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The Digital Marketing Podcast
2018 Productivity Tips For Digital Marketers
00:19:52
How To Be More Productive
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by targetinternet.com hello, and welcome back to the Digital Marketing Podcast. My name is Kieran Rogers.
- [00:19]
B
And I'm Daniel Rolls.
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A
And today, Daniel, we've got some new year productivity tips and tools we have.
- [00:26]
B
So a lot of us at this time of the year will look at what we're doing and we'll make New Year's resolutions and we'll plan to do things more effectively. And I just want to look at what we've learned over the last year and some of the things we've applied and what we're doing and just kind of suggest some things that people should be doing. This should be their New Year's resolutions for digital marketing.
- [00:44]
A
All right, perfect. This sounds good.
- [00:46]
B
So, first one, which is obvious, we've all been talking about this for a while, but there's some practical solutions. Stop churning out rubbish content, or not even rubbish content, just very average content, mediocre. That doesn't really get you the traction based on the amount of effort you've had to put into it. So, couple of ways I've been thinking about this and I've gone a bit old school on this, which is to think if I'm creating content, it has to be PR worthy. And what I mean by that is that would a public relations company better pick this up and get people talking about it in the press? That's the kind of stuff we want to create. Now, I'm not expecting every content to be like, you know, front page of newspaper stuff, but think about that. Why would someone want to talk about this? And then what I want us to do is turn all of our content, that's hub content, that regular content that we publish and churn out into hero content, into stuff that drives people back to our website month in and month out. So the idea is that you're going to publish some content. Yes. It's going to get a bit of social media traction, but actually you want to get picked up in Google afterwards. You want Google picking up. So it means you have to do one thing and really do this really effectively, which is use keyword research tools. When you are titling any piece of content you create, work out what are people searching for, what are they interested in, and use that to basically SEO your content. But do that when you're planning content in the first place. So when you have your brainstorm, sit there, open up the keyword research tools and start to think about things from different perspectives. So when you create something, yes, people like it but also it then starts showing up in Google as well. You've got a keyword research tool. I don't like this one.
- [02:18]
A
I know. Well, that's good. He doesn't always like the tools that I come up with, but that's another story. So we've talked about. I mean, a couple of these you'll be well aware of. So, you know, if you do a search in Google, you get your search term. If you scroll down to the bottom of the first page of the search results, you'll see other related terms. And it's a really great kind of resource to make use of. So that's the first one I'd make you aware of. What I like about it is it. It gives you quite a good focus on. You pick an obvious keyword and you get other quite closely related keywords and it begins to give you a bit of an idea of the keyword landscape.
- [02:58]
B
But what if I wanted to find out how many searches there were or how much they cost in Paperclip?
- [03:02]
A
Well, I am very glad you asked that, Daniel, but before we come onto this, he's so keen. Before we come into this, you'll have heard us talk about another rather remarkable tool called answerthepublic.com. with answerthepublic, what they do is they pull together all the data. You know, when you do a search on Google, you get the other popular related search, the auto suggestion feature. They take all that data, I think, from Google and also Bing. From Google and from Bing, yeah. And they combine it all up into their tool. So it gives you lovely little diagrams of. Of various different questions on any given subjects that people are asking, but only.
- [03:41]
B
If you knew how many people had searched for each of those and how much they cost in pay per click.
- [03:45]
A
So. Right. So if you. One of the things that always frustrated me, you never know what the search volumes are with these things. Now, you can get some of that Data from Google AdWords, but it's sort of a bit of a faff getting to it. And we discovered a tool quite recently called Keywords Everywhere. And this is a little plugin that goes into your web browser, available for Chrome and I think Firefox as well. And it's really, really neat what it does. What it does is it'll link into the AdWords API and for any given keyword search that you do, it pulls out the average cost per click and also the estimated average search volume. Now, there is a caveat with this, which we've certainly noticed. When I start to compare some of the results that the Google AdWords interface gives for search volume, it bears no resemblance for what I know the traffic is because we're getting reports on it within our Google Analytics and you can see something will have an average search of 0 per month and yet we're regularly getting 3, 400 searches a month.
- [04:48]
B
On it or visits from it. There's a whole lot more searches than that. So it's a good point.
