Work in a marketing agency is full of unique challenges.
Audience targeting, lead generation, rebranding, and other tasks of this kind take a whole lot of creative energy and productive effort. Performing them well means your agency can become more competitive in the ruthless industry. It means you can attract larger clients and boost profitability as your reputation grows stronger and you start to instill greater trust.
The question is: how to achieve such an impeccable work performance?
For this to happen, you surely must be an expert in your field and hire the best of talent. But besides, you have to know the basics of effective project management and take full control over your business resources to drive efficiency and stimulate growth.
That’s where time tracking for marketing agency comes in handy. It helps you see how your team uses its time, analyze productivity, and make informed process improvement decisions. Besides, it automates multiple routine activities, allowing you to focus on high-value marketing tasks and stay tuned in what’s really important.
Read on as we discuss the benefits of time tracking for marketing agencies and explain why every marketing business needs to implement it.
7 Benefits of Time Tracking for Marketing Agencies
1. Excellent Performance Management
Performance management is about ensuring that everything your employees do – either individually or collectively – helps your marketing agency attain its goals and desired project outcomes. It’s about a regular evaluation of team productivity and work results. And it requires you to understand how many tasks your employees can complete over a period of time and how many hours they spend on them.
Here’s how you can apply a smart time tracker to simplify performance management in just a few steps:
- List projects and tasks your team is expected to work on.
- Set deadlines and estimates for those tasks and assign them to responsible employees.
- Instruct everyone to track working hours on a daily basis and, after a while, you will have enough data to run a meaningful performance analysis.
- Generate time tracking reports to scrutinize the collected data, compare the actual numbers against estimates, see how successful your employees are in meeting the set deadlines, and identify whether some of them work slower than they should.
When analyzing your team’s time tracking data, you’re going to see what impedes your business progress and then make conclusions on how to address the found inefficiencies. This way, you can help your employees advance at work and improve team processes for better.
2. Insightful Time Management
Marketing agencies perform hundreds of different activities: they do advertising, content marketing, social media marketing, SEO activities and more. So, they need to understand how time is distributed across these activities and particular tasks included in these activities to understand which of them require automation and additional measures to minimize these time expenditures.
To review time distribution across activities, your time tracker should be able to group tasks into categories and allow you to review them in detailed time reports. actiTIME can help you with that because it allows creating custom fields with any custom values that you can assign to particular tasks.
After you assign these values to tasks and track time against them, you can see how time is distributed across marketing channels or any other type of activities of your choice and review time expenditures for individual tasks for a chosen time period.
If you have several projects and clients, you may include them in this report or pick just one or several clients or projects to be displayed. If you have several custom fields, you can turn them on and off too in the report settings.
To access this report any time without setting it up every time, you can save these settings as a shortcut that will be available on your report dashboard. If you need to download this data, you can turn this report into a CSV file in a few clicks.
3. Accurate Cost and Revenue Tracking
An average marketing plan includes a multitude of diverse activities: SEO, audience research, content creation, and whatnot. The problem is that all these activities are associated with varying costs, and it’s by far not an easy task to track them all accurately – unless you apply a quality piece of time tracking software.
Time trackers let you keep a more precise record of project expenses by including staff-related costs into the picture. In actiTIME, for example, it’s possible to set unique cost of work rates for every member of your marketing team. In other words, you can specify how much money an employee will receive per hour of work, and the time tracker will then make all the cost calculations for you automatically, based on the totals of time invested in a piece of job.
Monitoring costs in such a way, you get a better idea of how much money is actually spent on different marketing activities. And if your software contains billable time tracking functionality as well, you can compare your spending against the revenues gained per specific tasks or projects as a whole.
As a result, you will clearly see which types of work eat up too many resources while bringing small or zero profit. Afterward, your choice is to find a way to make them more cost-efficient or eliminate them entirely.
