Why Time Tracking is Important for Your Marketing Team

Nowadays more and more businesses are starting to use time tracking, and many sing praises about its benefits. However, to be perfectly honest time tracking isn’t new and has existed in various forms for centuries.

The difference is that compared to manually tracking the time employees work or using punch-card systems – now time tracking is digital. That makes it not only more automated but also lets you know exactly how your employees are spending their work hours.

That information is extremely useful throughout your business. But it is even more important for your marketing team.

Improve Performance

The data from time tracking is extremely useful to help improve the performance of individual employees as well as your marketing team as a whole. Because it keeps tabs on how your employees are spending their time, you can identify inefficiencies, distractions, and workflow bottlenecks.

For example, you may find that meetings take up a lot of your marketing teams’ time. Or that some marketing processes have too many steps and involve too many people – which can cause cascading delays.

The empirical data from time tracking will let you identify areas that need to be improved. In that way, you can improve the productivity and performance of your marketing team more effectively and not just stab in the dark.

At times other analysis tools can help. For example, if you use Harvest for time tracking you can integrate Harvest to Google Sheets to export its data and analyze it further alongside other relevant data about your marketing team’s work.

Set Fair and Measurable Goals

One of the problems with setting goals for marketing teams is that they can be too results-oriented. In other words ‘success’ or ‘failure’ is defined based on the success or failure of marketing campaigns – because that is what is quantifiable.

However, at times the success or failure of campaigns may be due to factors beyond the control of your team. In such cases, it would not be fair to use goals that hinge on the campaign results.

Time tracking data can give you another way to set goals – one that is both fair and yet measurable. The tracking data will let you see the time spent working on a campaign, which can then be linked to the work that was done.

If you set goals based on working hours, work completed and results it will be not only more comprehensive – but also fair.

Distribute Tasks Effectively

As you go over the data from time tracking, you will be able to keep tabs on how long your marketing team members are spending on different tasks. And when you do, you may notice that some members spend significantly less (or more) time on certain tasks.

If an employee completes tasks quickly and with satisfactory results, it may indicate that they are particularly skilled at that task. In which case assigning similar tasks to them may improve the efficiency of your team.

Similarly, if an employee completes certain tasks more slowly, it may be that they’re unfamiliar with that task or require better training. To address that you can either choose to assign them tasks that fit their skill set better, or sign them up for the training they need.

Overall the time tracking data will let you distribute tasks far more effectively, and increase the efficiency of your marketing team.

Prevent Burnouts

The work of your marketing team may seem like it is never really done. There are always new campaigns that need to be launched as well as existing campaigns that need to be optimized.

Using time tracking will let you know exactly how many hours your employees are working. Its data will show if anyone is overworking, and at risk of burning out.

When you notice that any member of your marketing team is working longer hours than they should, you can look at ways to adjust their workload or talk to them about it. Not only will that prevent burnout, but it will show your employees that you care and help motivate them.

Calculate Marketing Costs

Costs are important to every marketing campaign. After all, you need to know that the amount you spend on marketing is justified and focus on campaigns that have a good return on investment (ROI) based on the marketing costs.

But people often forget that time is money too – and the amount of hours your marketing team works on a campaign should be included when you calculate the overall cost of any campaign. Normally you’d have to simply estimate the working hours spent on a campaign, but with time tracking you can be far more specific.

The data from time tracking will let you know the overall working hours spent on a marketing campaign by every member of your team. With that data, you can calculate exactly what the costs were in terms of man-hours – even if the rates differ for different employees.

By improving the accuracy of your marketing cost calculations, you’ll also improve the accuracy of your ROI calculations.

Make More Accurate Estimates

Last but not least, after you’ve gathered data for some time you can use it to make more accurate estimates for future marketing campaigns. The estimates can include the number of work hours required for certain campaigns as well as the marketing costs.

With more accurate estimates you can then plan your marketing campaign and distribute tasks more effectively – helping maximize the use of your marketing team’s time. The more data you gather, the more accurate your estimates will be.

Conclusion

As you can see, time tracking can play a very important role for your marketing team. It isn’t just about making sure that your employees are working – but also improving performance, efficiency, and giving you the data you need to make better decisions regarding your marketing campaigns.

To put it simply – if you aren’t already using time tracking, you’re missing out. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll be able to gather crucial data that you’ll need in the future.