Marketing Agencies Need to Track Time: Here is why they should do it

When you hear the expression 'time is money' you think of businesses that depend on translating their work time into profits. Traditionally, marketing agencies bill their clients on an hourly rate. Therefore, saying 'time' while meaning 'money' is the ultimate truth for the marketing agencies whose and success literally runs on being on time with:

• outlining the clients' needs with precision
• defining the audience  
• working out the winning strategy
• creating the relevant content
• reaching the target audience
• getting the feedback
• analyzing all the metrics
• improving and polishing the performance.

Whether you have to handle billing your customers, or budgeting projects, the proper utilization of your time is critical because it defines how good and successful you are at selling your creative efforts.

Micromanaging your team and imposing control over their schedule might result in breaking the workflow: the marketing employees will feel resentment that can reflect on the quality of their work.

What is the solution? Engaging your team and persuading them that time tracking is of huge benefit! With taking into consideration these 5 facts, your team and you can enhance the business productivity in no time.

• Apply a time tracking app optimized to the needs of your marketing team.

It is not uncommon that the team refuses time tracking upon the awful experience of dealing with software that appears to be too complicated. Luckily, the choice the market offers now is diverse. It can provide you with a simple elegant solution of tracking time without fuss. Launching the app is all you need. The data will be automatically kept and stored for further use.

• Your team is not necessarily in the office permanently.

Quite probable, they can be busy in a meeting, on the phone with a customer, or simply working remotely. It means that a good time tracker in addition to the web app should enable your time tracking experience across any device and provide identically wide functionality regardless of time tracking platform you choose.

• It looks like time tracking data is more than just calculations.

Data and specific metrics make the process of cooperation more transparent. The visibility of hours spent on the tasks makes participants of the process more accountable: the employee gets paid for the job done and the client enjoys the zero time loss when receiving the info on billed hours.

• Marketing agency teams due to their workload might feel undermanned.

With the expanding list of activities that the team is engaged the marketing agency might fall into the trap of unmet deadlines. Application of time tracking might be of great help as the data collected by a time tracker makes hiring more people understandable.

• Time tracking software that integrates with apps you already use is a game-changer in terms of workflow facilitation and giving your team superpowers.

When the integration list of the time tracker includes the apps your marketing employees use, it helps greatly, to say the least. Simply said, it is invaluable in facilitating such activities as optimizing the schedule, processing payrolls, making the time your team spends on email, on phone talks, meetings, working on social media channels accountable.

Solutions to consider

To make your marketing team more productive and overall happier, you need to implement time tracking solution into your business routine that would fit by the criteria mentioned above as time tracking in this case proves one of the best practices for managing marketing projects and getting paid on time.

Among time tracking brands that are perfectly suited for the needs of marketing agencies, there are TMetric, Hubstaff, My Hours, Harvest.

They obtained the status of the time trackers for marketing agencies due to providing:

• easy 'onboarding' process
• fail-proof accuracy of work time calculations
• impressive integration lists
• optimal subscription plans.    

What other solutions would you suggest?