You may be the hottest thing in digital marketing since Twitter, but if you aren’t meeting your client deadlines, you’re unwittingly damaging your reputation.
Yes, your creative and technical skill set are vital for planning and implementing superb digital marketing strategy. Yes, your ideas are fantastic – and the results achieved for your clients often speak for themselves. However, most people (and most people includes almost all your clients) are impressed when you get things done on time. They won’t be impressed when you continually miss deadlines, no matter what the quality of your work.
Digital marketing is a notoriously fast-paced industry, with high expectations and demanding campaigns, so it is understandable that deadlines do tend to whoosh by on occasion and before you know it – you’re late. These six tips should help you manage your deadlines more efficiently so that you won’t let your clients down:
- Set reasonable deadlines
Trying to keep your clients happy by saying yes to deadlines that might be too tight to meet won’t make anyone happy in the long run. Be honest with your client, and with yourself, about when you can realistically accomplish certain tasks.
- Be clear on what you need from clients
It’s important to be very direct with your clients on content that you require from them to implement their digital marketing campaigns. Set content deadlines and be clear that if you don’t receive content by a certain date you won’t be able to meet your deadlines.
- Break large projects into manageable parts
There’s a saying that goes: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Large projects where there is a lot of work involved can be overwhelming, which can lead to procrastination. By breaking large projects up into a series of manageable goals, the volume of the work is less daunting.
- Know when to delegate
Whether you’re running a large digital marketing franchise or you’re a one-man band, you need to know when to share your workload. Doing everything yourself, especially if you have a lot to get through, is guaranteed to make you late. Delegate to other employees, or outsource to a freelancer when you’re swamped.
- Try to work ahead of schedule
If you know that you have some tight deadlines coming up, do your best to remain ahead of the game. During ‘quiet’ times in your digital marketing agency, catch up with future work in advance to avoid the rush later.
- Take responsibility for your actions
If worse comes to worse, you’ve overcommitted, set an insane deadline, are running late and can’t delegate some of your work… then it’s time to be accountable. Put in the extra hours to meet that deadline – rather that, than annoy your client by failing to deliver on time, yet again. Pulling an all-nighter should teach you to learn from your mistakes and plan more effectively next time around.
For help and advice with your digital marketing, contact us today.