Running an online marketing campaign can quickly become a time-consuming activity. This is a trap every marketer can fall into – thinking that your organizational skills are more than enough to see the campaign through on time and only during working hours.

The number of digital marketing channels available today tells us a different story. Digital marketing has become harder and it requires more efficiency and consistency than ever before.

Since you’ve been dealt the responsibility card, you have to do your best to make the most out of your time. During the past few years, I’ve found that the following tactics have helped me a lot in delivering the best results in the shortest possible time frame.

Never Start Without a Plan

Starting an online marketing campaign without a plan is borderline insane. Your plan, of course, should reflect your digital marketing strategy. If your client or the company don’t have a digital marketing strategy, you really have to inspire the shareholders to develop one.

In fact, the chances that they don’t have it are high. According to a Smart Insights report, 49% of brands are engaged in digital marketing with no defined strategy.

Starting without a plan can be disastrous and since you need to build your plan upon digital marketing strategy foundations, let’s take a quick look at the prerequisites for good marketing campaign plan:

• Clearly established business goals and mission. Without this, I had trouble effectively communicating with my clients in the past.
• Defined key performance indicators. The only viable way to measure how close you are to achieving your goals.
• Analysis of your past online activities, as well as an analysis of your competitors’ digital marketing strategy.
• Developed profiles of your target consumers.
• Defined marketing budget and realistic assessment of your marketing team’s capabilities.
• Clearly defined goals for every digital marketing channel you choose.

A good digital marketing strategy is half of your digital marketing plan. Both the strategy and plan will help you save time, as you will always know which KPI to track and measure. You’ll also have more energy since you know how and where to focus your attention.

Besides, clearly established goals and defined daily actions will get everyone on your team on the same page.

Set Your Goals

We have already talked about the goals to some extent, but since they are of great importance for your online marketing campaign success we have to address them in a more detail. Why? Because marketers somehow quickly forget the difference between goals, objectives, and KPIs.

Maybe it is because of the new age of big data that I see so many colleagues becoming too data-oriented, thinking that goals are, in fact, the KPIs. If you want to save time running an online marketing campaign, knowing your KPIs won’t help you as much as an aligned team.

And what aligns a team? A goal.

You have to inspire collaboration and motivate your team to move toward the same goal. The KPIs are there to tell you how far you are from reaching it. They are nothing more than numbers. With a clearly established goal, both you and your team will keep on moving forward. Not to mention the impact of that sense of achievement when the goal is reached.

This unique experience builds up confidence, makes teams with strong relationships and, in the end, saves you time by enabling you to focus on core marketing actions instead of people management.

Automation and AI

Automation and AI are definitely here. There are so many marketing and business process management tools out there with built-in automation features. The automation alone is there to handle boring and repetitive tasks for you. With the AI in the picture, the story becomes quite a different one.

Thanks to AI, all of the data you gather during the marketing campaign is given a proper meaning. Dissected, analyzed and put back together by the AI, your marketing campaign data is able to tell you time-saving stories.

How can these two help you in your online marketing campaign efforts?

Beside automating boring and repetitive tasks, automation powered by AI can streamline your multi-channel campaign efforts. It can be used to enhance your presence in these channels and even send messages. Marketing automation tools are able to push emails, Facebook messages, SMS, notifications, and so on.

The AI serves as a personalizing agent. By learning from past experiences, the AI enables the automation platform to send custom-tailored messages to individual customers. Something that would take you and your team hours upon hours to complete.

The automation and AI offer one more benefit – analytics. All of the automated processes and their outputs are stored in the central database, which can be analyzed for patterns, best-performing messages, most optimal times for reaching out, and so on. Analytics can provide you with valuable insights that can help you fine-tune your online marketing campaign on the go.

You can also use this data to build strong customer profiles and update the ones that you have established in your digital marketing strategy. Furthermore, thanks to automation and AI, these profiles will be updated on a regular basis. This saves a great deal of time, since neither you nor your team will ever have to go through copious amounts of data to build customer profiles and personalized customer offers.

