The definition of efficiency is accomplishing more with less. For those who strive to become marketing consultants, learning how to integrate productivity and efficiency is a must have attribute. This career depends on a candidate’s ability to multitask, organise, follow specific directions, identify and use technology solutions that increase workflow, reduce mistakes, and produce positive results. We will outline below how to become more productive.
Establish Email Schedules
While prompt replies to email activity is a crucial attribute of a marketing consultant, being overly expectant can backfire and reduce your efficiency. To be more productive, set aside periodic times throughout the day to check and reply to emails. Depending on your workload, and your clients preferred methods of communication, you can schedule your email activity around their schedules. You don’t need to cut your email duties to once per day, just schedule some time to stay ahead of your daily activities.
Depend on Voicemail
While multitasking is possible – talking on the phone is typically a big distraction. Whether it’s taking personal phone calls, engaging with clients, or trying to drum up future business opportunities, non-stop phone conversations during business hours are a productivity killer. Unless you’re expecting a scheduled phone conversation, let incoming calls go to voicemail and reply as needed.
Be Firm with Your Scheduling
Eventually, your time will be in hot demand. Whether it’s catching up over lunch, or a quick cup of coffee to connect and network, it’s quite common for people to want you to meet for casual or non-essential conversation. This is when saying “no” is perfectly acceptable. When you have work to accomplish through the day, the last thing you need are constant breaks in the activity to accomplish something non-productive. If you have ‘break’ or lunch time set in your schedule and want to connect during these times – that’s great. Just don’t go out of your way to meet for social engagements during work hours.
Maintain Physical Activity
Being physically active increases blood flow, which plays a vital role in maintaining physical and mental health. For those in marketing, mental clarity tends to stimulate creative juices, allowing them to resolve problems easier and reduce frustration. As such, try to integrate some exercise into your day. Whether it’s a quick bike ride or taking a walk outside during your break, find time to get up and moving. Doing so will help you maintain mental clarity, improve workflow, and increase efficiency.
Wake Up Early
Getting up early is a normal activity for the world’s best leaders. In fact, many of the top executives in business routinely wake up by 5am to begin their day. While that’s rather early for some, the key is to get up as early as possible, so you can accomplish more during normal business hours. If your clients work evenings, it’s OK to rise a bit later. But, regardless of your workflow, or normal business hours, the key is to wake up several hours before work, so that you can take care of personal tasks, exercise and let your mind wander in that ‘creative zone’ before starting your workday.
Maintain Meeting Schedules
It’s amazing how many meetings don’t happen as scheduled, whether it’s due to clients not being ready, or your own shortcomings. However, with proactive effort you can make your meetings run to time. For starters, as the meeting organizer, you need to be focused, time-sensitive, and detail oriented. Create a detailed agenda and stick to it. It’s a good idea to plan ahead and distribute an agenda to attendees prior to the meeting, so that they can review it and write down any questions they might have beforehand. If your meeting is thorough, questions afterwards should be reduced.
Establish Strong Email Filters
Most of today’s email platforms have rather impressive personal setting capability. The key is to use them to the benefit of your business personal schedule. As a starting point, create separate folders for your personal and work email communications. From this point, you can create sub-folders for individual clients, and additional sub-folders for specific contacts, tasks, or groups. This type of organization might seem daunting or excessive at first, but it will pay huge dividends as business improves, you retain more clients, and take on additional responsibilities.
Additionally, you can set up automated replies if you’re currently occupied with other tasks, on vacation, or have restricted email connectivity for whatever reason. When a client receives a simple notification that you’re not able to reply quickly, it sets a positive tone. You can turn your notifications or automated alerts on or off easily and set up multiple organization filters with very little effort.
These simple tips will help you break into the Marketing Consultant profession, and ensure you stand out above the competition. Marketing consultants, whether new or existing, should consider their insurance options.
