In last week’s blog I discussed why prioritization is so important for progress and why it’s so much more than just picking your battles. There is a method to the madness.
Unfortunately, gaining a clear understanding as to why one action ranks over another is oftentimes tricky. Anyone who has felt inundated with work, life, relationships knows this firsthand. It takes a little work to determine an order of prioritization, but it can be done.
Death, taxes, and a 9:30 a.m. Uberconference call with Ilene every Monday through Friday--these are the certainties in my life.
I requested this call about three years ago. We had started to get busy enough where she was handling one end of the company and I was handling the other. A bad habit of skimping on communication meant, at best, gaps between the two of us. At worst, it meant holes is client interactions. So, this became our morning huddle and our time to find out what was on each other’s dockets.
I subscribe to a daily inspirational email newsletter, which doesn’t always spark me as so much “inspirational” but rather a bit preachy. However, from time-to-time, the creator (Jerry Del Colliano) gets me into a light-bulb state of mind. One recent topic was, “People Want to Buy, Not Be Sold.” The writer prefaced his quick snippet of wisdom with the following:
That’s true not only of merchandise and services, but ideas and concepts.
If you have a great idea for your team, spend much of your effort into getting them to buy it from you rather than have you sell it to them. If you have a daughter or son who could benefit from your wisdom, don’t push it, get them to buy it from you.
I’m forced to prioritize daily—and many times throughout the day. My daily routine actually starts the night before when I put my workout clothes next to my bed (wishful thinking!). If I make the girls shower at night, that’s 10 or 15 extra minutes the next morning… so, let’s do that.
Once they’re on the bus to school, there’s no more hiding from the beastly inbox of things waiting to be addressed. Sometimes that’s not so simple to determine what comes first. The same applies to business and marketing. You know certain pieces of strategy are more pressing than others, but how do you select, definitively, the order in which they rank?
When you hit a plateau—in business or life—it can mess with your motivation. Oftentimes, it’s even more frustrating than hitting a “wall,” because that would mean there is a clear obstacle in your way and there are defined ways to get around it. With a plateau, there may not be a clear hurdle to get over or anything glaringly negative in terms of performance results. It may just be… boring.
Of course, this happens all the time in business, and many times marketing is leaned on to shoulder the burden and get out of the rut. A campaign levels off, then starts to become ineffective. Budget cuts can create a challenge and often require creativity. Senior leadership isn’t interested in what you have to say, making it easier to stay placated and say, “I guess this is fine…”
It’s anything but fine.
Automating certain marketing tasks is not only a great way to be productive, it’s also an effective strategy to strengthen your company’s brand. With marketing automation, you can guide prospects through your various marketing channels, turn leads into customers, and cultivate those customers to become your brand’s ambassadors.
There are many tools available that include marketing automation features. Before committing to a tool, it’s important to understand what marketing automation is and how it can be incorporated to improve your marketing efforts.
We are a marketing agency of email savants. It comes with the territory of being the agency of record for a company that has superior email capabilities. I can tell you the optimal character count of the subject line on an iOS mobile device (55 characters, thank you very much). Jeannette surpasses Hubspot while coding an email that will render well in notoriously-problematic Outlook. Do not even try to stump Shina on the differences between authentication, identification, and validation because you’ll fail and be shamed.
We’ve all been there. You open an email on your smartphone and it displays so poorly you get frustrated and tap “delete.” The malfunction can be a button that doesn’t work, email copy that’s cut off because it’s too wide for the screen, or words so small you’d need a magnifying glass to read them.
