Prioritizing the most effective tasks is an easy way to ensure your valuable time is put to the best possible use. Here are four 30-minute tasks you can do each week to improve your digital marketing.
Task 1: Perform a landing page test
Source: Optimizely
Landing page testing is a crucial part of eking out the maximum performance from your marketing activity. Crafting a high converting landing page means that the effort you have put in elsewhere to draw traffic to your site is validated.
Even if your page performance is OK, spending just half an hour each week testing can draw out even better results. There are lots of landing page testing tools on the market to help streamline the task of testing page elements and analyzing the data.
Focus on elements which can be changed and adapted quickly:
- The headline
- Intro text
- Phrasing of your offer
- Promotion type (money off versus free shipping for example)
- The call to action
- Image selection
To be even more efficient, you can extrapolate the knowledge you learn from one experiment to inform other areas. If your money-off test delivers more sales than offering free shipping, use that same offer in your email marketing. If one image performs markedly better than another, try incorporating it into your next social media post.
2. Perform competitor research
Every brand, no matter how niche or unique its product, will have a competitor it benchmarks performance against. Competitor research is easily overlooked, especially if the time available for marketing tasks is minimal but, it can actually be a very easy and useful way of gathering meaningful, actionable information.
Of course, you could spend hours poring over rival activity across various channels but, with just 30-minutes a week to spare, you need to work smart. Pick one area to focus on – social media, backlinks or blog content for instance – so you’re dealing with manageable chunks within your permitted timeframe and prepare to dedicate a few sessions to the job at hand.
The aim with competitor research is not just to find out what competitors are doing, it’s to gather intelligence and learn from their efforts, so you can make better calls with your own strategy and not have to start at the beginning. Look for things that worked and those that didn’t, and start making notes:
- Is there a particular type of social media post that tends to generate the most likes, shares and comments?
- What doesn’t?
- What times of the day and days of the week are these posts most successful? Are calls to action being used such as tag friends and how effective are they?
- Click through and view the profiles of users commenting on posts. What are their interests?
Google for example could check out Ecosia’s Facebook page. A quick flick through the comments shows why its users are switching to its eco-friendly search engine.
You could use Wordtracker's free Scout app to check out the keywords competitor websites are using. Find out what's working and see where there are opportunties for your website.
3. Check a Google Analytics report
When time is weighing heavy, action in the form of creating a blog post or writing a social media update often takes precedence over taking a step back and measuring or analyzing. It can feel like wasted time if you don’t come out the other end of your allocated 30-minute block with something to update your site or post on one of your owned media channels.
In fact, allocating a chunk of time once a week to dig into your Analytics is a great way to ensure the time you do spend on creation is focused in the right areas. The vast Google Analytics dashboard can be off-putting and it would take days if not weeks to extract all the available data and transfer it into a meaningful format and strategy. However, in 30-minutes you can hone in on a specific report and take something meaningful from it. This in turn should make your next piece of marketing data-led and more precise.
Read our four most useful Google Analytics reports post to find out which ones will help you make the best of your allocated 30-minute timeframe.
4. Repurpose a piece of content
Are you guilty of a set it and forget it approach to your content? This is a trap that most of us fall into at some time or another. We craft a great piece of content, publish it and then promote on social media. We perhaps include a mention of it in our email shot and then… nothing. Over time, promotion wanes and the content is slowly replaced with newer pieces.
When time is your most precious commodity, you can’t afford not to make your content work harder. Dedicate 30-minutes per week to repurposing one of your existing content pieces. A half hour block isn’t enough time to create a high quality blog or article from scratch but, it is sufficient to make a big dent in repurposing.
Take a piece of content that you are particularly proud of as your starting point. It could be an article, a white paper or even a keynote speech you gave at a conference recently. This can be turned into several other pieces of content, giving new life and purpose into an asset that you already own.
- A whitepaper for example could be segmented into a series of bite-sized blog posts.
- It could be made into a Slideshare presentation
- It could form the basis of a lead generating landing page.
- It could be transformed into a podcast
- Made into a question and answer style post or
- Distilled into an infographic
One 30-minute session may not be enough alone, but if you dedicate a block each week, you’ll soon have a brimming library of new assets, created in a fraction of the time required to generate a totally new piece of valuable, useful content.
While 30-minutes may seem like a brief chunk of time, if you plan ahead and commit to remaining focused, it can be used to make your marketing much more effective. What other marketing activities do you carry out in 30-minutes a week to drive your efforts forwards? Share your suggestions with us in the comments.