- [04:52]
A
So it's not 100% accurate. Now, we don't yet know the reason why this I suspect possibly the AdWords interface is focused on commercial keywords, but it is really useful to get an idea of the kind of popular of a particular term within AdWords because that would suggest it has high commercial value if it's quite expensive, but also to gain some insight into the actual keyword volume of searches that are coming through. What I particularly like about keywords everywhere is it a is free, which is good. I mentioned it's free.
- [05:23]
B
It's great.
- [05:24]
A
It is a good tool, but also you can target it towards the APIs for specific countries as well.
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B
This is fascinating.
- [05:30]
A
Yeah. So if I want to look at search terms for the UK or India, Australia, France, France, various other countries in there as well, you can target it, which is really interesting because actually the click costs vary greatly between different countries.
- [05:43]
B
Give you an example, digital marketing training in the UK will cost you between seven and nine pounds per click. We were looking at India as a market and suddenly it drops down to about £2 a click. So huge difference. And that might be a market us worth addressing. So we can then go through and do that. So definitely worth taking a look.
- [05:57]
A
What it does though is integrates with any web site that you're visiting, so you can suck in keywords from any page and it analyzes all of those. It's particularly good. It's got some nice interface with obviously the Google search engine results. So all of those related searches again you start getting volume and cost per click on that. And on answerthepublic again does exactly the same thing. The one tip here is rather than using the circular diagrams you get in answer the public, go to just the text based option. There's a little tab within there because you get to see everything all at once. If you go with the diagrams, you have to hover over each question. It's a bit of a pain, but yeah, really nice little combo there and it's definitely saved a lot of time. Quite good.
- [06:40]
B
So productivity tip number one, make sure you're doing proper keyword research. When you're planning your content and you're planning your social content. So our next productivity tip. If you heard me speak at Brighton SEO recently, you would have heard this. And this is what we discovered is if you use social media monitoring basically as part of your search optimization process. So use social media monitoring to monitor certain phrases and what you manage to do is identify phrases as they start to become interesting and people start debating them before they're showing up in keyword research tools. Then you write a piece of content using that particular phrase and because you've got kind of first lead advantage, you end up showing up in Google hopefully before anyone else. And it works. We've tested it a few times and it does a good trick. So we identified that people were searching what is Google preferred? So we were monitoring the words Google within our social media monitoring to see what was being spoken about around Google. And we suddenly saw this kind of trend of what is Google preferred? Which is an advert program by the way, created a three, three or 400 word blog post and it went in at number one as a definition post. Now, since then, Google have done their own definition, they put their own definition above ours. But what people are doing is looking at what is Google preferred and they're looking for the first one that's not written by Google. So we're still getting a lot of traffic for this every month as well. So productivity tip number two, make sure you're using social media monitoring tools as part of your keyword research process. So let's move on to the next one. So process mapping sounds very exciting and rock and roll, but basically what we're saying here is because there is this overlap between social media content search, the content for your emails, your social media outreach, you need your processes planned out so that you're doing this as efficiently as possible. So what I would say is put a content calendar at the heart of everything you do and if you have done that already, great. But make sure your content calendar covers content, SEO, keyword research, and maybe social media keyword research. Have you published into social media? Are you sending this out in your newsletters? Who are your advocates that want to see this content and who are the influencers? You want to see this content because you've already identified, you've pre identified your influencers and your advocates. Most social media and content calendars are missing the influencer outreach bit and they quite often don't talk about email either. And I really think they should be doing both of those things. So we've got a content Calendar you can download from the website. We'll put the link into the show notes for that as well. But process map things and do other things. Like if you're creating images, use something like canva to create templates for each of your channels at the right resolutions so that your team can go in and do this easily. And as part of this, you know, your social media policy should be part of this. But it shouldn't just be a set of things that says don't do this, don't do this. Your social media policy would be something that says don't do this. But actually here are the five best tweets we've ever written and here's four examples of our tone of voice because it allows you to create more of a hub and spoke approach. And that is at the center. You've got a set of guidelines, you've got a content calendar, you've got tools for doing things efficiently. You might have a hootsuite or something like that for managing your social media. And then different people in the organization can implement and create and share the content as well. But process mapping is really key to this. What makes good social media a lot of the time is mapping out your processes ahead of things and using a content calendar at the heart of that. So make sure you've done that. Next, productivity tip. Have a look at keeping yourself up to date in a time effective way. The way I do this is use Feedly and you may have heard me mention this a few times before. Feedly is a newsreader. You can bring all your post into one place. The way that I do it is I have a particular category in Feedly and I just follow the Google blog, the Facebook blog, the Twitter blog and I just know what those platforms are up to. But we're creating some content that's going to help with this.
