Every noteworthy CEO considers sales their business’s lifeblood; you won’t have said sales without strong marketing project management.
Ineffective marketing managers tend to tunnel their vision on micromanagement, such as content and goal creation, which shouldn’t be the case. More often than not, teams that execute different tasks with consistent levels of high efficiency generate the most increased traction.
To excel in your campaigns’ marketing strategies, we’ve compiled ways on how you can improve your marketing project management.
Initiate Your Marketing Project
You should always initiate your marketing projects with goals and requirements in mind, whether for the holidays or advertising campaigns. Below are some of the steps to do this.
Define Your Goals for Projects
Any project, not just those concerning marketing, should always begin with goal setting. A 2022 marketing report revealed that marketing teams that set practical goals have a 376% chance of being more successful.
This step can include general goals, such as choosing the right lead generation strategy or social media traction.
You’d also be wise to keep your goals specific, measurable, accurate, realistic, and time-bound, or SMART for short. These goal qualities ensure you don’t bite what you can’t chew.
For example, you want your current marketing campaign to increase your website’s conversion rates. Instead of simply saying that, try putting it this way: increase our website conversion rate by 75% by the third week of the project’s implementation.
Define Project Requirements
After setting goals for your project, you should now define the necessities to attain those goals. This could include staffing, software, and other logistics. You should also try to look at contingency requirements such as additional funding, as it could be handy for unexpected events.
Try inflating the number of countable necessities by a bit for emergencies. If you think you’ll need ten reams of bond papers for your posters, you can add one more in case one ream gets wet, or you misprint something.
Plan Your Marketing Project
This step is where you include the nitty-gritty bits of initial project management, such as resource assessment, project scheduling, and task allocation.
Assess Your Resources
After you’ve defined your project’s requirements, you should check if your present resources can fill the necessities. If not, you should check for possible adjustments without compromising the quality of the outcomes.
These adjustments could come from hiring new staff or purchasing new software to accommodate your project. Think of them as investments that could benefit your company in the long run.
You should also never cheap out on crucial components of a marketing campaign since the outputs heavily reflect your company’s image.
Seek Investments to Complete Your Project
Of course, you’ll need funds to fulfill any type of project. There are many different types of investments that you may seek.
For example, you can try directly investing in a high-yield savings account that provides interest rates significantly more than the national average. The higher interest rates enable you to save up for your project’s long-term necessities.
Alternatively, you can opt for a conventional savings account should some of its perks, such as ease of access, be important to you.
You can also invest in a certificate of deposit (CD). This savings account is among the safest ways of investing since it pays interest to the issuing bank in exchange for holding a specific amount of money for a particular time.
CDs are particularly useful if you know that your project will go on for a period long enough for you to need some additional funds after the maturity date set forth.
Then, there are money-market funds, mutual funds that invest in fixed-income assets with short maturities and minimal credit risk. These are good if you’re looking for higher returns than a high-yield savings account with comparable risk. The short maturity also makes it suitable for immediate marketing campaigns.
Suppose you’re looking for more immediate funding solutions. In that case, you can try taking a business line of credit, a revolving loan that provides you access to a pool of money you can gradually use to cover short-term company requirements.
You can also take other loans, such as business loans. Contrary to a business line of credit, a loan immediately gives you a lump sum of money instead of having the funds gradually.
Schedule Your Projects
Setting a timetable to keep track of things is also an effective way to manage your marketing projects. You could do this via a physical calendar in your office or a virtual calendar through productivity-boosting applications such as Trello or Google Workspace.
You should also ensure that your team accomplishes their tasks before the deadlines. You could ask your team about their initial expectations on how long they can finish their tasks, giving you a better time projection.
You can also look at past time frames to give you a better idea of how fast the team can accomplish one task. Was a two-day leeway not enough to finish a design template? Consider adding a day or more to it.
Break Out Your Projects Into Tasks
Keeping bigger tasks into bite-sized deliverables keeps your team from feeling overwhelmed. This also makes it easier to track overdue tasks and solve them as soon as possible.
For example, you could break your advertising campaign project into smaller tasks such as initial brainstorming, email creation and sending, and design creation. If this still proves overwhelming for them, keep it even smaller.
Assigning tasks to the most appropriate person should also be your team’s norm. You wouldn’t give graphic design tasks to those without experience in the field, right?
If you don’t know your team’s strengths yet, it won’t hurt to ask them directly about it. After all, including them in the planning process makes things easier for you.
You can still assign untrained teammates to tasks that they have no initial experience with. However, this can only be efficient if you schedule a training period before your campaign starts. Training them in the middle of your campaign can put things on hold.
Execute Your Marketing Project
Once you’ve finished planning your project, it’s time for its execution. Below are some steps on how you can do it.
Create, Publish, and Share Your Content
Creating your content shouldn’t be your main focus if you’re the project manager. After all, you must have a more unmistakable look at the bigger picture. You should only direct your assigned members with what you want to see in the final content while also considering their insights. A project management slide helps to easily present the assigned tasks and the plan among your peers.
After refining the drafts, you can now publish them through the proper avenues. It can be a good idea to share it with your partnered companies, personalities, or retailers online. Alternatively, you can send them physical posters for distribution if you’ve included that in your marketing deck.
Monitor Marketing Project Progress
You should keep Murphy’s Law in mind when monitoring your project’s progress. It says that “anything that can go wrong will go wrong,” and unfortunately, this is true most of the time.
Practice reviewing your marketing project’s progress every day. You can designate some members as task leaders if you have a big enough team to report daily progress. This way, you can solve a problem at its roots before it grows so much that it halts your operations.
You could also use tests to gauge your content’s effectiveness. You could try heatmap testing to show you which part of your website gets the most traction.
Try to look at the available metrics to see which content gets you the most interaction, and try focusing on that.
Close Your Marketing Project
Once you’re content with your goals or have finished your targeted timeframe, it’s time to close your project and move on to a new one.
Measure the Project’s Impact on Your Goals
After a closed marketing project, you should measure its effects on your company. Examine all available metrics since Day 1 and compare them with your previous marketing projects and this project’s initial goals.
Ask yourself if you’ve met this project’s initial goals, if this project is more effective than the last one, and if there are other improvements you can work on.
Try also to see your posted content and look at what got you the highest web traffic and interactions, generated the most lead conversions, and sold the most products. If you’ve already adjusted your efforts while monitoring your marketing progress, try to compare the differences before and after.
Taking Marketing Project Management to Another Level
Project management, more so with marketing, can be challenging. Fortunately, the tips we’ve shown you today make you better equipped to handle a marketing project.
However, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all in project management– you’ll learn which styles suit you best along the way. Nonetheless, you’d do well to start with these tips as your framework.
You should also remember that keeping communication lines open with your team will benefit you more than any project management tools.
Featured Image by Jason Goodman on Unsplash
The post 5 Ways to Improve Your Marketing Project Management appeared first on noupe.
