
Let’s explore further to learn some powerful hacks for productivity so your digital agency can seek more growth. “Many marketers struggle with finding and establishing a credible and authoritative voice for their brands and cutting through the noise to capture their target audience’s attention.” – Michael Brenner of Marketing Insider Group.
11 Best Productivity Tips for Your Digital Agency
1. Focus on essential tasks daily
A slight shift in focus can affect your efficiency as a digital marketer, so prioritizing the essential tasks and scheduling them according to relevancy and urgency will positively impact your productivity.
Manage your to-do list daily; list the top 3 tasks per their priority to attain better outcomes. Make sure you don’t procrastinate or leave aside essential assignments. Leaving aside specific unimportant tasks increases your focus and helps you take one critical task at a time. It’s better to single-task things than lose productivity by trying to multitask all the time.
2. Use the right platforms to save time
Advanced software helps you delegate tasks that become a barrier to time management and brain capacity. Several online solutions can manage your time and productivity, including electronic signatures for your contracts and agreements and facilitating social media management platforms. The world has turned into a global village, and you must run at the same pace as your competitors do – quicker and wiser.
Using the most efficient platforms lets you manage your content marketing efforts. Remember, the right decisions at the right time regarding which solutions to choose help you save a lot of time and increase your productivity levels.
3. Delegating tasks makes things simpler
Digital agencies experience similar circumstances in the beginning. You manage and run business operations singlehandedly and deliver much work by yourself. At times you have to go beyond your capacity or refuse potential clients. However, you must share the work with time and workload by onboarding a resource. And gradually, you start running a digital marketing agency.
Delegating tasks has significance for any small business. It could be onboarding some new resources or acknowledging which tasks to delegate later. A practical tip for increasing agency productivity could be: when you have a time-taking task that doesn’t involve your team’s efforts, take someone on board. You can find many platforms to outsource and make things easier.
4. Take breaks
Taking breaks might not sound practical, but it can significantly improve your productivity under modern research. You can take frequent breaks during working hours to maintain efficiency and resume afresh. It’s up to you to ensure how you manage breaks.
You can follow modern methods or time management rules, such as the Pomodoro Technique or the 90-minute Rule. The 90-minute rule says that you should take a break after working on a task for a maximum of 90 minutes. Free yourself physically and mentally from the assigned tasks and resume after 20 minutes. Try implementing a pattern, and you will experience a significant change in your brain efficiency levels.
5. Turn off email alerts
Checking email consumes a lot of time, and if it’s not too important, you can allocate only a couple of hours daily at peak times of the day. You can avoid distractions and constant notifications that might hinder your focus and productivity during critical working hours.
When you are constantly pinged to check emails, it deviates your attention from essential assignments. Hence you should be extra cautious while managing your daily tasks at work. Keep decluttering your email inbox and unsubscribing from unwanted email lists to keep the focus on emails that need your time and attention.
6. Ignore nonessential websites
Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube seem to be an exciting escape for taking a break, but they could become a blocker in managing our time effectively. We might realize later that a considerable amount of time goes away in nonproductivity. But the internet has got solutions for us.
Utilize browser add-ons like McAfee WebAdvisor and Priority Matrix for Edge to avoid distractions in unnecessary websites that affect your marketing activities. Once you develop this habit of blocking unwanted websites, you can push away the constant impulse to open Instagram or watch YouTube shorts.
7. Take benefit from price elasticity
This tip is not directly associated with productivity; instead, it has more to do with generating more revenue. It implies increasing your charges. The economic theory of price elasticity teaches you to increase your charges regularly, almost after every six months. It comes with several benefits.
Agency business is based on providing a valuable product, so it comes under inelasticity. If you’re offering value to your customers, they won’t bother with your upgraded charges. However, you must be mindful of your charges and ensure you’re offering the desired value against them. Your loyal clients will quickly pay you the desired charges to retain your business terms.
8. Work more during morning hours
We understand that being a morning person is not everyone’s cup of tea, but scientific research proves that our energy and productivity levels are the most active during morning hours, mainly before lunch. It gets slower by the afternoon as we experience lesser productivity and slow task delivery.
Hence, it gives us a practical hint to schedule our most challenging and demanding tasks right after breakfast. We are the most energetic and motivated during early morning hours and eventually get more work in lesser time. By practicing this tip, we can be more productive and increase our happiness levels.
9. Identify where your results come from.
The 80/20 Rule states that 80% of the outcomes are generated from 20% of the input. Another name for this rule is the Pareto principle. From your digital marketing agency perspective, it could imply that 80% of your profits can be earned from 20% of your tasks. It can also mean that 80% of your work efficiency depends on 20% of your daily efforts.
To accelerate your digital agency’s productivity, implement the 20% through assignments, customers, and time that generate outcomes. Revisit your business to make space for more effective options.
10. Big team doesn’t mean more extensive results
Onboarding more people into your team is not directly proportional to better productivity. Large teams do not necessarily mean more significant results. It could even show a decline, at least in the initial phase. It applies to our profits as well. Keeping a minor team has a unique value; as Paul Jarvis says in his book, your business is more elegant when smaller. It’s usually more productive per employee as well.
To grow your agency, ensure you fully acknowledge the changes in the team’s productivity and habits. It could result in better or could experience loss too.
11. Keep the focus intact
How do you manage waking up to a list of Slack alerts, dozens of unread emails, and back-to-back phone calls? Doesn’t this sound too unorganized? How can you retain focus on your work when you have a constant flooding of unwanted pings and notifications?
The right solution to this barrier is focus and intent. Establishing a high-earning and productive digital agency with the most returning customers demands uninterrupted focus. It means taking out your laptop, putting notifications on mute, and focusing on high-priority tasks until they are finished. No social media, browsing, emails, and Slack is running in the background.
Your best bet is to focus on your official tasks to achieve more returns.
Key Takeaway
Running a digital marketing agency can be bumpy, but the right tips followed at the right time can return maximum benefits. By implementing the tips mentioned above, time management rules, automation techniques, and working as a team, you can organize your marketing tasks and keep things more accessible for everyone. Use digital tools in a streamlined way to get better results and stay updated with current trends and market competition.