How To Increase The Efficiency of Your Marketing

Now more than ever, when we want things, we typically want them then and there, our industry and our businesses are no different. Of course, when it comes to digital marketing your strategies and campaigns are likely to take time to come to fruition. That’s just the nature of what we do as marketers. However, there are some ways to improve the efficiency of how you carry out your responsibilities. 

Being able to quickly conduct your marketing initiatives is a skill that often comes with experience and practice. With that said, even the most seasoned marketers should be striving for improvement, and marketing efficiency should be on the list of priorities. 

With many businesses going hybrid or working from home completely, now should be a good time to review the efficiency of your marketing and identify new opportunities for improvement. If you’re new to the marketing scene, or you’ve been in the industry a while, here are our top tips for improving the efficiency of your marketing. 

What is Marketing Efficiency?

Before we jump into our top tips, let’s first identify what we mean when we refer to ‘marketing efficiency’. The word efficiency means the same here as it would across any other industry. To perform efficiently; is to deliver your work in a way that achieves maximum productivity with minimum wasted efforts or expense. Marketing efficiency is the term given to describe the relationship between your marketing inputs and the consequential marketing outputs. 

As you’re likely already familiar with, marketing inputs can vary greatly. In the context we’re looking at, a marketing input could be time, monetary spend or other resources. Your marketing output will be the desired results of these inputs, to make this clearer, let’s look at a couple of examples:

If we were looking at a PPC Campaign we’d highlight the budget as the input and the no. of conversions as the primary output. An efficient PPC campaign would utilise less of the budget for the best possible return on your investment. 

Another example could be in relation to content marketing where your input would likely be time with a possible output being generating new traffic. However, we wouldn’t just evaluate the copywriting time, we’d look at planning, proofing, and publishing. 

This exercise should help you identify potential bottlenecks in your marketing processes which can then form a part of your efficiency plan.  

Why does marketing efficiency matter?

So why does the efficiency of your marketing even matter? Well, that sounds quite silly as a question in itself doesn’t it? In marketing, and in fact any business out there, they will have commitments and targets to improve the efficiency of each department or function of the brand. The more efficient a brand can be, the more resources can be saved.

There is a clear relationship between marketing efficiency and return on your investment. Marketing efficiency focuses on achieving smaller spend or great savings for the same results. This is a goal that businesses from various sectors and markets will share, although each one will have its measurables. 

At a time when only 22% of marketers are satisfied with their current conversion rates, now is the time to reevaluate the efficiency of your marketing. Below we’ve outlined 10 actionable top tips to make your marketing more efficient. 

Essential Strategies for Improving Digital Marketing Efficiency

1. Revisit Your Marketing Goals
2. Regularly Audit Your Content
3. Build or Update Your Personas
4. Reevaluate Your Products and Services
5. Plot Your RACI Matrix
6. Streamline Your Approval Process
7. Keep Your Marketing Meetings Productive
8. Make Use of Collaboration Tools
9. Clean-Up Your CRM
10. Partner With a Marketing Agency

1) Revisit Your Marketing Goals

Time and time again we hear from brands that they can’t recall the last time they reviewed their own marketing goals. Too often goal-setting is a set-it-and-forget-it exercise which leads to a lack of focus and direction for your marketing strategy. One of the first steps to achieving optimal marketing efficiency is revisiting your marketing goals and objectives. 

Without a clear goal in mind, you could end up wasting precious resources producing content or running a campaign. To maximise the efficiency of your time and efforts you need to ensure that each project or campaign fits into your overarching strategy. By doing so, you can guarantee that each of your actions directly contributes to achieving your wider marketing and business goals. 

If you’re still not sure, communicate with the rest of your team or stakeholders to make certain you’re aligned. 

2) Regularly Audit Your Content

This one is not the most desirable activity we have to do as marketers but it’s a job that must be done. Regularly auditing your content means you’ll build a form of catalogue that organises all of your brand’s content. Primarily, content audits are used to ensure there isn’t any repetition and to identify pieces that require an update. This will save you time digging through your website or wasting time on content you’ve already created. 

In the context of improving your marketing efficiency, your content audit will be a good tool to add to your arsenal. 

Your audit will support you to effectively repurpose, repackage and redistribute your content. When your audit is complete, you’ll have an overview of the content required to create heftier content offerings such as an eBook. In addition to this, your audit will enable you to quickly identify gaps in your content and help shortcut planning processes. 

3) Build or Update Your Personas

A persona is a semi-fictitious representation of your business’s ideal customer. The purpose of buyer personas is to enable you to target your messages to resonate with your target market. In addition to nailing your brand communications, the insights derived from persona research should ultimately inform your marketing strategy. 