- [10:27]
A
Absolutely, yeah. So yeah, we've put together an article which basically the idea was okay, what blogs and what YouTube channels should every marketer to follow. So we've selected a few of our favorites and yeah, take a look at it. I think it's a really, really useful resource. Don't have to follow them all, but I think if you dig in there'll.
- [10:47]
B
Be everybody and we would like to hear your recommendations. Well, what is it that you read or watch or kind of listen to that keeps you up to date? And we'll take a look at that stuff as well.
- [10:56]
A
I have another little tool that I've been playing around with a little bit. I've actually linked it up to your Twitter account just so that you can see it. It's called Nuzzle. So if you go to nuzzle.com and what it does, you link it to your Twitter account and what it does is it breaks down. You can look at different periods. I've just looked at the last week for Daniel's account and it'll tell me what news from your friends has there been. So actually you're almost using your own friends audience on Twitter to work out what they're all sharing and why. That could be used in two ways. You might want to not share things that they've already shared. But also it's a great way of filtering and getting up to speed with the things that everybody else thinks are really, really useful. So if like me, you don't get to sit in your Twitter feed all of the time, something like this is really, really good. It also analyzes news from friends of friends as well and news that you may have missed and recently read stories that you've looked at. So I think really useful services free doesn't cost anything. I thought it was really cool.
- [11:56]
B
So great. So keep yourself up to date and try and do that in a time efficient way. Right, last one. We could be here debating this till the end of time, but fix your email volume problem. That is so many of us, we debate this every year as well. We get so much email it becomes distraction. And I'm just raising this again because I thought I'd crack this. And the last four months of my life have been the bane has been the email. And what's really interesting to me is that it wasn't that the volume had gone up, it's just that I was busier. So there were like maybe 40 or 50 emails sitting in my email box that I hadn't dealt with. And the stress that that was causing with me constantly feeling like I wasn't on top of things was, was a real problem. And I've. There's loads of tips and advice and I want to hear your tips and advice in terms of what you found that solves it. I've told you this before. We did a bit of a study into this and we worked every email you reply or send, you get 1.7 emails back. So there is no actual winning this. Okay. But I found my mental health has been so greatly improved by clearing my email box every day and that things are bigger. Go into a task list that I schedule those in and I've, I mean these are all kind of well known tips, but the whole thing of only checking your emails a certain number of times a day. So I normally do first thing in the morning, last thing in the evening and a bit of a triage at lunchtime. I found what works for me is actually having an hour in the morning where I do emails and an hour at the end of day and everything else that needs beyond that time goes into a task list and gets scheduled. Setting expectations with people and saying to people I only check and I only respond over these periods of time can be quite useful things to do as well. And then also if I am behind I will put a auto response on that says I'm very sorry at the moment this is happening, please phone me as well. So I think it's just funny those little techniques but actually it's still one of the biggest problems that I have and actually Kieran knows if he wants to respond to me, text me.
- [13:38]
A
I do text emails can take days sometimes and understandably I think, okay, so I've gone one step further. I second everything Daniel said. One of the things that I did sort of by accident actually because I could never work out quite how to link up this particular account with my iPhone is that I stopped having my work email on my phone. Now I work from home. So actually when I need to be at home answering emails I can be there. But actually it's really good because you've always got your phone there and the temptation's always there to nip in and see whether there's anything new that's come. And actually what it does is it destroys that time that you've got with your friends or with your family when you really should be focusing on other non work work stuff because suddenly you're in that cycle of thinking about how you're going to respond to this, you going to say about that one and it's just not, it's not productive. So you end up being tired of the subjects that you need to get back on or worse still firing off that response that actually if you'd had a little bit more time to think about it and were in different circumstances you would have given a much more carefully edited response back. So that's my top tip for you and try it out actually and find out whether it does make a difference. Really there's something very wrong if you can't deal with the email during your working hours.
