How to prioritise your marketing activity when you can’t do everything

In 2026, I’ve not seen many marketing or communications teams, or their budgets, get any bigger. The only things that seem to be growing are the to-do list and the number of channels we could be using.

Post more Reels. Start a TikTok. Send more emails. Improve your SEO. Optimise for AI. Build an employee advocacy program. Start a podcast. Work with creators. Jump on the latest trend. Post on LinkedIn. Post more on LinkedIn. The list goes on…

Good marketing and communications planning isn’t about fitting more in. It’s about knowing what deserves to make the cut.

Whether you’re working in a big business, small business, corporate communications team, government, tourism organisation or trying to sell tickets to an event, there will always be more communications activity available than time, money and people to deliver it.

Which means we all need to get much better at deciding what not to do.

Enter: Impact v Effort – one of the simplest frameworks we use at Media Mortar to decide where communications time should go. It’s important because not all communication is born equal.

If your marketing to-do list is too long, Impact v Effort will show you what to cut.

How do you decide what marketing activity is worth your time?

Before picking up a proverbial marketing pencil, plot your proposed activity on an Impact v Effort matrix.

Impact: What value could this activity create? That might be reach, sales, enquiries, behaviour change, understanding, trust, engagement, ticket sales, leads, fewer customer service enquiries or getting one very specific group of people to take action.

Effort: What does it actually take to deliver? Think staff hours, approvals, budget, production, stakeholder management, meetings and ongoing maintenance.

When you plot those two things against each other, your communications activity starts falling into four buckets – quick wins, strategic investments, nice to haves and time drains.

What is an example of a quick marketing win? High impact, low effort

A quick win could be answering a recurring customer question with a simple piece of content. Resurfacing a blog that still gets great engagement. Filming a 30-second phone video instead of producing something polished. Updating a high-performing post and running it again.

It makes strategic sense to prioritise these activities, and then find ways to do more of them.

These activities don’t require enormous resources, but they solve real problems. The last part is important because a post reaching 800 people that prevents 200 unnecessary customer service calls might be considerably more valuable than a Reel reaching 50,000 people who do absolutely nothing afterwards. In marketing, the metric only matters if it connects to what you were trying to achieve.

What is an example of a strategic investment? High impact, high effort

Think a genuinely useful website. Building an email database. Creating an evergreen content library. Investing in SEO. Producing a major campaign. Developing a bank of quality photography and vide. These are the activities that can cost serious dollars or hours, but create meaningful and often long-term returns.

The biggest mistake I see here is businesses treating everything like a strategic investment. There are only so many high-effort activities your team can realistically carry at once. Choose them deliberately – and remember they’re likely to be a long burn.

What’s an example of a nice-to-have? Low impact, low effort

Nice-to-haves aren’t necessarily bad things to have in your marketing plan. However, they become dangerous when you start investing too much time in them.

Maybe it’s posting about an awareness day because it happens to be National Something Day. Maybe it’s updating a graphic nobody particularly needed updated. Maybe it’s attending a meeting where your contribution is approximately four minutes of a 60-minute agenda.

If you’ve got capacity, fine – but nice-to-haves should never push quick wins or strategic investments down the list. In my experience, they usually do because they give a sugar-rush of completing a task rather than sinking your teeth into something more complex.

What is an example of a time drain? Low impact, high effort

This quadrant of the marketing plan is where communications teams can lose extraordinary time.

What sits as a time drain? The highly polished video that takes weeks to produce but doesn’t really have an audience. The six-page newsletter nobody asked for. The graphic painstakingly designed for an announcement that could’ve been a sentence. The meeting about the meeting about the communications plan. The social media post that goes through seven rounds of feedback because 11 people have an opinion about the placement of a comma – we’ve all been there!

These are the activities we need to get ruthless about. Every hour spent in this quadrant is an hour you don’t have for something that could actually move the needle.

Plot twist: sometimes the activity isn’t creating the effort

Here’s where I think Impact v Effort gets even more interesting. Sometimes the communications or marketing activity itself isn’t high effort … the process around it is.

A simple social post becomes high effort because it requires five approvals. A media response becomes high effort because the communications team was brought in at the last minute. A campaign becomes high effort because every stakeholder wants their own message included. A 30-second video becomes high effort because everyone decides it needs to be professionally scripted, filmed, edited, captioned and approved.

So the question isn’t always, “Do we need to do this?”, rather “Could we make this easier to do?”

How do you create more impact from less marketing effort?

One of my favourite ways to find more impact without creating more work is ridiculously simple: get more from the content you already have.

We have a strange tendency in marketing and communications to assume new equals better.
If something worked once, there’s every chance it will work again. Repurposing changes the Impact v Effort equation because the hard thinking has already been done.

One good story could become:

• a website article
• a LinkedIn post
• an Instagram carousel
• a Reel
• an email
• a media pitch
• a staff story
• three FAQs.

That’s one piece of thinking doing eight jobs – talk about content efficiency.

What should you do with your marketing plan to make the most of its impact?

Let’s put your current communications and marketing plan to the Impact v Effort test. Take everything you’re doing right now and map it onto the Impact v Effort matrix. You might be surprised by how much of your team’s time is sitting in the wrong quadrant.

Then ask:
Keep doing: What’s clearly working?
Do more of: What’s working but underinvested?
Stop doing: What’s consuming time without enough return?
Test next: What’s one opportunity worth making room for?

REMEMBER – if we say yes to everything, we’re not prioritising anything. Not all communications are born equal, and it pays for every communicator or marketer to know it.

If you need help prioritising your activity, you know where to find help – hello@mediamortar.com.au