As a marketer, I'm sure you've got an endless list of things to do.
Or maybe you get distracted by new marketing strategies you want to try.
But with so many things to do, and so little time, how do you prioritize your marketing
efforts for maximum effectiveness and efficiency?
You're about to find out in this video.
Stay tuned.
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What's up marketers?
Sam Oh here with Ahrefs, the SEO tool that helps you grow your search traffic,
research your competitors and dominate your niche.
If you're unfamiliar with our company, we're a team of around 50 people with just 9 in marketing.
Now, to put this into perspective, our competitors have 300% to 1300% times more bodies than us.
Yet somehow, we've still been able to make noise
and grow our revenue in a competitive industry.
So today, I want to share a step-by-step process you can use
to prioritize your marketing efforts effectively and efficiently.
Let's get to it.
Alright, so step #1 is to remove distractions that hinder efficiency.
Listen, if there's anything you do throughout your workday that decreases your efficiency,
then it's best to remove them from your daily schedule.
For example, if you check your Google Analytics everyday with the purpose of eyeballing traffic stats,
then I'm almost positive you're wasting precious time.
I can't tell you how many people I've spoken to
who start freaking out because of one slightly lower day in traffic.
If that worries you, then it'll most likely affect your performance in a negative way.
Let me explain.
Let's say you saw a couple days where your traffic decreased by 10%.
This may lead you to believe you've been penalized.
So you go and search for the latest Google algorithm updates
and find out that something happened a few months ago.
So you start reading about penalty recovery.
And you spend hours trying to implement tactics that people are just speculating.
And before you know it, your whole day has passed
and you haven't touched a single thing on your to-do list.
So stop.
Other common activities are checking your social media networks for likes, follows, retweets, or comments.
Yes, it's important to engage if you're using these channels, but your social presence isn't
going to die if you don't respond within an hour.
Limit these kinds of impromptu activities and set scheduled times to analyze your analytics.
You'll find yourself saving time and more importantly, staying in the right mindset
while working on tasks that matter more.
Finally, don't allow yourself to get distracted by "Shiny tactic syndrome."
This is when you hear about a new tactic, and you drop everything you're doing
to give it a shot, only to abandon it halfway through.
So bottomline:
You don't need to be active on every social media network because a guru told you to.
You don't need to check your real-time stats on Google Analytics every 4 hours.
Not everyone needs a mobile app.
And you don't need to respond to every email within 5-minutes flat.
Life will go on.
Alright, now that we've cut some distractions, step 2 is to figure out what's working for you.
Rather than letting FOMO kick in and dropping everything you're doing, this step is all about
identifying the marketing channels and strategies that are working for you right now.
And the way you do this is by separating these marketing activities into three categories.
Category one are channels and strategies that are already working for you.
And by "working," I'm referring to generating more customers to your business
over vanity metrics like pageviews.
Rather than guessing, this is where you need to do a deep dive into your data sources.
So that might be looking at your Google Analytics conversion rate or new customer sign-ups.
If you don't have conversion tracking set up, another great way to dig up this information
is to do one-on-one calls or emails with customers.
You can ask them questions like:
How did you learn about us?
And what made you purchase our products or services?
If you have a decent sample size of customers, I'm confident you'll start seeing patterns
and be able to identify your core marketing channels.
An example for us, would be our blog and YouTube channel, which we use to educate current
and prospective customers on SEO-related topics.
These are two marketing channels where we spend a ton of our time, resources, and focus
simply because they work.
The second category are things that don't work.
And by not working, I'm referring to things you've actually given a fair shot.
Write down these activities and remove them from your workflow.
And the third category are channels and strategies you'd like to try.
A good way to do this is to have a running list of brainstormed ideas.
You can do this easily using Trello, where anyone can add new ideas, and casually discuss
different opinions or approaches within the cards.
I cannot stress how important it is that you're able to identify activities
that are proven to deliver ROI.
Because if you focus your attention on unproven activities, it'll eat into time and money
you could have spent on doing something more profitable.
Alright, step #3 is to delegate critical tasks you don't need to be involved in or share
the workload with more capable team members.
Let's say you did an SEO audit on your website.
You may be the best person to identify issues and prioritize what needs to be fixed.
But you don't need to be involved in fixing every little thing.
For example, if you find some missing meta descriptions,
you don't need to be the person to write all of these.
You also don't need to update them on the site.
While the tasks may be small, they add up and affect your mental capacity to focus on
other tasks that require your expertise.
The way to solve this is to break your critical tasks into bite-sized pieces and delegate where possible.
For example, if you're like us and create blog content, you need to do your keyword research
write your blog post, edit it, create a featured image, and then upload everything to WordPress.
Then you probably share everything on social media and write up an email for your newsletter.
If you're doing all of these activities, then my guess is that you're doing too much.
And this isn't a compliment.