Use The Right Tools

Without the right tools for the job, you can kiss efficiency goodbye. No, I’m serious, with so many digital marketing channels and diversified online marketing methods, doing things manually is out of the question. Fortunately, the business software industry is restless and the tools are many. Which ones are the right ones will depend on your strategy, goals, and plan. Here are your options.

Since email marketing is not losing its popularity any time soon, let me address it first. An email marketing tool is a must if you are reaching your prospects, leads, and customers via email. Doing it manually will cause you headaches and make it more probable to miss out on important statistics and messages.

For this purpose, you can use a dedicated email marketing software capable of listing the performance of your emails. Tracking the number of your subscribers, unsubscriptions, click and open rates will help you assess the effectiveness of your email marketing efforts.

On the other hand, if you focus on the conversation, you will benefit more from a CRM platform, which keeps track of all past conversations with clients.

You should know that a CRM platform might be overkill if you are working for a small company. CRM ROI becomes significant if support, sales and marketing departments use it at the same time.

For your blogging efforts, you can also choose an easy-to-use blogging tool, or platform if you prefer. The less time you spend on posting your articles, the more time you will have to devote to more pressing matters.

I find using a project management tool as a must. This piece of software alone has helped me stay organized, keep my team on board and track project progress on the go. I personally find Trello to be the most rewarding for managing online marketing efforts.

The social media marketing management tool is the last one on this list. These tools will help you schedule and track the performance of your posts. You will also be able to identify influencers, manage comments and save time by using the pre-written responses feature.

Rely On Expert Help & Delegate Tasks

Marketers specializing in online marketing are not jacks of all trades. It took me a while before I admitted that to myself. Relying on experts help from other domains can not only save you time but increase the efficiency of your marketing campaign overall.

This why you should delegate tasks and outsource processes to professionals who can do it better and faster than you. The most popular freelance platforms and websites specializing in logo design can become your powerful allies when the time is of the essence.

When it comes to old-school task delegation, project management software will enable you to do it in a couple of clicks. Before you do it, I suggest that you call a staff meeting in order to communicate the goals of the project and ask your team members for some feedback.

When your staff gets personally involved right from the start, the delegation process gets that much-needed responsibility sharing moment.

Don’t Stretch Yourself Too Thin

You need to be clear about your responsibilities in one project in order to prevent burning out from getting stretched too thin. But this only covers one aspect of it. The other one is your very marketing campaign.

Remember the section about goals and KPIs? Are they realistic when compared to the number of your employees? What I am trying to say is don’t have many initiatives running at once. If you spread yourself and your marketing team too thin, you won’t be able to gauge the results that reflect the time you’ve put in.

Focusing on a few initiatives will put you in a position of complete control and, more importantly, you won’t feel as tired as you were when you were trying to achieve the impossible. Establish your goals, identify the best course of action to reach them, be honest about your and your team’s capacity to respond to the upcoming challenges, and start working. It doesn’t get any more simple than that.

Keep Optimizing

If repetition is the father of learning, then optimization is the father of marketing. Let me correct myself, ongoing optimization is the father of marketing. The phrase “markets are constantly changing” is too vague. What are the markets? They are comprised of people and people’s needs and demands are the things that are constantly changing.

Their online behavior is changing as well. Influencer marketing may be the best working thing for a millennial target audience today, but YouTube ads can take the lead tomorrow. What I am trying to say is that you need to keep your finger constantly on the pulse of your target customers.

This in combination with your marketing data analytics will enable you to optimize your campaigns both on the grand scale and on a micro level.

Optimization is the frosting on your marketing cake. If you lay healthy foundations right from the start by developing an effective online marketing campaign plan, set your goals, use the right tools and leverage the power of automation, AI, and analytics, you will be able to fine-tune your online marketing campaigns and save time while doing so.

About the Author: Damir is an avid writer here to help you with graphic design and branding tips in order to take your business to the next level. Part of the team at DesignContest, a place that will make your every graphic design idea come to life.