5 Benefits of Time Tracking Solutions for Digital Marketing Agencies

Digital marketing has always been the ideal job for remote work. Think about it: 

• You have to brainstorm ideas with the team – can be done on Zoom or Skype; 
• You have to conduct research on what competitors are doing – requires a computer with the Internet; 
• You have to create presentations for pitches – again, your computer’s got your back. 

Digital marketers were always keen to work remotely, but they never really got the chance to do so because… well, “company policy”. 

The novel coronavirus was a disaster, except for the fact that it finally gave digital marketers the push they so desperately wanted.

Adjusting to a remote working environment was challenging for managers and their teams, but things started to come around in due time. Today, about 1 in 5 digital marketing agencies have adapted to remote working culture, with over 80% of the managers believing that their teams have become more productive. 

However, marketing managers have been struggling with tracking the number of hours their teams spend working versus their actual capacity. That’s why they are now turning towards dedicated time tracking tools to make their jobs easier. These time trackers help: 

• Track the number of hours employees are putting in daily
• Gauge their teams' performance 
• Provide relevant productivity insights
• Streamline resource allocation to tasks accordingly 
• Ensure timely project completions

This brings us to the discussion we were having the other day about the impact of time trackers on marketing teams. During the discussion, our Senior Digital Marketing Manager pointed out that time trackers do not only improve efficiencies at work but also complement certain core traits of digital marketers. 

Let’s take a look at a few of those traits here and talk about how they benefit agencies.

#1 Marketers Like To Spit Ideas – Time Trackers Brings Focus into  Their Creative Process

A core part of a marketer’s job is to brainstorm ideas for different clients and their campaigns. Coming up with the perfect Big Idea is a difficult task in itself: they deal with the thoughts of potential rejection, the inability to fully grasp a product’s value propositions, and of course, the unending self-doubt about meeting the campaign’s KPIs. 

The point is, getting into a creative mindframe is challenging, and you, as a manager, want your employees to use all that creative energy in developing winning marketing campaigns instead of spending it on tasks like manual hour logging. 

Such activities can disrupt anyone’s train of thought, which may cause your team to lose focus on what’s important: brewing up new ideas. A good way to prevent such instances is to start using a smart time tracking software. Such tools automate time tracking for your team, with the latter adding a few more functionalities like project management and resource planning for managers. 

#2 Marketers Like Liberty – Time Trackers Are All About That

Marketing agencies are all about liberty. You cannot bind a creative person to think a certain way; it ruins their ability to create effective campaigns. With smart time tracking, your team gets all the freedom they need to sweep clients and their audiences off their feet.

For instance, timegram gives employees the liberty to eliminate personal browsing or app usage data from their recorded activities  (called Highlights). On the other hand, managers also benefit from this by receiving a clean report with only productive data, saving them from sifting through non-productive activities. 

By doing this, timegram allows your team to stop worrying about time tracking and focus purely on being creative, even if it means watching a 5-minute motivational YouTube video to get their head back into the game. The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising revealed that award-winning campaigns are 11 to 12 times more effective win because:

• Employees who are given liberty work more creatively 
• More creative employees produce more effective campaigns
• And more effective campaigns mean bagging more clients and business for your agency 

What we’re trying to say is that you need to give your team the creative freedom it needs to create top-tier marketing campaigns.

#3 Marketers Love Solving Problems – Time Trackers Do The Same For Them

Every marketer’s main job is to resolve their customers’ pain points. This can be challenging at times, especially with the numerous tasks involved in creating winning campaigns. Furthermore, with over 63% of companies working on a hybrid model, delegating tasks can get tricky for managers. 

With time tracking and resource planning solutions, managers can easily create projects, divide them into subtasks, and allocate them to different team members. At the end of the day, you get insights into the actual time spent by each team member on the task and compare it against what you estimated, allowing you to gauge your team’s real capacity. 

So, the next time you assign projects, the actual timelines will reflect the estimated ones, improving the overall efficiency of your team; that’s a marketer’s pain point resolved right there! 

#4 Marketers Are All About Actionable Insights – Time Trackers Provide Them With The Best Ones

Marketers feed on insights, be it the traffic numbers of a website, cost and ROI analysis of paid campaigns, or conversion rates of a landing page. These insights are critical to ensure that their content reaches relevant audiences at the right time, yielding better results and higher ROI for their marketing campaigns.

Every move a digital marketer makes revolves around insights, even when it comes to self-management. They are always keen to find out how they could improve their productivity or prioritize routine tasks. 

Time tracking solutions provide productivity reports that help marketing managers analyze the time spent on different tasks along with their strengths and weaknesses. By having insights into who your top performers and average Joes for each type of task are, you will be better equipped to use your team’s talent in the best way possible for higher efficiency in the next project. 

#5 Marketing Agencies Are Able To Generate Timely And Accurate Invoices 

One of the biggest and most time-consuming tasks for marketing managers is extracting billable hours and sending them to Finance for generating invoices to share with clients. This may not sound painful if you only have a client or two onboard, but as the number of accounts increases, things can quickly start getting out of hand. 

The worst part is that the time spent on this process doesn’t productively contribute to the agency’s performance – you could better spend those hours pitching a new account or streamlining campaigns for existing clients. 

timegram relieves marketers of this worry. With your team logging accurate time spent against each project, billable hours are automatically calculated for each project (based on the preset rates by admins). All that’s needed from your side is a click here and there, and boom! The invoice is generated.

You can also set workflows to share the invoices with your clients from within the timegram app – thank us later.

timegram for Digital Marketing Agencies

With zero disturbances, full autonomy, and total privacy, digital marketers get to do things their way a whole lot better. timegram reflects the same traits, making it the right partner for your agency. 

In addition to being your new BFF, there are a few reasons why timegram can be ideal for your digital marketing agency. 

• It offers seamless time tracking and reporting which saves time; this is critical in the highly competitive digital market
• It remains quietly active in the background, minding its own business throughout the day, ensuring it doesn’t disrupt your teams’ creative thought processes
• With accurate insights, marketing managers like you can allocate tasks more effectively to increase the team’s productivity and consequently improve the agency’s position in the market 

If you like it, how about you sign up now?