The 5 Biggest Marketing Time Wasters

It is ridiculously easy to waste time.

This is especially true if you work online. There are so many potential distractions that it’s almost impossible to stay focused.

So, how can we avoid these hazards and get our work done? We can start by taking a look at the five biggest marketing time wasters.

1) Getting Bogged Down in Technology

CRMs, analytics solutions, and marketing automation tools are incredible. They’ve made marketing easier for everyone. But, they can also be a massive waste of time.

Recently I was trying to consolidate some leads within our CRM. One lead report led to another, which led to another, and other….pretty soon I realized that I had spent several hours in the CRM and accomplished basically nothing.

Be very weary of how much time you spend working on or with your technology solutions.

A note: this is why we built an alerts and notifications system into Convirza. You can literally have call analytics reports emailed or texted to you. That way you don’t have to log in to Convirza 17 times a day to figure out what’s going on.

2) Spending Time Writing Stuff No One Reads

How many marketers have created some sort of product collateral or informational document–something they spent hours writing and designing–and then no one reads it?

This happens more often than not.

Research indicates that your sales team won’t end up looking at or sharing most of the collateral you produce. They just won’t. No one will ever see it.

Our marketing team was wasting so much time producing collateral that no one ever read that now we don’t produce sales collateral anymore. We simply send everyone to our website for more information. Sales collateral was a waste of time.

3) Ignoring the Data

Maybe the biggest time-waster on this entire list is ignoring the data.

How does ignoring the data waste time?

Well, we often talk about the money marketers waste when they ignore data. But think about the time that is wasted as well! If you ignore data about the effectiveness of an email marketing campaign and you create, design, write, target and send another email campaign anyway, you’ll waste a lot of time.

Marketers waste a ton of time because they ignore the data.

4) Distracted by Other Responsibilities

If you’re the owner of an SMB, marketing is only one of your responsibilities. You have plenty of other things to worry about.

BUT…occasionally, sit down, put on your marketing hat, and focus on marketing. For a few minutes each day or a few hours each week, focus only on marketing.

If you’re in the marketing department for a medium-sized or large businesses,

5) Failing to Focus on ONE THING at a Time

We all know people that say they are multi-taskers. My wife is one of these people. She can do 12 things at once….or so she says.

In reality, it is impossible to multi-task. The brain simply can’t focus on more than one thing at once. Multi-tasking is physically impossible. (I won’t tell her that).

Marketing multi-tasking is also impossible. For example, if you need to write an email for new campaign, you should close the other Tab that contains your email account. Why? Because if you see that you’ve received a new email, you’ll waste 5 minutes and take a look. Then, because you’re already distracted, you’ll take a minute and check your Facebook page, you’ll text someone, and then read an article a friend posted on Facebook. Pretty soon you haven’t done anything in 20 minutes.

That email that should have taken 10 minutes to write will end up taking you about an hour.

That’s a lot of wasted time. And it can happen to the best of us.

Focus on your tasks until they’re done. Close all the other windows and tabs on your computer if you have to. Just focus until the work is done.