- [14:59]
B
Well I think that comes onto what this is a cultural thing for organisations as well in terms of what the expectations are of the organization as well. So how quickly you should respond. I've seen more and more people are starting to put service level agreements in place that don't expect an immediate response from emails, but we will respond within 48 hours and things like that. And I think that's a healthier kind of approach to it. Maybe even if that's just a holding pattern, but even that can get gamed. A lot of people will go say, right, it's got to be 40 hours. Within 40 hours I send an email saying, I'll be back to you in detail on this soon. So you've got to work it out. My feeling on this as well is because we are dipping out of social media so much, we're dipping it out of email so much as well. To sit back and think and do some logical kind of time processing of some things gets missed a little bit. We all know this from our personal lives as well. But if there is one productivity tip, cracking this email thing, however you go about doing it and say, well, I can't do this in my organization, I'm expected to respond immediately. There are techniques you can use. Do you need to check every five minutes? Could you just check every hour? If you have to check that regularly, could you not just give yourself blocks of time to do that? Blocks of time to concentrate on particular tasks can work quite well as well. And it is about building culture and organizations.
- [16:09]
A
Yeah. The other thing is having another channel, having everything all go through one channel is not the best way of managing things. So in some organizations that I've worked out, we've had, you know, we specifically say a bit like you do, really, if you need to get hold of me, text me for example. And actually making sure that urgent stuff can surface way, way better than something urgent getting buried amongst thousands of junk emails that all ping into your account at the same time.
- [16:37]
B
I saw a great thing from Dara, who's the MD of Twitter, and he had some of the slides at a presentation he did and he said the best ways to communicate with me and number one, it was kind of like SMS or text me actually. And then it went down and email was a bit further down and then a bit further down was phone me. Because a lot of people don't like phone calls. They find them quite interruptive. Some people do. I think that's a personal style thing. And then down the bottom it had send me a LinkedIn message. And I have a terrible problem with this because LinkedIn's an important channel for us because we drive a fair bit of sales through LinkedIn. But actually my LinkedIn inbox is just another inbox to find. And what I normally do when I get LinkedIn message and it's relevant, I give them my email address and say just email me.
- [17:13]
A
But that's the thing, systems always become problematical when there's too much junk volume coming through because you naturally, you have an aversion to going into it.
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B
Right.
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A
And that's one of my things with LinkedIn. I get so much junk stuff from.
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B
Recruiters because there's so many people employ you, Kieran, to steal you away from me.
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A
I don't think that's the case at all. I think they just blat this stuff out by the thousand and we all kind of suffer it. So, you know, it's important that you establish with your own teams in particular, you know the best way to get through to you. It was always one of my pet hates was the. Have you read the email? No, not necessarily. But if it's urgent, have you spoken to me about it? You know, that kind of scenario and that's just setting expectations and managing the channels. People in my experience always go through the path of least resistance and actually we all have a little bit of control over that. So take a step back in the new year, think about how you're doing that and come up with a plan.
- [18:10]
B
Exactly. So we'd love to hear. I don't know what the absolute solution is. I'm finding ways of managing myself. But let us know what works for you and it will be different horses for courses who works for different people. But we'd like to hear how you're keeping yourself efficient. So let us know how you're doing and we'll speak to you again on the Digital Marketing Podcast.
- [18:32]
A
Thanks for listening to the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by Target Internet. If you're investing in your digital marketing skills, take a look at our free benchmark skills test and look at the wealth of online learning we provide to help marketers get up to speed and stay up to date. Just visit targetinternet.com Benchmark.
- [19:04]
B
Where I do it is I have a particular category in Feedly and I just follow the Google blog, the Facebook blog, the Twitter blog and I just know what those platforms are up to. But we're creating some content that's going to help with this.
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A
Are we? Did I miss that?
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B
The stuff that Pete is doing.
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A
Oh, right, yes, sorry, yes, yes, absolutely, yeah. So we've put together.
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B
I just want to interrupt. Actually we've edited this out, but I'm going to say this as well. I just said, and we'd done some stuff to help with this, and Kieran just looked at me utterly blankly and after about 10 seconds of awkward silence, went, we have, so let's carry on. But that didn't happen.
- [19:42]
A
You know what? I'm going to put this in after the show.
- [19:43]
B
Yeah, that's good, that's good, because I.
- [19:46]
A
Should be ashamed of myself. I'll go away and think about what I've done.
- [19:49]
B
Kieran's got a bit of a cold.
- [19:50]
A
Yeah, I have.