Spring is Near – Let’s Get Marketing Organized!
It’s been tradition throughout the ages, Spring sparks us to turn our houses inside out, throw rugs over close-lines, and CLEAN. It’s so easy to let the clutter pile up in our personal lives, and undeniably, it also happens in our professional lives.
Marketers go through project after project like rapid fire, plow through umpteen revisions of a single marketing piece, and depending on the distribution channels, are swimming in asset versioning. This madness can often spiral out of control.
How are you to organize your brand’s marketing collateral? How can you make room for new creative projects and strategies? Here are some ideas to keep in mind this Spring season:
1. Cease hoarding projects—delegate! If you have a skilled team of individuals, spread the wealth and move some of those project folders that are cluttering your work area onto others’ desks (evil laugh). No, but really, having other people share more of your responsibilities will help you off-load. Now you can focus on backlogged projects that you have been wanting to tackle. Additionally, involving others in different aspects of your projects builds teamwork and collaboration, which will ultimately increase productivity when the right team members are included.
2. Archive old projects/collateral. We have a tendency to save everything to our desktops in haste so that it is easy to retrieve later – don’t go down that rabbit hole. Take a few hours to clear up your desktop by creating folders, and in those folders, archive folders. Being able to see the desktop wallpaper of your recent trip to the Grand Canyon is a good thing.
3. Find a Marketing Resource Management platform and don’t look back. Having an online marketing resource platform where you can load up all your marketing collateral and organize it via tagging structures, visibility dates, and filters will save hours of aimless searching on a weekly basis. Dig around and find a platform that fits your needs as an organization and see how quickly an MRM solution will help you organize and automate the different types of initiatives on your marketing calendar.
4. Update your websites. Content grows stale and moldy too. You may have a team of SEO experts and digital marketers to take care of this for you, but I can’t stress it enough – freshen up the content on your websites. Googlebots will crawl and index your site, which will boost your position in the search engine result pages, in turn helping your website gain more visibility and traffic. More traffic = more leads = more business. Win!
Adopting the tips above will help you remove daily clutter and regain some freshness, clarity, and a sense of renewal. That workspace reset will help you increase productivity and be a better marketer. These tactics should also expose some gaps or inefficiencies in processes that have been covered by the dirt and grime of disorganization. If you’re scared to take the full plunge of adopting all of the tips, just give one a try, I promise you will see the impact.