An eye-catching and beautiful website is more likely to entice web visitors to stick around, find out about your products and services, and, most importantly, encourage them to convert. If you manage a Squarespace site, you might be wondering how you can enhance your images, add vivid fonts, and improve your overall web design to boost your traffic.
We’ve put together a list of ten simple tweaks you can use to optimize your website, including some stunning Squarespace animations that will make your pages really pop!
1. Add a button
If you want to encourage web users to sign up for your newsletter, buy a product, or send you an email, a big bright call-to-action button is the perfect way to do this.
You can create an easy button on Squarespace by adding a button block. Move to the section you want to add your button to, click the blue + icon and choose Button. Here you can add your text and select the page you want your button to take your web users to.
You can style the buttons on your website by going to the home menu, choosing Design and clicking Buttons.
Don’t forget to keep your button text short and sweet to encourage conversions – 25 characters or less!
2. Implement an accordion block
An accordion block is ideal if you have a lot of content but would like to keep your page short and scrollable. For example, if you want to include a lengthy FAQ on a page for search engine optimization purposes.
To add this feature go to the page you want to add the accordion block to and click the blue + sign. Choose Accordion from the menu to add your block to your page. Next, click the pencil icon and go to the Content tab to add and edit individual parts of the accordion.
If you want to style the accordion, click on the Design tab where you can change the background color, how the expand icon looks, and the divider style.
3. Animate your background photos
You don’t have to settle for a dull and boring static background image with Squarespace. With seven background animations on offer, you can make your background stand out and entice your web visitors to scroll!
Click the pencil icon on the image you want to tweak, go to Background, and Image effects. Choose the animation you want to implement, and you’re good to go.
If you’re using a Brine template, you can enable parallax scrolling on your pages – this makes your background image move more slowly than the content in the foreground for a cool effect! Go to the Site styles panel (the paintbrush at the top right-hand side of the page), scroll down to the Main: overlay section, and check Enable Parallax.
5. Get social with social media icons
Social media is essential for building engagement and finding new customers. If you have social media profiles, you can promote them anywhere on your Squarespace website in just a few clicks.
If you want to add your icons to a page, click the blue + icon, choose Social Links and add your links in. Looking to add social media icons to your header? Hover over it and click Edit site header. Then, click Elements, toggle Social Links and add them in.
6. Introduce some background art
Not got a photo to use as a background image? No problem! You can create some cool animated background art to make your website more engaging.
Click the pencil icon and go to Background. You’ll find six different background effects to try. You can change the color by going to the Colors menu. Why not mix and match animations and colors until you find a combination you love?
7. Add a dropdown menu
Usability is essential for your website – you want your visitors to find the information they need as quickly and easily as possible. A dropdown menu is excellent for displaying your pages in a user-friendly way.
Click Pages, then click the + icon. Then select Folder. Give your new folder a name and drag your existing pages into the folder to build your dropdown menu. You can drag and drop your pages so they appear in the precise order you want.
8. Change the fonts
When you select a specific Squarespace theme, it will come with pre-designated fonts. The good news is that you can change these fonts to suit your own personal branding requirements.
When you’re editing a page, click the Site styles icon at the top right-hand side of the page, which looks like a paintbrush. Choose Fonts, and you can choose a new font pack to replace your existing fonts. The bonus is that this font pack is applied to the whole of your website, so you don’t have to painstakingly change the font on individual pages.
9. Enable comments
If you have a blog, enabling comments is a fantastic way to engage with readers and build a strong sense of community around your site. Squarespace has built-in commenting functionality which means you can keep track of comments and likes, while quickly blocking spammy messages.
To enable comments, go to the home menu and click Blogging. Click Comment settings and select Enable Comments Globally. If you want to toggle comments off and on for a particular post, go to the blog post, open the Post Editor and choose Comments on or Comments off.
10. Make your header transparent
If you want to make your Squarespace website feel more modern and streamlined, you can make your navigation bar transparent. This blends your header in with the colors and imagery already used on your page.
