The best systems to boost productivity
PLUS: What are your marketing blind spots?
“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”
Maya Angelou’s famous quote is a strong setup for this week’s strategies for productivity, marketing blind spots, and key insights on social media usage.
Let’s dig in.
Today’s agenda:
⚒️ Best productivity systems
🦾 What’s holding your marketing back?
📱 Platforms your audience loves the most
💼 Briefly: AI agents, TikTok’s ban, and diagnosing traffic drops
⏱️ Up & coming
Streamline your productivity
Efficient productivity systems lead to a better work-life balance and the ability to sprint full-speed ahead when necessary, says Jenny Romanchuk for Hubspot.
👉 Systems to leverage:
Pomodoro Technique: Breaks up work into chunks of 25 minutes of focused work followed by deliberate 5-minute breaks (of course, you can adjust the timing to be what works for you)
Eat the Frog: Do the hardest tasks first to simplify the rest of your day
Eisenhower Decision Matrix: Prioritizes tasks into four main quadrants: Do first, schedule, delegate, eliminate
Best productivity tools: Trello, Asana, ClickUp
💡 Which tools and strategies are you currently using?
Shift your marketing perspective
We all have marketing “blind spots” that we aren’t aware of—but if they’re blind spots, how do we know what we don’t know?
🕳️ Joy Gendusa, founder/CEO of PostcardMania, has worked with over 115,000 businesses and has witnessed these common pitfalls:
Forgetting to keep tabs on your competitors and understand what is working well for them (and doing it better!)
Neglecting to ask your customers what it is about your business that they value vs. your competitors
Failing to leverage the power of offline marketing vs. strictly digital efforts (check out these direct mail stats)
💡 Consider reaching out to your most loyal clients for insights, or sending an email survey inquiring about what made your brand stand out vs. your competitors.
Are you using the right social platforms?
Pew Research Center’s annual report on social media use in the U.S. found that YouTube is the most-used platform by U.S. adults.
🔑 Key stats:
83% of respondents have used YouTube, followed by Facebook (68%) and Instagram (47%)
TikTok is the fastest-growing platform
Adults under age 30 are more likely than those over 30 to use Instagram, SnapChat, and TikTok
Adults ages 30-49 are more likely than other ages to use LinkedIn, WhatsApp, and Facebook
🎯 The report can offer valuable insights to businesses trying to target certain age groups across platforms.
💡 The best way to gauge social usage in your audience is by conducting your own surveys and analyzing engagement metrics on your channels.
Briefly
🤖 Tech giants are working toward leaving chatbots behind in favor of AI agents capable of actually solving problems instead of just offering advice about them
📉 Google released an insightful guide to help businesses diagnose the reasons behind drops in organic traffic, and Search Engine Land took it a step farther with three additional reports
📱 Former treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin told CNBC he’s trying to put together an investor group to buy TikTok amid the government’s attempts to ban the app
✍️ 6 myths, mistakes, and misunderstandings you may be making with your content and SEO
⚒️ Social platform Bluesky is giving users and teams more control over their timelines with moderation tools
Up & Coming
Apple may build Google’s Gemini into the iPhone, according to new reports.
The deal isn’t likely to be announced until June, but the decision would help with both expanding Google’s AI services while also catching Apple up in the AI world.