How Marketers Stay Productive: Ben Aston of The Digital Project Manager
This week we feature Ben Aston, Founder of The Digital Project Manager. The Digital Project Manager is the home of digital project management inspiration, how-to guides, tips, tricks, tools, funnies, and jobs. They provide project management guidance and training for the digital wild west where crazy clients, tiny budgets and stupid deadlines reign supreme.
In this interview, you can read more about his work at The Digital Project Manager, favorite marketing tools, productivity tips as well as his advice for budding marketers.
Your location: Vancouver, Canada.
Your favorite gadget: Pebble Steel smart watch.
You start your day with: A tall Americano.
Your favorite time-saving trick: Finalizing my to-do list the night before.
Your top 3 blogs you read daily:
Describe an average day at The Digital Project Manager?
We're always on the hunt for great content so we spend a huge amounf of time researching topics, writing briefs, reviewing articles and writing our own content and visuals. We also prepare and record podcasts, creating infographics and review the analytics to see what's working, and what's not!
As a marketer, what is your favourite productivity hack?
It's not so much of a hack, but to be productive the key is to have a plan. We make sure we're allocating enough time to do the important things properly so we always get to the things that are most important. It's taking the time to plan properly that enables us to focus on strategic things rather than just reacting.
As a person who is well-versed with online marketing, I’m sure you rely on a few marketing tools to automate your site's efforts. What are the top 3 tools you use?
My favourite tools for automation are Mailchimp for email, Missinglettr for social media, and Quuu Promote for influencer engagement.
Your company has a growing community of users. How do you use this treasure trove of customer insight to power your marketing efforts?
Not enough! We've got a growing subscriber list and community on Slack so we engage with them to get more qualitative feedback on the content, rather than just the quantitative data that we get from analytics. These richer insights are harder to get, and synthesize, but are great for helping us decide where to put more, or less effort.
What is your strategy for getting people to your site and then converting them to a customer?
Principally the strategy is creating good content - the bulk of our traffic is organic. However, we combine that with some social promotion on Facebook and Instagram.
Is there any advice you’d like to give to budding marketers to help them work smart and stay productive?
Stop guessing and look at the data - there's always so much we could be doing, but to make any headway and to prioritize properly you need to understand the hard data from analytics, as well as the why - spend time talking to customers and you'll always pick up valuable insights that you can use to optimize your efforts.
A big thanks to Ben for taking the time out to answer these questions! If you haven’t already, we highly recommend that you check out The Digital Project Manager.
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