Click Edit site header, go to Style and choose Dynamic from the dropdown menu.
And there you have it! Ten simple code-free changes you can make directly in Squarespace. Why not give them a try today?
The practice of medicine is a profound responsibility. It’s a sacred trust between clinicians, patients, and the people who love them.
But medicine is also a business, and if you want to be able to continue serving patients and their families, then you must strive to make that business profitable. Marketing, not surprisingly, is a critical component of that effort.
However, the ascendency of the internet in general and social media, in particular, has transformed the ways that healthcare facilities endeavor to reach their target audiences. Medical practices today depend largely on a multifaceted approach that not only combines traditional and new media but that also leverages the myriad forms of digital media marketing.
This article examines the various ways that physicians are incorporating multimedia marketing into their campaigns and explores the pros and cons of each.
Marketing in Medical Practice
Some clinicians may feel a bit wary in marketing their practices. They may feel leery about the prospect of “advertising” as traditional for-profit businesses do.
The reality, though, is that in an increasingly crowded and competitive industry notorious for its shrinking profit margins, practices must grow in order to survive. Marketing, then, isn’t about greed or selfishness. It’s about being able to endure and serve in a challenging market.
When you’re marketing your medical practice, it’s helpful to remember that your conceptualization of “marketing” is probably going to need to change. Marketing in healthcare is far less about advertising products and services and far more about building relationships with prospective and established patients and their loved ones.
And because relationship-building lies at the heart of medical marketing, you’re going to need a proactive and comprehensive approach to make it work. This includes availing yourself of the various digital channels through which to connect with your target audience.
In most cases, this will mean cultivating a robust online presence that includes a dedicated website with a blog and discussion forum, as well as an array of social media accounts.
In addition to the use of new media, though, it’s also important to capitalize on traditional channels — from print, television, and radio promotions to billboards and direct mailers. This will help you reach a broader audience, including those who may not have reliable internet access.
The Pros and Cons of Multimedia
As suggested above, one of the greatest advantages of a multimedia marketing approach is that it enables you to reach a broad and diverse target audience using their preferred media. If your practice seeks to serve all age groups and income levels, then combining the enormous power of digital marketing with the proven techniques of traditional marketing is the way to go.
When you deploy a multimedia approach, it’s vital to be strategic and deliberate. One of the most significant downsides of this sort of saturation technique is that your strategy may lack coherence.
For instance, you will want to create a consistent brand style that will inform all of your campaigns, regardless of where and in what form they appear. The goal is to ensure, ultimately, that no matter where your target audience receives your content, they will be able to instantly recognize it as your brand.
When you’re using such a multi-pronged approach, it’s also important to ensure that you have a clear, cohesive, and utilitarian communications strategy driving it. In other words, you need to have a reason behind every message you create, every content and design choice you make, and every decision concerning the timing and placement of your content.
This means understanding exactly who the content is intended for and what needs the content is designed to meet for that audience. Likewise, you will need to be clear on why a chosen platform, time, and style will be the best for reaching and engaging your intended audience.
Using Video as a Digital Marketing Tool
In addition to using multimedia to build brand awareness and support business growth, you can also tap into the tremendous power of video marketing. For example, health consumers are increasingly turning to social media to learn more about health and health products.
In an era in which medical technologies are often outpacing patient education, you may capitalize on your audience’s social media habits to educate them on services and products. You may, for instance, create explainer videos that introduce patients to new IoT medical devices, explore their benefits and drawbacks, and demonstrate how to use them safely and securely.
This is an ideal way to engage your target audience while building trust and showcasing your professional expertise. The most significant disadvantage, though, is the potential to appear as if you are hawking these products or seeking only to profit from the provision of services.
Remaining objective, measured, and forthcoming about the product or service, as well as any gain you may derive from them, is vital if you don’t want to come off as a snake oil salesperson.
