Eleven of twelve articles in the CXL
Minidegree In writing an overview about? Project Management, we learn:
- Have a marketing project management process that’ll help you ship more successful campaigns
- Understand the common pitfalls of a poorly managed marketing project and how to avoid them
- A framework you can follow to improve how you’re building, executing, reporting and learning from your marketing efforts.
This module is essential for you if …
- You don’t have a process, framework or strategy in place for project managing your marketing campaigns
- You’ve been doing things the same way for a long time but want to learn how to improve and optimize your process to get better results from your marketing efforts.
- You feel like something’s missing from your marketing…and think a project management process might be it.
Marketing project management is a way of working that provides a framework for delivering projects. It can help teams complete all sorts of work on time and on budget, from marketing campaigns and product launches and competitor analysis.?
Key benefits of marketing project management include easier collaboration, better coordination among team members, and more efficient delivery of project work.
Marketing project management processes:?
- The project is focused on producing specific outputs, called deliverables. A deliverable could be anything from a series of blog articles to a new marketing strategy for a brand.?
- Project work is divided into manageable chunks. This includes task lists, tasks, sub-tasks, and milestones representing major achievements on the way to project completion.?
- The work is managed within a project management tool. A project management tool is a digital workspace used to plan and track project tasks and facilitate collaboration among the team.
- Each project progresses through well-defined phases, including planning and execution. There is usually a pre-defined timeframe and budget for the project.?
Project management can be used to manage all sorts of marketing activities and campaigns, including:?
- Pay-per-click (PPC)?
- Email marketing
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
- Content marketing?
- Product launches?
The traditional project management method is split into phases:
- Initiate: What is the scope of what you'll create?
- Plan: How will you create your content and with what resources?
- Execute: Create your content.
- Monitor and control: Identify and remove any roadblocks that are preventing you from executing.
- Close: Get approval, publish, and review.
Choose The Highest Priority Project From Your Marketing Project Backlog
Part of the agile project management process involves creating and maintaining a product backlog. For your purposes, that's a fancy definition for a prioritized list of marketing projects.
Explain The Project Background With A Creative Brief
- Who will this project benefit the most? Pinpoint a subset within your audience.
- What do you need to create? Define the end deliverable.
- Why will this project benefit the audience you've specified? Write your value proposition that answers your audience's question, "What's in it for me?"
- What kind of resources might you need to complete the project? Estimate the time and tools involved.
- What does done look like? Help your team know what you'll accept as a successful final product.
Define Your Project's Requirements To Fulfill
- Automation: Is this a way to automate a part of this project to prevent manual work during execution or afterward? Anything to cut out unnecessary, tedious manual work a robot could do will immediately boost your productivity.
- Elimination: Can this project eliminate something else you're doing as a new and improved replacement? Removing work from your future to-do list will help you find time to execute even more projects from your backlog a whole lot faster.
- Maintenance: How can you make this project as successful as possible now with the least amount of daily, weekly, or monthly maintenance? Think 10x growth now that continues to provide long-term results without having to touch it.