So how do personas improve marketing efficiency? Well, they support your decision-making processes by providing you with evidence about your target market. Your buyer personas will help confirm whether your marketing strategy is the right fit for your audience. This will mitigate the risk of wasting time and budget via misdirected decision-making. 

If you haven’t already got a set of personas for your brand, we’ve got just the tool. We’ve created a handy downloadable template to help kickstart the process. You can download it below. 

4) Reevaluate Your Products and Services

Reevaluating your products and services essentially involves getting to know them better. Granted, this one will be more straightforward for businesses that have a significantly smaller collection on offer. 

Nevertheless, by building your understanding of your service or product offering you’ll be better equipped to sell it. I know this doesn’t come under the traditional role of a marketer but bear with me.

If you can grasp the unique selling points of your products you’ll be able to identify how this connects with the pain points and challenges of your target audience. By formulating a stronger understanding of this relationship, you can improve the way you communicate with your market. Improved messaging will help generate stronger results off the back of the same input. 

It’ll also save you time by removing the need to research a product every time you wish to talk about it.

5) Plot Your RACI Matrix

A RACI Matrix, also known as a responsibility assignment matrix helps you do just that; assign responsibilities. The RACI matrix is often used to support project management but it can definitely support your marketing too. 

As you probably know, so much time and energy are wasted when too many cooks enter the kitchen. The RACI matrix will clarify employee roles and responsibilities that relate to your marketing. Helping to relieve any disruptions and mitigate disorganisation. The RACI matrix is broken down as follows:

• Responsible
• Accountable
• Consulted
• Informed

You can put this table together in a simple spreadsheet or in your task management platform. It should list all stakeholders on a project and their level of involvement in each task. 

6) Streamline Your Approval Process

This one is closely linked to the previous top tip. A lot of time can be wasted waiting around for the approval of your marketing initiatives. Work with your team to define who really needs to be involved in the approval process and then hash out a plan that works for those parties. 

This should ensure clear communication and smooth workflows across your marketing teams and others who may be involved. 

7) Keep Your Marketing Meetings Productive

Meetings can run over, they can feel like they’re leading into a meeting about a meeting for the meeting. We get it. Your marketing meetings should be an uninterrupted time for you to discuss or present your agenda in front of those who need to be consulted. 

To make the most efficient use of your time, create a clear agenda, minimise opportunities to go off-topic, and maintain focus throughout. By the end of the meeting, your team should feel well-informed and each member should have a clear goal or action with an assigned timeframe. 

P.S, it’s not mean or rude to not invite those who don’t need to be there, in fact, your colleagues will probably thank you for it. 

8) Make Use of Your Collaboration Tools

Since the pandemic, the tools we use every day have evolved their collaboration functions. When it comes to marketing software and tools, it’s very rare to find one that doesn’t accommodate teamwork. 

Collaboration functions can hugely impact the efficiency of your marketing as they can help you get the job done quickly without being disrupted. Most tools will enable you to grant your colleagues access to work on something together or simply view it and add feedback. 

Of course, emails still deserve a place in our workplaces but collaborative tools can really have a positive impact on how you communicate and work with your team. 

9) Clean Up Your CRM

We’re all guilty of this one, again it’s not the most glamorous marketing task but it needs doing. Today, customer relationship management systems are indispensable for businesses of varying scales and types. However, for you to get the most out of your CRM, you need to keep your data clean and organised. 

Businesses equipped with a CRM like HubSpot, will collect and store customer data for future purposes. Modern CRMs enable the data to be accessed by various departments across your business including your department; marketing. 

Organised data can help drive meaningful conversations with your prospects, leads and customers. For you specifically, it can help push contextual conversations that help accelerate the buyer’s journey. However, over time CRM databases become littered with errors, and inconsistencies causing issues for all parties. 

In order to maintain high-impact interactions and engagement you need to utilise your customer data. Don’t let your data become obsolete!

10) Partner With a Marketing Agency

If you’re a one-man-band or a small marketing department with limited resources then you could benefit from the support of an external team. Performing efficiently can feel like an impossibility for teams who don’t have the tools or time to do the job effectively. Too often, internal marketing departments are stretched too thin, creating an environment for burnout, lapses in creativity, and unmotivated exercises. 

By partnering with a marketing agency, your team will get the support it needs to generate impactful results for your business. Splitting the workload into digestible pieces enables you to plan, time manage and really focus on your prioritised actions. Now that’s what we call true marketing efficiency!

Digital Marketing at Loop Digital

At Loop Digital we specialise in providing powerful and affordable digital marketing services to businesses across the UK. We strive to support solo marketing professionals and smaller teams to achieve their goals with our bespoke marketing solutions. 

Whether you need support for an upcoming marketing project or you’re looking for a long-term marketing partner, we’re here. We’ll work with you to build a plan that’s right for you and your business get in touch with our team today to find out more.