When it comes to time management tips for online marketing, the idea can seem great on paper, but if you don’t have the right tools in your toolbelt, you can easily become overwhelmed quite quickly. The long and the short of marketing is this: people are overworked. In fact, 82% of people say they have more work than they can possibly complete. 60% of people who work 50 to 59 hours feel overworked, and, unsurprisingly, 77% of people who work more than 70 hours feel overworked. This is true for both business leaders, as well as their employees.
There’s a misconception out there that if you’re keeping busy, you’re doing something right. However, bear in mind that being busy can mean a host of different things, and they’re not always for the better. Just because you’re burning the midnight oil, it doesn’t mean you’re actually accomplishing something of substance. With that said, let’s peel back the layers of the onion so we can find areas of opportunity where you can work smarter, not harder.
Why Should Time be Managed?
First and foremost, you need to focus on what matters the most. What exactly is your goal? Are you a business leader who needs to free up your time so you can hire and train new employees who will ultimately help generate revenue for your organization? Or maybe you’re so overwhelmed that you need to delegate certain tasks so you can have a better work-life balance.
In any event, time efficiency offers a way to take control of your daily routine so you can start to use your time to your advantage.
Managing time has its benefits, including:
- Reduced stress
- Feeling better and more fulfilled
- Feeling confident
- Improving your business
- More time with family and friends
- Time to explore new hobbies
- The ability to accomplish more
- Better communication
- The ability to keep promises to your team and your external customers
Often, people have trouble managing their time because they set unrealistic expectations on themselves and then want to push themselves too hard to get over the finish line. At Surefire Local, our goal is to empower our customers with time management tools so they can do the jobs they’re actually supposed to do, like interacting with customers and boosting employee engagement.
What Should You Know About Digital Marketing?
Sure, this is kind of a loaded question, as the topic is immense and would take us days to cover fully. But, in short, it’s important to know that the old way of doing things—like keyword stuffing—is not only no longer best practice, it can actually hurt your online visibility. When you have the right software in place, you can focus on the essential building blocks for online visibility in today’s world, including:
- Google My Business
- Content
- Digital Advertising
- Your website and local SEO
- Directories
- Social Media
- Reviews
- Email Marketing
One of the things most of our customers are surprised about when they talk to our Surefire Local experts is how many online directories there really are. Sure, a lot of people are familiar with Yelp and Facebook, but there’s actually an entire world of online directories out there, and if you’re trying to manage them manually, you’ll have an extremely hard time keeping up. Fortunately for you, we have an amazing ecosystem of software that does things like analyze your online presence, maintain your online directories, and notify you when you’ve been mentioned online.
Now, let’s talk about specifics. How can an online marketing software (specifically, Surefire Local) help you achieve efficiency, visibility, and ROI with our all-in-one marketing platform?
1. An Easy Snapshot View of Everything
With Surefire Local’s software, you’ll get a snapshot view of how well your marketing is working for you, with up-to-the-minute stats and tips to improve your reach and revenue. You’ll have a home to view new leads, reviews, website traffic, content created, chat messages, and activity generated from your Google My Business (GMB) profile and other directories.
You or your team can easily pull up this information to assess the health of your online presence easily because it all lives in one place.
Let’s say advertising is one of your organization’s pain points, which is true for many of our customers here at Surefire Local. If you’re coming from an agency that was less honest, or perhaps less transparent, you may not even have the information you need to understand how your campaigns have been performing in the past. With our software, all of the data is pulled in real-time from multiple sources, including Google Analytics and Google AdWords. Of course, some of these interfaces aren’t as easy to navigate as our solution, which is another benefit to having all your data pulled into one, unified home on the Surefire Local system. You can view everything on a high level, or you can drill in deeper to see exactly what’s performing and how people are finding you.
2. Create Content to Keep Your Digital Footprint Updated with Recent, Relevant Information
Remember, Google has made some significant changes to its algorithm over the years, which is why traditional marketing agency models no longer work for many small businesses like yourself. Google now prioritizes relevant information over other factors. With our solution, you’re able to create numerous types of content without having to log into multiple sites to publish the work you’ve created.
With Surefire Local, you can write, schedule, and publish your blogs, then immediately track the successes and opportunities of each post. Additionally, our software allows you to delegate tasks. Let’s say you’re the one who writes your blogs, but you don’t have time to actually post them. You can delegate that to a team member who has access to the Surefire Local Marketing Platform, and they’ll be published in no time.
You also have an unlimited image repository with Surefire Local. Use this to your advantage because Google loves original content, and that means using your own photos over those you can find on stock photo sites.
3. Get More Reviews and Build a Customer-focused Brand Reputation
Measuring how people are talking to you is a critical component to the overall success of your marketing efforts (and ultimately, the success of your business). Once upon a time, a negative online review could spell a death sentence for a company, but in today’s world, people pay attention to how you respond to those negative reviews. What matters most to many consumers is how well the business owner, manager, or leader addresses the problems that are described in negative reviews.
Of course, you can’t address problems if you don’t know they’re there.
That’s where Surefire Local comes into the picture.
With our software, you can measure your online reputation across all review sites and see which words most frequently appear when people talk about your business. As an added bonus, these insights will help you create content based on how people are speaking about your brand. When you know how people are talking about your business, you can take action steps to make the most of your efforts.
It’s not always easy to get good reviews (or even any reviews in general), but our platform helps you with that. You should always be in a position to receive open feedback, whether it’s positive or negative, and Surefire Local can assist you with this process. With our platform, not only can you send requests for reviews, but you can also reply back quite simply.
4. Control Your Brand Data on up to 80+ Business Directories
Our platform has a single section in it, which allows you to interact with and interface with 80 plus directories online. All in one fell swoop, you can go here, update your messages, upload photos, and content that you want to be sent out to the masses. The key here is that you can send your content to any directory you’re listed on—whether you know you’re listed there or not. You no longer have to worry about a million logins and passwords; you can do all this work with a few clicks of your mouse.
5. Compare Your Digital Footprint Against That of Your Competitors‘
Over any given time span, we can set our platform to show you where you’re at, versus your competition in terms of online visibility. You can get into our tool and really start analyzing how people are finding you, how they’re finding your competitors, and what share of the market you’re capturing.
You can easily see why one competitor might be beating you on a certain keyword, and we can work with you to pivot your content so you’re addressing those competitive boundaries.
6. Control and Manage All Lead Management Workflows
With Surefire Local, you can identify how many leads you’ve generated, examine how those leads compare to the past 30 days, and discover the sources from which those leads are coming. We’re able to specify where certain leads go, which means, for example, if you’re doing a heavy pay-per-click ad campaign, we’ll already know that those people who interact with your ads are going to e a lot more engaged than someone who’s a casual web surfer. In other words, that might be considered a hotter lead, and maybe it should go to a salesperson, rather than the office manager. With our platform, you can control these actions.
How Surefire Local Can Help
Surefire Local has created what effectively amounts to a single pane of glass that allows you to look into all of your online marketing efforts from a single place. With our software, you can become a marketing superhero, no matter how large or small your business is. It’s not unusual for our customers to see significant growth in their online presence once they sign on with us. This, in turn, translates into more leads and, therefore, more growth. Sign up for a Surefire Local demo today!