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By: Eric Hollebone on March 28th, 2018

How To Turn Better Time Management Into A Bigger Marketing Budget

They say time is money, and that’s certainly true for time-strapped marketers.

If you read the first two posts in this series, you know that while many marketing departments are caught up in a whirlwind of never-ending work, most can step out of that whirlwind and reclaim that lost time—and then some.

In “Can’t get more marketing budget? Try bending the laws of physics,” we laid out a process for understanding how your team’s time is being spent, and in “Break the ‘iron triangle’ with these top timesavers for marketing,” we showed you how to identify the solution that addresses your top problem areas. In this last post, we’ll show you how to use the time you save to carve out a bigger marketing budget.

Lean and mean

Automating and streamlining time-intensive processes will transform your marketing department. You’ll go from manual, inefficient batch and blast tactics to trigger-based systems that generate leads while you’re off doing something else entirely. You’ll launch landing pages in minutes rather than days thanks to pre-designed templates and built-in tracking. And you’ll eliminate the endless hours spent chasing project details and updating stakeholders on progress with a system that chases down the details and tracks progress automagically.

In short, you’ve implemented lean processes in your marketing department. By trimming the fat, you’ve created more value for your customers with fewer resources. You’ve taken that time and turned it towards the creation of more campaigns, more touchpoints, more valuable and informative content, more meaningful customer experiences.

It’s a significant accomplishment, and one that’s central to the success of a customer-centric organization. You are going to want to share your success with the wider organization for partly virtuous reasons and partly self-interested ones. Sharing your experience can help your colleagues achieve their own time-saving transformation (that’s the virtuous part). But sharing your results can also help you claw back a bigger share of the budget by demonstrating that you’re a responsible (or even gifted) steward of your organization’s resources.

Lost in translation

To capture the attention of your organization’s decision-makers, you need to be able to translate your success into terms they can understand.

We touched on the issue of measurement in the previous blog post, where we suggested you compare the time it took to complete a task before and after implementing a technology solution. Multiply that unit of time savings by the number of times the task is performed within a specific timeframe—a day, a week, a month—to determine the longer-term impact.

That’s an important first step, but to make the most of this data, you need to turn it into meaningful organizational, departmental, and customer-centric metrics.

For example, when I was tasked with streamlining my overworked marketing team, I set specific goals in each area. At the organizational level, demand generation was a priority. For my marketing department, the project completion rate needed to increase. And to tangibly enhance the customer experience, we needed to boost customer satisfaction on our website.

We started by taking a baseline measure of the number of leads generated in the year prior to the implementation of the marketing automation platform, and then tracked the increase in the number of new leads generated by the new system in the two years following. We did the same thing for our project management platform and introduced a health monitoring platform for our website.

Finally, we translated those metrics into the big, impressive numbers that would make our executive sit up and take notice:

These are the numbers we brought forward as proof that our optimization efforts had made a significant impact on the organization’s goals, our departmental efficiency, and the customer experience. And when it was time to renegotiate the marketing budget, those numbers helped us make the case for more resources and a deeper investment in supporting technology, because we had clearly demonstrated the department’s ability to use those resources wisely and demonstrate exceptional value.

And back to step 1…

In the first post, we talked about the very first step in the process of recovering lost time—stepping outside the whirlwind to examine your day-to-day operations with a critical eye. It’s also the last step in the process, because there is always something more you can be doing to become even leaner and more efficient. Even when you’ve tamed the whirlwind and created a smoothly functioning department, it’s important to continually review and optimize the way you and your team spend their time. Make a yearly commitment to step back and look for new opportunities to streamline and automate time-consuming processes so that you can continue to find more time for strategic, high-value activities.