It's inefficient and for the most part, ineffective.
Let's look at this list and break it down.
Keyword research can easily be systematized.
In fact, we have videos on how to do keyword research where you can literally copy our process.
As for editing posts, I think every writer should do it to a certain extent.
But after writing for hours upon hours, you're eventually going to become blind to errors.
At Ahrefs, we have Josh, who's our head of content.
Anytime someone writes a post for our blog, he's the one who's going to edit and provide feedback.
Then it goes back to the author, who's responsible for amending the fixes.
Josh will then do a final edit and publish the article.
So what about when Josh writes a post?
How do we ensure his content is the best that it can be?
I edit it and provide feedback.
This editing and review process allows us to always put our best foot forward without burning anyone out.
Next on the list is creating featured images.
This one is simple.
If you're the writer, don't create them.
Instead, create a detailed description of what you'd like to see and send it to a designer.
We have an awesome designer on our marketing team, but we still occasionally send these
to a freelancer when our internal designer is bogged down with more critical tasks.
Now, we need to upload everything to WordPress.
And since we work primarily in Google Docs, we actually use a tool called Wordable,
which exports Google Docs straight into WordPress.
Since it doesn't take very much time using this tool, we normally have Josh, who does
the final edits to send them to WordPress.
Ok, so maybe you don't have a huge budget to pay people salary.
But you can use networks like Upwork or Fiverr to work with contractors on a per-job basis.
A simple way to know whether it's worth hiring is to put a monetary value on your time.
Now, it's important to note that you need to somewhat objectively decide your monetary value.
So if you had a gig where you spent 1 hour, and you made a thousand bucks,
it doesn't mean you're worth $1,000/hour.
Just be honest.
So let's say you think your time is worth $30/hour.
And it takes you about an hour to upload your document to WordPress
and make sure there aren't any errors.
Now, if we look on Upwork using the keyword, "Wordable," you'll see a couple of potential
prospects who have mentioned it in their profile.
And it looks like this person might be good to try
who may be able to do your job at 4X less than your personal hourly rate.
But you should always trial and make sure they can deliver the quality you're looking for.
Let's move onto step 4, which is to document your micro tasks and delegate some more.
When I first started creating videos for Ahrefs' YouTube channel,
I was asked to "create awesome educational content."
So for the first little while, I did almost everything:
сontent ideation, scripting, recording, producing, editing,
closed captions, writing descriptions and tags, thumbnails, uploading,
social media scheduling, and responding to comments.
But as time went on, I was able to start training and delegating tasks
to other people on our team who are more capable.
And even though we've lost some people throughout my time here, onboarding new talent has been
a cinch because of solid documentation.
We have detailed documentation on all of the effects we use in our video editing programs.
We have a video on doing the closed captions for our videos.
We have a document for doing translations of our closed captions.
And another document for how we write our YouTube descriptions.
These are all micro tasks that used to overwhelm me.
But with our video team handling small tasks here and there, they've made my life easier,
and our videos a lot better.
Document your micro tasks and delegate appropriately.
And the result should be more output and better focus in the areas where you're most effective.
With your documentation in place, you should be able to find people who can help you complete
more work in less time.
So it's time to move on to step 5, which is to scale what you're doing.
To illustrate my point, when I was creating videos for our YouTube channel, I was producing
a maximum of one video per week.
After our team started taking on these micro-tasks, I can put out around 2-3 videos
in the same amount of time.
So to scale this process even further, it's simple.
Identify bottlenecks and breakthrough by modifying processes or hiring additional help.
This is something we're doing right now and it's allowed me to allocate more time to other
marketing channels and projects outside of weekly YouTube videos.
For example, I've been able to speak at conferences.
Get YouTube Ads to work for us.
And provide some training to others in our group like our outreach manager,
who's absolutely crushing it right now.
Had I continued to try and run YouTube all alone, none of this would have been possible.
Let's move on to step 6, and that's to experiment with new things.
If you've been following Ahrefs for some time, then you know this guy: Tim Soulo.
He joined Ahrefs four years ago as pretty much the only person on the marketing team.
He handled the blog and YouTube channel, hired new people to the marketing team,
trained them, and contributed to the development of our product.
And it wasn't until last year when he was able to let go of these two channels he had
built to people like Josh and I.
So this year, Tim has been able to speak at a lot more conferences, contribute more time
to the product, and be on over 20 podcasts in the last 4 months among many other things.
And as we continue to experiment with new channels, we're just going to rinse and repeat
steps 1 through 5 focusing on only the things that are working for us and the low-hanging fruit.
Now, I'd love to hear from you.
This video was clearly outside of what we generally publish on our YouTube channel,
so if you want to see more content like this, let me know in the comments.
And of course, make sure to like, share and subscribe
for more actionable SEO and marketing tutorials.
So keep grinding away, focus and scale what's working right now, and I'll see you in the next video.