Effective Tips to Streamline Your Workflow in Digital Marketing

Tricia Lim

There are days when you struggle to find motivation to deal with your overwhelming list of to-dos, create content, and juggle other marketing responsibilities. As a digital marketer, I’ve learnt the importance of streamlining my workflows to make the most of my tasks.

Thankfully, there are ample resources and practical advice you can find from like-minded experts in your niche these days. With the right strategies, tools, and practices, you can reduce stress and maximize your efficiency—regardless if you’re dealing with two or a dozen accounts.

Here are 5 ways to streamline your workflow as a digital marketer!

1. Keep an updated content calendar

It doesn’t matter if you’ve been creating content for 1 week or for years, having a content calendar is an unavoidable part of a smooth content creation process. There are various advantages to keeping an updated content calendar and here’s why:

It helps you save time – a content calendar helps you free up time that can be spent on other marketing pursuits.
It minimizes the chance for errors – you can avoid any miscommunication between team members who might create content covering the same topic.
It creates consistency – customers in this modern era look for brands who are consistent and authentic. Content calendars are valuable because they keep you consistent in churning out content that is cohesive for your brand and audience.
It enables collaboration – when you rely on working together as a team, it’s essential to utilize a content calendar to keep everybody on the same page.
It keeps you accountable – schedules are useful for a reason, it ensures that you focus on all content-related tasks to meet your deadlines.

We wrote a more in depth guide on how to create a successful content calendar, so be sure to check it out for more information!

Scheduling your content in advance is key to staying organized and on top of things. Trust us, you’d want to avoid all that extra stress from having an overwhelming volume of to-dos on your plate.

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2. Batch your content

Since we’ve previously established that content creation can be very time consuming, content batching is a common best practice to win back marketers’ time in their schedule.

If the term is a little new to you, content batching is simply a productivity technique that content creators use to set aside time to create all of your content. Even if you’re not creating content specially for social media, this practice can still apply for creating video or blog content. For example, instead of spending the whole morning juggling to plan and create content for one Instagram post, you’ll spend that time planning for the entire month’s Instagram lineup (captions, content, and graphics).

It sounds contradictory to making your life easier, but it’s actually the opposite. This technique helps you to focus your creative energy without jumping between other tasks and plan your content weeks in advance—without stress.

These are 3 tips to batch your content in no time:

1. Identify your content pillars

Content pillars are the key to every successful content marketing strategy. They’re the 3 to 5 topics which your brand consistently discusses, amplifies, and creates content for on your marketing channels.

You want to select content pillars, or topics, that reflect your brand with themes that your audience are most interested in. Publishing content this way creates a cohesive message across all your marketing channels.

These are highly valuable because content pillars can act as a reference point for content ideas and help you to overcome creative blocks. Plus, these will help you avoid creating last-minute posts.

2. Writing out all your captions

Whilst you’re at it, you can dedicate some time to get in the zone to church out as many caption ideas as possible.

What are the must haves for compelling captions? Here are a few you need to know:

Hook – First things first, you need a hook to stop their scroll and draw your audience’s attention. It should be something that entices your audience, such as “Can I tell you a little beauty secret” or “Best tips for overcoming procrastination”. Remember to be short but snappy, you only have a limited character count for most social media captions.
Line breaks – I don’t know about you, but I avoid reading captions with heavy chunks of text. When writing out your post captions, avoid clutter by adding line breaks. They help to make length captions easy to read and skim!
Emojis – Depending on your brand voice and positioning, emojis can make a huge difference in adding personality, fun, and flair to your caption. So use it wisely!
CTA – These are an absolute must have for any business. If you want to boost your post engagement, use call-to-action phrases to invite them to take action. It could be something like “tag a friend”, “leave a comment”, “remember to save the post for later”, or “click the link in our bio”!

3. Filming your videos

If you haven’t incorporated videos into your content batching plan, this is the time to start! Nowadays, video content is favored more than ever before. Take Instagram for example—even though it began as a picture sharing social media network, the new era of Instagram is putting video content at the forefront of the app. Therefore, adding video content such as Instagram Reels are essential for engagement on the platform.

So, if you’re filming videos for your brand, start by setting aside a portion of your day to batch record your footage. The preparation needed for a video recording often includes a camera setup, props, lighting, and sometimes a backdrop too. By planning ahead, you can save a lot of your time. This way you can focus on one task at a time, and channel your creative energy without interruption.

3. Use a task management app

Other activities that make up a marketer’s day often involve planning email campaigns, conducting keyword research, and brainstorming with the team. Honestly, we’d be lost without our task management apps.

Here are the necessary task management tools for keeping our digital marketing team together:

Trello – We use this tool to manage all our projects, organize tasks, consolidate frequently used information, all on one platform. One of my favorites is using its calendar features for our content management.
Google Workspace (formerly Google Suite) – this tool is perfect for businesses looking to scale up their marketing team’s capabilities. Our team stores up a lot of our content materials on their Google Sheets, Docs, Drive, and important dates on the Google Calendar. It’s an easy-to-use digital hub.

4. Use a keyword research tool

Content research tools are so handy when it comes to creating content that your audience actually wants to see. Whenever we’re not sure about which topics are trending, we can turn to these keyword research tools to better understand what people are searching for.

Some prompts we digital marketers often think about are:

What’s trending right now?
Which news are people talking about?
What’s the latest industry trends?

These keyword research tools help us stay on top of rising trends and boost organic traffic to our website:

Answerthepublic – excellent for researching and writing articles with great SEO. This tool comes with free and premium features which allows you to tap into a wealth of content ideas.
Google Keyword Planner – Among the essential tools in our marketing tool belt, Google Keyword Planner is one of them. You can discover which are the right keywords for your SEO and PPC strategies. The interface shows you key metrics like search volume, trends, CPC, and competition score, which helps you choose the best keywords. The best part of this tool is that it’s free!

You can also check out our other blog on all the digital marketing tools used by experts in 2022.

5. Use Canva to design your graphics

When you have limited graphic design capabilities or resources (for example, when our graphic designer has her hands full), you can get ahead by using design software like Canva. Canva is an online design and publishing tool catered for anyone who wants to design. They’re useful to have because of its easy to use interface, and its template library that’s packed with beautiful templates for users who aren’t accustomed to graphic design.

You can use it to design some templates for your most commonly used social media and blog graphics. This way you won’t have to design from scratch every time you batch content. (It’s a real lifesaver).

The bottom line

While working in marketing may feel overwhelming at times, we promise it’s easier with the help of some tools. The secret to our lean mean marketing team is keeping ourselves organized with the help of readily available tools for planning, design, and task management. These tools help us to streamline our workflows, communications, and reduce our work stress. With these tools and tips, you’ll shave off lots of time in your schedule to leave you more room to get creative and efficient with your marketing efforts!

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