Remote Events in Real Time
If these pandemic years have taught us anything, it’s that it’s not always feasible or desirable to meet patients in person. For this reason, clinicians are increasingly creating opportunities for patients and their loved ones to engage with their practice in virtual settings. Virtual healthcare is an ideal way to ensure that patients can access the medical care they need through real-time video and chat without exposing themselves to undue risk.
Further, healthcare apps can also be used to help educate patients, monitor their health status, and promote self-care. Especially among vulnerable patient populations, health apps and virtual platforms can be a lifeline to patients’ physical, mental, and emotional well-being.
But these tools do more than expand the scope, quality, and accessibility of care. They also serve as a form of interactive marketing insofar as they enable healthcare providers, patients, and families to safely come together in virtual environments.
For this reason, clinicians are using not only one-on-one, private consultations in the virtual space but also live group events. This might include anything from a weekly course on nutrition to a daily exercise live stream. Clinicians may offer audiences the opportunity to participate in online health fairs, health education seminars, or online support groups.
Such live events can be highly beneficial in nurturing patient relationships while also increasing brand awareness and driving the growth of the practice.
One potential downside, however, is that those in need of in-person care may neglect to get it. They may develop the misperception that virtual consults and online seminars are an adequate substitute in all cases. And this may end up doing some patients far more harm than good.
The Takeaway
In an increasingly challenging market environment, multimedia marketing can be an ideal way for physicians and health systems to achieve significant long-term growth. The effectiveness of the approach, though, depends on the ability to overcome the potential downsides of the myriad forms of traditional and new media marketing while maximizing their many advantages.
Trust. It’s the backbone of any relationship. Whether you’re talking about a romantic connection, a friendship, or even the connection between a business and its customers. Simply put, if people don’t trust you, they’re not going to spend their hard-earned money on your products or services.
But trust isn’t just freely given, especially not in the world of business. It’s cultivated over long periods and fed with honesty, effective service, and quality products. There are many instances where trust will need to be established from nothing in the business world.
In the case of startup businesses, it’s even more important, as you don’t have any previous successes or experiences to draw on when trying to woo your target audience.
So how can you start building trust with a new audience as a startup business owner? In this article, we’ll walk you through several branding strategies that can jumpstart your trust-building efforts, creating a sustainable and loyal customer base that will return to you over and over again.
How Important is Brand Trust?
Brand trust is absolutely vital to the ongoing success of your business. This has been true since the earliest days of general stores and local mom-and-pop businesses. When people find a business they trust, they repeatedly return and often give it the benefit of the doubt when it makes a mistake.
Despite the shift from brick-and-mortar commerce to online commerce, brand loyalty and trust is still a factor online. In fact, consumers are 30% more likely to return to a site where they’ve shopped before and had a positive experience.
The unknown can be scary when it comes to spending money. Often, people want to return to a company they know is safe, honest, and of a certain quality rather than chase the latest deal and throw money away on a potentially inferior product.
Brand trust is the secret to generating repeat business, which is crucial for your ongoing profitability. If your business is a revolving door, where customers come and go and constantly need replacing, you’ll be spending a lot more on marketing, and remaining in the black will be a constant struggle.
It’s far more cost-effective to hold onto an existing customer than it is to bring in someone completely new. That’s why businesses work so hard to establish trust in their audience. While you should always be trying to attract new customers, you also need to serve your existing clientele as they provide a source of recurring revenue without having to be wooed through the sales funnel all over again.
When there’s a change in business ownership, the new business owners will need to decide whether they would like to continue the same branding strategy as their predecessor to create less friction or if they will completely rebrand the business and target a new audience. If they choose the latter option, trust will need to be re-established. This is a huge risk that new business owners take, as the trust-building process isn’t easy.
But when you’re a startup owner, you have no choice in the matter. You’re starting from square one with these people, and you must employ the following strategies to get them on your side.
Strategies for Building Trust With a New Audience
Deliver On Time or Early
One of the main secrets of startup success is to offer a product or service to customers for which demand is high, and supply is low. Noble Gold Investments got off to an incredibly strong start in 2016 with this tactic and is competing with companies that entered the market several years ago. You can read more about it in this Noble gold investments review.
