Quiet Time: Strategic Optimisation During Low Activity Periods

When we think of a career in digital marketing there’s a tendency to imagine an account manager who’s rushed off their feet trying to complete a hundred tasks at once. With new campaign builds, optimisation of existing activity, building out reports and getting ready for the next promotion, having space to breathe is a precious commodity.

However, every now and then you’ll find yourself in a situation where all your tasks have been completed, the campaigns are ticking along nicely and, just for a second, there’s no looming crisis on the horizon. It’s a rare occurrence and it’s definitely not going to last forever but when that time does come around it presents an opportunity to work in a way that’s not possible during day to day management.

This week, we’ll look at a few ways this downtime can be used to effectively drive performance by discovering opportunities and insights that can be missed during routine optimisation.

1) Relax & Recharge

The fact is, if you weren’t doing a good job at managing the account you wouldn’t have this downtime in the first place. Account performance is driven by consistent, high quality management and a well run account is a direct reflection of the quality of the person running it.

Digital marketing can be a high stress career and it’s important to recognise this during periods of less activity. Making space to relax and give the brain a chance to recharge is an excellent use of this time as it helps to rebuild mental energy for the next busy period which is always just around the corner. Whether it’s taking a walk or scaling back optimisation to focus on the basics for a few days, a temporary reduction in stress will help ensure that the quality of work remains consistent whatever the account throws at you. Often, you’ll find that you’ve been subconsciously thinking about problems and potential solutions over this period which will mean you come back with fresh ideas as activity begins to ramp up.

2) Develop Deeper Business Context

During day to day optimisation, managers can be so wrapped up in campaign performance that they forget to see the bigger picture. Campaign data is useful, but the business being advertised has a huge amount of additional information that can be used to build more effective marketing strategies for long term performance.

During periods of less activity, speaking directly to your client contacts about the state of the business, other marketing activity that’s live and long term strategic focuses is a very effective way to use time. Not only will these conversations give valuable information that will help to drive account performance forward, they’re also a useful way to build deeper relationships and create trust between businesses and the people running their marketing activity.

3) Lower Priority Optimisations

Any account manager will be able to give you a list of tasks they’d love to take a look at on their account, if only they had the time. These tasks aren’t critical to account performance but they’d drive incremental gains and ensure that all activity is running according to best practice.

These lower priority optimisation tasks can cover things like negative keyword list reviews, analysis of audiences applied to the account, demographic & time segmentation data and even a strategic review of ad copy that’s been continually pushed back as more urgent tasks take priority.

Focusing on a few of these “nice to have” optimisation tasks is an excellent use of downtime when all the crucial optimisations have been taken care of. Taking the time to properly review these areas leads to the discovery of opportunities for optimisation and helps to ensure the long term stability of the account.

Prioritisation will always be a crucial part of managing an account and during periods of high activity it’s understandable that some things will be forced to take a back seat. Noting areas that could be improved is a great start so that when those quiet periods do come around there’s already a list of potential tasks in place to ensure that the period is spent productively and effectively. Along with a focus on the account, it’s also important for managers to focus on themselves and ensure these periods are used to relax and recharge, ready for the next busy period.

For world class digital marketing strategies during peak & quiet periods, get in touch.