Most of us have used a checklist for personal, financial, and even professional goals. But many marketers are overlooking how a marketing checklist can have a huge impact on campaign efficiency, effectiveness, and quality. Whether you’re an in-house department or an agency, taking advantage of checklists is vital for maximizing your work process. They can help improve workflow and efficiency and cut down waste.
What Is A Marketing Checklist?
A marketing checklist can be an incredibly powerful workflow enhancement tool. The modern checklist doesn’t involve a pen and paper, instead using current technology, cloud-based infrastructure, and smooth user interfaces. You can even find checklist templates that help with repetitive tasks, like onboarding new clients or increasing your team’s efficiency.
Improve Workflow
The most important way checklists like those you can create with Swydo will help you is by improving workflow. Not only will having a list of steps reduce errors, increase productivity, and create clear goals, they make the whole process easy to communicate to your team.
Checklists offer a host of benefits. For example, checklist templates let you quickly set up projects, easily delegating tasks to the right member and seeing real-time progress. You can use a number of tools to make your own marketing checklists to maximize your productivity.
Marketing checklists can help improve a number of areas in your work process, including onboarding clients, SEO audits, content creation and promotion, article writing, and more. From making communication easier to helping improve collaboration, checklists and checklist templates can make your work life easier in a number of ways.
8 Reasons To Use A Checklist
Checklists undoubtedly improve workflow, but they also hold a number of other benefits.Implementing lists into your agency can yield most of these benefits almost immediately. Here are 8 of the top reasons to use a marketing checklist.
1. Decision Fatigue Is Real
Marketers make decisions constantly throughout the day. From deciding PPC keywords to allocating social media spend, decision fatigue can build up throughout the day. Checklists help relieve this fatigue by streamlining the decision making process. Rather than make similar decisions week after week, marketing checklists codify the most effective choice, freeing your time up for more critical choices.
This becomes especially true when working with low level decisions. Odds are you won’t be making radical changes to your work process every week. A checklist can completely offload these decisions, requiring your team to simply follow the lists to perform these lower level tasks.
2. Make Fewer Mistakes
When you keep processes, metrics, and strategies in your head, there’s a chance you could forget something important. By omitting one key metric or step can cause tons of damage to your campaign. This not only elongates how long the campaign needs, but can result in thousands of dollars in losses. Mistakes are bound to happen, but using marketing checklists can help reduce these errors. They act like a safeguard against human error.
When you’re working as part of a team, this becomes even more important. The more people involved in a project, the more likely there is to be a mistake. Checklists can scale to your organization, helping manage larger projects and ensuring a high quality of work.
3. Improve Collaboration
Traditionally, tasks were delegated in person during meetings. Marketing checklists and templates, however, remove the need for lengthy and time consuming meetings. Instead of constantly checking in via phone calls and email, team leads can rest assured knowing their team has a checklist to follow.
Even after a task has been delegated, they can be updated through the Swydo platform. This means that if there was a major change in strategy over the weekend, everyone’s going to be on the same page Monday morning. By updating the checklist, everyone can see the new goals and activities for the week ahead.
Checklists also help keep everyone on the same page. If your agency is working on a unique campaign, a checklist will clearly state each step, KPIs, and campaign goals. That way there’s less of a chance of any confusion.
4. Streamline Repetitive Tasks
In every campaign, there are always repetitive tedious tasks throughout the process. Whether it’s compiling weekly reports or allocating paid advertising spend, these tasks feel repetitious. But it’s critical that everyone does these tasks consistently. A checklist can help streamline these repetitive processes, minimizing variance between different employees.
5. Measure Your Results
Marketers are constantly looking at a sea of metrics, KPIs, and data. Assessing the information and making strategic decisions can be daunting. You can use a checklist to give context to your campaign results by creating a list of your weekly or monthly goals. This clearly lays out which targets you’re hitting or missing.
By not using a checklist to keep track of your goals, you may have a harder time visualizing campaign success. But when you see that you’re only hitting 3 out of 5 targets, you can more effectively respond to what you’re missing.
6. Create More Efficient Processes
One of the most important benefits of using checklists is how it improves your process. It helps cut down on the number of steps involved in a task by letting you map out each one. For example, when you’re performing an SEO audit, you may have been repeating some of the work without even realizing it. A list will help you cut that extra work out by clearly laying the process out in front of you.
Checklists can be both ordered or unordered. Create a checklist of specific steps, to be completed in order, or just create a list to make sure that you hit all of the important points. Each option can make your work process more efficient.
7. Increase Productivity
Working in a high level marketing position can be tiring. Collaborating with a team, handling client expectations, and the huge amount of metrics and data to parse through can leave any marketer drained. Trying to remember complex steps can hurt your ability to concentrate, resulting in a loss in productivity and more chances to make mistakes. But a marketing checklist can help ease the burden by storing vital information. This ensures that you’re mind is freed up to focus on taking in clients, managing your team, and increasing productivity.
8. Communicate More Effectively
Digital communications are revolutionizing the marketing industry. From automated report generation to group updates, marketers are embracing communication innovations. Marketing checklists are a welcome addition to the space. Not only do they help clearly tell each team member what their tasks are, but they can instantly update the whole team on everyone’s progress.
With checklists like the templates offered by Swydo, delegating work and getting immediate feedback is built into the platform. Rather than risking the loss of vital information in communication, the team can instantly respond to updates. Any improvement in communication efficiency can yield huge increases in productivity.
What To Put On A Checklist
When you’re making a checklist, you want to consider the context that it’s being used for. If you’re making a list of steps in a process, it’s important to include all steps. For example, when performing keyword research, it could be easy to differentiate local from national keywords. A checklist is the perfect way to make sure to remember these key details.
When making a list for analyzing results, you want to incorporate the most important information and omit the smaller details. If you’ve made a list to evaluate a landing page, you’ll want to include all of your KPIs like conversions, CTR, and bounce rate. But you’ll want to omit details that may not be relevant, like number of impressions on a search engine.
The nice thing about checklists is that they’re incredibly versatile and easy to make or change. If you make a checklist that doesn’t quite meet your needs, you can easily update it to make it work for you.
Optimizing Your Workflow With Checklists
Checklists are incredibly versatile, helping to maximize workflow efficiency. They can be used in a range of applications, from collaboration to measurement to communications. Using checklists produces a number of benefits for marketers, saving time, money, consistency, and boosting productivity. Checklists can be an indispensable instrument in your suite of marketing tools.