Whenever someone orders such products from a new online store, whether they decide to pay through traditional methods or using revvi credit card type systems, they’re going to have a few questions, like:
How long will it take to receive my order?
What state will my order be in when it arrives?
Will my order ever arrive?
By providing a great delivery experience, where items arrive either on time or early, you’ve taken the first steps needed to build trust with your new audience. The best way to ensure this is to partner with reliable shipping companies that can get your products out the door and into the hands of your customers quickly without breaking the bank.
Consider an alliance with a courier service. This can help you offer same-day delivery on products and also handle sensitive documents without any action taken by your new customers.
Shipping efficiency creates reliability, one of the most important elements in building trust.
Keep Brand Imagery Consistent
Your brand imagery is an important part of establishing trust in a new company. When new customers stumble onto one of your ads or social media posts, they won’t trust you immediately. There are a lot of scams out there, and modern consumers know this. That means they’re always going to be hesitant.
Now, imagine you’re feeling this hesitancy, and the moment you click on an exciting ad, it takes you to a site that looks nothing like the branding that initially caught your eye. The colors are different, the logos are different, and the verbiage and tone have completely shifted away from what initially drew your attention.
That’s going to shatter the trust of your prospective customers right away. It should all look consistent when they click through your website or a landing page.
Consistency is crucial because your potential customers should know what they can expect from you. Aside from your message and tone, the imagery you share across your social platforms and website must be consistent as well. Using mood boards and free poster templates for your brand will not only help you boost credibility but also make your brand look polished and professional.
Create a Blog
If you want your audience to learn more about your company, the value of your services, and the culture you’re working so hard to establish, it might be time to create a blog. Blogs are an excellent way to establish yourself as an expert in the field and a trusted place to shop.
If your customers have doubts about your industry knowledge and expertise, a blog can be a great place to put those fears to bed. Think about your customers’ questions and the pain points that drive them toward your business. Those are the questions and topics you should be addressing in your blog.
Make the content relatable, informative, and easily shareable. You should also stick to a regular posting schedule. This will help you establish a routine that your readers can rely on and ultimately come to trust.
Comment sections are also helpful with blogs. Your customers can ask questions or share their own experiences. This could even translate into them forming connections with other customers and starting conversations on your platform. Make sure you’re responding to these comments as well, engaging with your audience regularly to establish even more familiarity and trust.
Create a Podcast
In the same vein as creating a blog, you should also consider podcasting. Podcasts are a popular and growing medium. People typically enjoy these on-demand audio shows in the car or while working out, and they can be a great way to establish trust.
More so than on a blog, when someone can only read your words, a podcast allows them to hear your voice and lets your personality shine through. People tend to trust the podcasters they frequent, and they start to feel a connection to them, almost as though they know them personally.
When you’re podcasting, you’re demonstrating your expertise while forging personal connections with the people you’re trying to market to. That makes it an invaluable resource in the neverending quest to build trust with your audience.
Focus on Customer Service
Customer service is an important part of the business trust puzzle. People need to know that when they have an issue or a question in relation to your company or products, they’ll be able to get satisfactory aid through your customer service department.
One bad customer service interaction is typically enough to make a customer abandon a brand. That’s why you want to make sure that your customer support representatives are well trained and have access to the tools needed. They should be kind, courteous, and knowledgeable.
If it’s within your budget, consider a 24/7 customer support AI chatbot that can help you answer some of the more simple or common questions posed by your audience. This will ensure that you’ll be able to provide some form of support, even when your call center is closed for the day.
Personalize Advertising
General advertising cast out to the entire world at once doesn’t do anyone a lick of good. In 2023 ads need to be personalized to inspire customers to purchase. You need to let that specific person know what you can do for their specific issues.
Doing this is not only more effective from a conversion standpoint, but it can also help you establish trust with members of your audience. If customers believe that you know what they need and provide a service to meet those needs, they’ll have more trust in your brand and turn to you more often.
