As a Marketing Manager, your time and focus can often be pulled in a million different directions over the course of a day. This can make it seemingly impossible to get your actual workload done. Whether it’s heading out to meetings with clients, holding internal meetings with your team, meeting proposal deadlines or answering an inbox full of emails, where does your marketing role even come in to play? It’s all about getting the right balance. Check out CuCo’s top tips on how to stay on top of your managerial role:

1. Prioritise 

Start everyday by understanding the order in which things need to be completed to create a structure for your day – there is nothing more stressful than realising you’ve missed a majorly important deadline or are late for a meeting that slipped your mind. Put tasks into levels of priority, delegate work where necessary and then focus on completing one task before moving onto the next. Obviously this is sometimes easier said than done, as inevitably newt tasks will pop up and be passed on to you throughout the day (rolls eyes). Don’t panic! Take a second to re-prioritise your list. Take time to make time.

2. Create an Email System

A Managers inbox is often a very busy place and checking emails generally take up way more time than you would imagine. Ensuring you are utilising an effective and organised system will allow you to give yourself a little more free time to spend elsewhere. Of course different systems work for different people but you can easily simplify the email stress by categorising emails into folders such as – Act Now, Read Later and References. Then, once the emails are dealt with, delete or move them into folders relating to that specific client/topic.This system works great for our Marketing team, ensuring we are always on top of important messages and we know where to find an email quickly and easily.

3. Hold Productive Meetings

As a Manager, it is often up to you to organise and hold meetings. In order to maximise your time as efficiently as possible – stick to the point! Try sending a meeting reminder to those invited members along with a brief schedule of what the meeting will involve to allow the team to prepare in advance. This will help everyone involved retain focus on what you are actually there to discuss.

4. Unsubscribe 

Do you really need to be receiving those Groupon deals or Facebook notifications to your work inbox? They are just another reason for 1) distraction and 2) stress. They fill up your inbox and often overwhelm you by giving you the impression that you have 30 emails when actually only maybe 15 – 20 of those are actually important. Do yourself a favour and UNSUBSCRIBE.

5. Use Consistent File Names

Ever get frustrated and catch yourself time wasting trying to find a file you created the day before but forgot either where it was saved or what it was called? Yeah, what a waste of your precious time. This one has a pretty simple solution – use consistent file names. Be as literal as you need to be but ensure other similar files are organised in the same manner. For example, this document is named ‘Blog Post – Top Tips For Marketing Managers’. Another blog may be titled ‘Blog Post – Inbound vs Outbound Marketing’. And guess where they both live? In the Blog Post folder, as easy as pie!

6. Praise Team Members

Last but certainly not least, make your team members feel valued. Employees that value their senior management want to do a good job, want to work hard and want to produce results. Praise them when they do. Employees that receive no recognition for the good and rather only criticism for the bad will be far more unproductive and only frustrate you more. Praise and praise again – a happy team = a happy you!