Ian Doescher
Ian Doescher is the director of nonprofit marketing at Pivot Group, a marketing agency in Portland, Oregon. He can be reached at ian@askpivot.com.

This is the Efficiency Issue of Digger, so I’m joining the party to talk about efficiency in marketing. By that I mean ways you can do more with less: less time, less money, fewer resources and so on.

You may be expending too much time, effort or money. Here are a few simple suggestions for ways to be more efficient in your marketing efforts:

1. Review what is working and what isn’t. Take a close, critical look at all of your marketing efforts with an eye toward removing the least effective items. This can be a hard process because sometimes we run across items in our marketing budgets that have been there for decades, without ever questioning why. When was the last time the Yellow Pages ad generated business for you? Are you better off spending that money elsewhere, perhaps on targeted Facebook ads? Reviewing your current materials and their effectiveness can help you have a more efficient marketing budget.
2. Streamline your regular communications. Are you currently sending out a monthly newsletter, weekly emails, and daily Facebook posts to try to keep your audience engaged? If so, well done! And yet, this may be a good opportunity to reduce the time you spend writing regular customer communications. Do you need to send a weekly email, or could the same information be sent every other week? Do your customers rely on a monthly newsletter, or would quarterly work equally well? There is a balance here, of course; I would never recommend stopping a communication tool that is truly effective. But the odds are that — in conjunction with the kind of review I propose in suggestion above — you’ll realize you can cut down on some of your regular communications.
3. Aggregate your social feeds. If you maintain several social media pages at once, don’t feel like you need to have unique content on every channel. It’s wonderful if you do, of course, but most business owners I talk to aren’t saying, “Wow, I just have so much content and not enough places to put it.” Instead, what I tend to hear is, “How do I come up with something to post every day?” Let one post do the work across multiple channels. Services like Hootsuite or Hubspot let you easily post messages to multiple social media channels at once (and schedule them in advance, too). Save yourself time and stress by using the same post on a couple of channels.
4. Go back to the well. When it comes to creating marketing materials, you can improve your efficiency by not reinventing the wheel. If you had a great design for an ad and you’re making a postcard next, don’t redesign it. Instead, just adapt your original design. If the copy you wrote for your radio ad works just as well for your website, use it. If you had three good ideas last time you brainstormed and only used one, use one of the other ideas.
5. Keep your copy simple. “Brevity is the soul of wit,” said Polonius in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The U.S. Navy put it less poetically: “Keep it simple, stupid.” When it comes to efficiency, start with your language. Don’t clutter your sentences with unnecessary words, flowery adjectives or unnecessary pronouns. “The beautiful plants that the adoring people love are now on sale” is as equally well expressed as, “The plants people love are on sale now.” (For inspiration, play with the slider on getcoleman.com.)

One final caveat: When it comes to marketing, effectiveness beats everything — including efficiency. But marketing efficiency is a worthy goal, and taking some of the steps above is a good start.

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Explore the EFFICIENCY ISSUE Rising costs, labor scarcity and competition create challenges for growers. Greater efficiency can be the answer. We talked to more than a dozen growers and industry colleagues who have become more efficient, and increased their bottom line, by improving their management, workflows, inputs and workspaces Your efficient nursery business Part one: Managing for efficiency Part two: Creating an efficient workflow Part three: Using your inputs efficiently Part four: Arranging the workspace Money efficiency – Carol Suruki of Moss Adams LLC