That means your advertising should be targeted. Through platforms like Facebook and Google, you can set specific ads to only run for specific people based on criteria like:
Age
Marital status
Geographic area
Gender
Interests
Search history
Income
Profession
Buying habits
And much more
You should have your audience segmented into various buyer personas and create ad campaigns specifically targeted and personalized to these groups. Using a customer data platform is an easy way to collect and store customer data and to build out detailed customer profiles.
Engage on Social Media
Every business needs a solid social media strategy. Obviously, you want your audience to engage with your social posts, sharing them, liking them, commenting on them, etc.
But when people take this desired action, there’s something you can do to help generate trust and endear your brand to these customers — engage with them.
Respond to social media comments, answer their questions, or just thank them for their observation if no question was asked. You can also pose your own questions to keep the conversation going. The beauty of public comments is that they’re public. You can establish trust with the customers you’re interacting with while also establishing trust with those who are just viewing the comments and seeing how attentive you are.
This also applies to the direct messages you receive. Make sure you’re responding to them promptly. It’s also a good idea to set up an automatic message that goes out whenever you get a new message from a customer. Tell them you’ve received the message and will get back to
them ASAP. Then, when you respond, be thorough and kind. Check for their responses and work to resolve whatever issue they’re having quickly.
List Reviews (Even Bad Ones)
Reviews are a powerful form of social proof that can be a lot more effective than corporate branding in establishing trust with your audience. The words of a peer carry a lot more weight than a company that is only trying to promote itself.
That’s why you should have review pages on your website, and also embrace Google reviews. Make sure you’re responding to all of your reviews, both positive and negative. Responding to a positive review is easy. You can just thank them for the feedback and continued use of your services.
With bad reviews, you have an excellent opportunity to establish trust with your audience. Address the concerns raised in the review and apologize for the experience falling short. Provide the user with resources that might help and offer to make the situation right for them. If you can turn around their perception, ask them to update their review.
Doing this publicly can make a huge impact on potential customers. They’re watching you handle harsh reviews in a respectful manner with no defensiveness whatsoever. They see you go to lengths to make it right, showing that you genuinely care about your customers. Bad reviews might seem like the end of the world, but they can be an amazing opportunity to improve the public perception of your business and generate trust with new customers.
Conclusion
Trust is a vital piece of the modern business puzzle, and you can establish that trust by following the strategies highlighted above.
To review, when trying to establish trust with your audience:
Ensure that deliveries arrive on time or early
Keep your branding consistent along platforms
Create a blog
Create a podcast
Focus on customer service
Personalize your advertising
Engage with the audience on social media
List your reviews and respond to them. Even the bad ones.
By doing this, you’ll be able to establish long-term trust with your audience and propel your startup business into the stratosphere.
To convince people to try your solutions, you can’t simply pitch them your product and expect it to work.
Customers don’t make buying decisions on a whim anymore. So, despite the brilliance of your marketing campaigns, it’d be difficult for you to dictate the buying decisions of your target audience by defining what’s best for them.
Around 50% of customers prefer brands that offer inclusive experiences. And that’s why businesses today strive to engage their respective audiences via two-way communication rather than sending bland marketing messages.
This is where the concept of a community comes into play. Building a community enables you to engage your respective audience by helping them find answers to their questions or the information that they seek.
With a community built around your product, you’re not pitching your product directly to your customers but rather catering to the concerns of the intended audience and helping them find a solution fitting their needs.
This helps you gain the trust of your target audience and build authority in your respective niche.
Here’s how you set up a community platform for your product.
Set Clear Goals
The first step to creating a community for your product is identifying what you wish to achieve from it and setting clear goals in accordance with that.
There can be multiple goals that you pursue but it’s highly recommended that you keep the list short. This will make it easier for you to translate your efforts into outcomes and gauge the impact of the community in general.
For this, you’d have to design and deploy well-thought-out key performance indicators to assess the value generated by your community and its contribution to the buyer’s journey.
