Increasing workforce productivity is a chief concern of almost every company, and especially in the marketing field, where workers face growing workloads, workers need a way to get everything done.
Unfortunately, productivity growth has stalled in recent years. According to BLS data, productivity actually declined in 2016 for some unknown reason. Even productivity among marketers has slipped in recent years.
The recent decline is likely temporary. Companies are investing in new technology to boost productivity growth in the coming years. Marketers have discovered a number of great tools that could help them streamline many of their most important tasks. Investing in big data is one of the best ways to create a more productive marketing team.
Here are some ways that big data is driving productivity growth.
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Give Employees Guardrails for Productivity
Searching for information, switching between tabs, and copying data between systems are all tasks that knowledge workers do hundreds of times a day, and the time lost in such simple acts is huge.
These problems are caused by companies not prioritizing process, sharing, and automation to give their workforce guardrails for executing repeatable tasks.
Big data can help identify which processes are causing the most lost time, and automation of routine tasks can help eliminate the worst ones from your team’s workflow. Project management tools like Wrike allow large teams to store up-to-date project data in a central place, so everyone is accessing accurate information. They can also help companies automate moving information through the company’s various systems, so workers can focus on more strategic work. These types of tools are essential for employers to get the most out of their organization.
Choosing the best vendors and third-party tools
Last month, I went to a technology conference in Silicon Valley. The keynote speaker emphasized the benefits of using big data to improve the hiring process. The expert stated that big data helps in a number of ways, including quickly verifying credentials, conducting skill tests during the interview and assessing performance from previous positions.
Countless other experts have reiterated this point. However, not nearly enough experts have talked about how big data can be used to identify the best tools and vendors to fuel productivity growth. It is used to see how all of these solutions perform, see you can make better informed decisions when you need them.
Finding keywords and placements more easily
Creating ads and landing pages isn’t the most difficult part of marketing. The most time intensive process is finding the right keywords and placements to display your ads.
In the past, this process was very time-consuming. Marketers running paid search campaigns would need to manually review all relevant keywords in the Google Keyword Planner. Finding placements for PPV or media buying campaigns was even more tedious. Marketers would need to manually conduct searches to find placement partners. This process could take days or even weeks if they were running Google searches.
Big data has made both of these processes much easier. There are a number of ways that they can find targets more quickly, including:
- Running Google Display campaigns to find websites with similar content. These websites can then be used for brokering media display ads or targeting with PPV traffic.
- Using scraper tools such as Skrayp to find urls much more quickly than you would with manual searches.
- Using ad spy tools, such as Box of Ads to find new placement opportunities.
- Using tools such as SimilarWeb to find related websites to the sites that you are already targeting with your ads.
All of these processes are exponentially more efficient than the strategies that marketers used in years past.
Dealing with social loafing culprits
A growing number of employees are using social media at work. Many employers use to have policies prohibiting it. They have since come to realize that barring access to social media websites entirely is not necessarily the best idea.
However, you still need to be careful not allow place to waste too much time on social media. Recent studies have shown that time wasted on Facebook alone costs employers close to $3.5 trillion a year.
It is important to track the amount of time your employees spend on social media websites. If individual employees are spending too much time, you need to take appropriate action.