Project management for Marketers

In today’s article, I will be talking about project management for marketers and some of what it’s about.

Let me start by defining project management. According to project management institute, Project management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet the project requirements.

After that definition, one question I’m going to discuss about project management is what happens overall when it comes to project management when you get it wrong? The typical issues that arise with poor project management fall essentially into three specific categories according to Alexa Hubley from CXL institute.

Resource issues: The first issues are resource issues and those will come up if you don't have a good process and you don't project manage your work. Resource issues include:

·        People – too busy, not prioritizing the right thing. Sometimes if you improperly resource a project, you don't have enough people on the project, you don't have people that have enough free time in order to work on the project, or people start to feel stretched. This could be really bad for success in building your marketing campaign.

·        Time (improper resourcing time) – rushing, context switching. So either rushing into a project assuming that you'll be able to finish it in a certain amount of time, or just creating too much context swishing. For people to be able to process and actually really think about what they need to get done in order to achieve their goals and targets for that campaign.

·        Output – cutting back, not producing what needs to be done. When you improperly resource your project, your output will usually be cut short, or it could become too big, and your overarching goal of what you set out to achieve just gets way out of scope which then leads to the next issue which is scope.

Scope issues: the second issues are scope issues and those have to do with not being able to meet deadlines and missing time lines. The main issues under scope are over-commitment and under-commitment.

·        Over-commitment – taking on too much. So, you'll over-commit on just promising the world and achieving as much as possible in order to create the most winning marketing campaign you can think of.

·        Under-commitment – taking on too little. you'll under-commit and you'll just, not create the best resources or the right content, or the ideal amount of emails to convert your customers.

·        Scope creep – pushing back deadlines. Scope creep is when something just never ends, and ultimately you don't have a good sense of where you are on your project time line and so therefore, things just keep going, and never end.

Attribution issues: the third issues are attribution issues those have to do with not knowing exactly what your metrics are, your targets, or how to achieve your goals.

·        Vague goals - too broad to be achievable. This happens when you set unrealistic or unnecessarily broad goals.

·        Performance tracking – not tracking KPIs for each campaign piece produced. Not knowing how to track your performance and your metrics.

·        Actionable learnings – not writing what works and what does not. If you're not hitting the right targets that are set towards achieving your goal, then how will you ever learn, how will you ever be able to improve what you've done in order to get better in the future.

Objective Setting

What objective setting means is that what is the goal of project management and what does it actually achieve? It is ultimately is up to a project manager for a marketing campaign to coordinate the right people, the right priority and the right processes in order to ship winning marketing campaigns that get you more sales leads and sign ups. They strategically arrange them to meet only one objective. .It's really important when setting your objectives for campaigns that you really just pick one. So you identify your objectives and determine the most important objective.

People

How do you coordinate people? A very good way to do this is to create a lunch squad. Alexa Hubley recommends the DACI framework which stands for drivers, approver, contributors and informed.

Driver: The Driver is the person who gets all the stakeholder buy-in, who actually collects all the information, keeps the project moving and overall keeps the rest of the team on track. So they're the person or the people moving this project forward. It is really important to assign a driver or drivers on your lunch squad.

Approver: The approver will likely be the project manager or the marketing manager, but it doesn't necessarily need to be. But they're the one who makes the ultimate decision. Who decides yes or no. this is a very critical role.

Contributor: Contributors will be stakeholders from teams across the company, potentially other people on your marketing team. But what they're role really is, is that to just provide expertise and experience that could inform how you create your marketing campaign, and so they're not really going to bedriving anything forward or working intensely on creating your resources and content that you'll ultimately use in your project. Instead, they're just there to be consulted.

Informed: These will likely be your senior leadership people. All the decisions you make based on this campaign, the people that might be affected by it.

By creating these roles, you have created the DACI framework. Multiple people can function in different roles but there can only be one approver on the team.

Priorities

You've got to set the right priorities, and what that means is that you have to make really calculated campaign steps, and in order to do that, there are four steps to use in order to set the right priorities. They are look back, deep dive, OKRs and date map.

Look back: you start by looking back and what you do is you look back and you figure out, okay, what have we done in the past that's worked? What have we done in the past that hasn't? What are some of the lessons we learned and what are some of the changes then overall we need to make when we go and set about creating this next campaign? What can we use from all of our wisdom now, from all the marketing campaigns we've ever created, in order to create a better one going forward?

Deep dive: This is when ultimately you as a team and on your launch squad go into the details of what you want your marketing to look like for the next quarter or for the next year or for this particular campaign, whatever objective you've set out to achieve. Deep dive should be scored based on urgency, effort and feasibility.

OKRs(Objectives and Key Results): Your objectives should be pretty ambitious. They should be qualitative. They should be very, very specific to the time and scope, and they should be very actionable by your team.

Date map: So you've actually set out all of your objectives, you've got all of the ways you're going to measure it, you've figured out which initiatives you're going to tackle and which ones you won't because they're urgent, if they are and you are going to tackle them, or there's too much effort right now for this quarter so you won't. That's when you actually figure out how you're going to slot that into the time that your team, the limited time box that your team can provide and dedicate to achieving those goals.

That’s it for this article, I will be posting my last article next week which is my last week with CXL institute. I hope you have enjoyed some of the knowledge and insights about Growth Marketing.

If you want to learn more in detail about growth marketing or any other marketing course, feel free to visit CXL Institute website. They have a wide range of marketing courses and top 1% professionals in different fields of marketing that impact first class knowledge. You can also apply for their mini-degree scholarship programs just like i did.

Catch you later!