Since we are setting up a community for a product, the core objectives here would be getting traction from a relevant audience and capturing quality leads to fuel conversions.
Furthermore, you can also minimize churn and maximize retention by addressing the queries and concerns of the existing customers through your community.
Define Community Guidelines
When creating a community for your product, it’s essential to lay out some ground rules to be followed by members or participants.
For this, you’d need a team of trusted and reliable moderators whose responsibility would be to make sure that the rules are justly implemented and followed by community members.
The goal here is to create a platform where your current and potential customers can interact and share their experiences concerning your product. This is user-generated content and it has the power to influence the buying decisions of 90% of customers.
However, for this to work, you have to ensure that your community is an ideal place for healthy interactions and discussions about your product by implementing certain rules.
The rules would apply to members, moderators, and other administrative roles in the community clearly defining the do’s and don’ts of community participation and management.
Select Community Type
Before setting up a community for your product, you should select the type of community best suited to your needs.
There are two types to choose from. The first one is a social community platform. Here, you leverage social media platforms like Facebook or Reddit to create a community around your product.
The second type is becoming a branded community platform. Here, you don’t rely on third-party platforms but rather create an independent community.
There’s no right or wrong here as there are pros and cons associated with each type you choose to go with. So, it all comes down to which method serves you the best.
You’re not charged a single penny for leveraging social media platforms to build your community. So, creating a community can be cost-effective. Plus, Facebook alone has over 2.45 billion active users – making it easier for you to reach out to the masses.
However, there’s a flip side to this. You’d have minimal control or authority over things as you may be the owner of your community but you don’t own the platform it’s hosted on. So, you’d have to play by the rules set by platform owners to keep things going.
The same goes for the second option. Setting up an independent community can be costly and may require a lot of effort to attract new members. However, you’d have complete control and authority over the platform.
You can also choose to go with both options. However, managing an independent and social community at the same time can be overwhelming. So, it all depends on what your requirements and preferences are.
Define the Roles
If you’re a startup or just getting started with your business, you can create a community from the ground up and start managing it yourself. Here, you’d be wearing multiple hats and be the only stakeholder.
However, as your operations grow, you’d have to create different roles for your community to keep the needle moving.
This generally happens when you realize that you’re spending more time managing your community than growing your business. So, it’s best that you start delegating.
You’d need moderators for your community from the get-go. For this, you can turn to your reliable veteran community members and assign the said roles. However, to grow your community and manage its operations, you may need to hire a community manager.
You’d also have to engage personnel representing your marketing, sales, and support teams. The marketing team would be responsible for promotional activities, sales personnel would be striving to generate and convert leads, and the support team would be catering to product queries.
Set Up the Community
With the completion of all aforesaid steps, the setup process for your community officially begins.
As per the set parameters and the options you’ve chosen to go with, you’d start setting up your community as an independent entity or by leveraging a third-party platform. In either scenario, here are a few things to consider when setting up the community:
Tell people your story
Showcase the community’s essence by adding a brief description
Add contact details
Add a cover image with your message, tagline or visual identity.
Add community guidelines
Add answers to FAQs
Add an announcement section
Add tags for relevant topics
Display association with your business page or site
Add call to action
Test the signup process
Setup onboarding or welcome messages
Activate the Community
When you create a community for your product, you don’t just set it up and leave it there. You have to activate it by engaging a relevant audience. And for that, you’d need a stellar content strategy.
According to 72% of marketers, content creation is the most effective SEO tactic. So, it enables you to get noticed and bring traction to your community organically, especially if it’s an independent platform.
Content not just helps you attract new members but also keeps the community alive by facilitating discussions among the members.
Just ensure that the content you share in the community is relevant and exclusive. This would make people stay active in the community and keep coming back for more.
It’s a Wrap
There you have it. The 6 easy steps for you to set up a community platform for your product. Creating a community around your product enables you to connect with a relevant audience and generate awareness.
So, it’s highly recommended that you have one and with the aforesaid steps, you can easily get started.
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.
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.