4. Streamlined Billing and Invoicing
Accounting doesn’t have that much in common with advertising and social media campaigns, yet it plays a vital role in the life of any marketing agency. After all, you can’t ignore tasks that help you get paid and stay profitable. In contrast, you should strive to perform them as efficiently as possible to minimize waste of resources, reduce costs and avoid mistakes.
Luckily for you, time tracking software allows for a streamlined and error-free accounting process. It helps track billable time and then converts it into billable amounts automatically. In addition, it creates invoices in merely a few clicks and rids you of any need to calculate payment totals manually.
Your only job is to add a client’s billing address to an invoice, describe all relevant payment terms in the document, and send it over to the right addressee – your time tracker will take the rest of the billing process on itself.
5. Better Project Estimation
Estimation is an indispensable part of project management. To agree on deadlines and budgets with clients, create realistic plans, and coordinate efforts with your team, you must know how much time and money it will take you to launch that advertising campaign or grow a company’s digital presence. And the better this knowledge is, the lower are the risks of cost overruns and task delays. So, getting precise and credible estimates is crucial before you jump right on any new project.
Here’s how time tracking software can help.
It provides you with valuable historical data on the use of resources in previous projects. And you can apply this data to forecast how much time and money you’ll have to invest in a similar new project in the future.
However, these data can be of service even when you’re estimating an utterly unique project that has no equivalent in your professional experience.
Time tracking results give you a clear idea of your team’s overall performance speed. They show how your employees tend to dispose of their working time in general. And using these clues during the estimation process, you may attain superior forecast accuracy, design more feasible schedules, and avoid significant project risks.
6. Superior Control Over Project Progress
Another critical thing for every marketing project manager to be aware of is progress tracking. It is what helps you make sure your team adheres to the plan, the estimates and deadlines are met, the quality of work is on point, and your clients are satisfied with the end results.
Different time tracking software offers disparate progress monitoring functionality. In actiTIME, for example, you may find the following features:
- Visual estimate trackers | They are located right on users’ timesheets and, with the help of color codes and % values, they clearly show which portion of the set task estimates is already used up and if your team’s timebound objectives are met.
- Reporting widgets | They display employees’ ongoing time tracking results on beautiful sparkline charts. Using them, you may view how many man-hours are spent on tasks in real time.
- Automatic notifications | This feature alerts about the risks of budget and estimate overruns, allowing you to identify and solve problems early on.
- Kanban board | This popular agile tool visualizes the collective work progress by indicating which tasks are currently in progress and which are already done. This way, the board lets you manage workloads more effectively, keep track of deadlines and identify process inefficiencies with ease.
To learn more about the Kanban board and how to apply it along with other actiTIME’s progress tracking features, be sure to visit this blog post.
7. Transparent Client Communication
Healthy and open client-agency collaboration is a guarantee of success in marketing projects. So, it’s pivotal to interact with your clients at every stage in the project management cycle and, for better outcomes, you need to involve them in the work process as closely as possible.
As a means to inform a client about ongoing project progress, you may use comprehensive time tracking reports. Such reports break down all the work you’ve completed and demonstrate how much time has been spent on it. This helps to communicate project costs with ease and avoid misunderstanding about the final billing results (in case you charge your clients on an hourly basis).
You may also create a separate user account for a client in your time tracking software and let them track progress and run required reports firsthand. However, for this to work well, your software should include flexible user permission settings. They let you restrict clients’ access to certain data and software features so that they don’t see any private information or accidentally leak it.
Use High-Quality Time Tracking for Marketing Agencies
Time tracking software fosters better performance management, enhances progress control, and streamlines accounting tasks. Thus, if you want to make your marketing agency more efficient and productive, it’s a good idea to introduce an intelligent and multifunctional time tracking solution to your team.
actiTIME is an excellent option to consider. It contains all the features you need to gain the benefits we described in this post. Plus, it’s highly affordable and simple to use.
To make sure of it yourself, subscribe for a free online trial and start improving your project management outcomes today.
