With the advent of globalization, project management has become a crucial tool for the organizations to create structure, manage project commitments and effectively deliver agreed upon results. It provides an essential framework to the marketing managers with which success of enterprises can be scaled up precisely and timely.
In its most general form, project management can be defined as: “The process of skills, knowledge, methods, and experience to achieve the project goals”. It is normally viewed in terms of outputs and benefits. The success of a project is based upon the criteria in which project is achieved within fix timescale and budget.
The process of controlling and directing a project is to be based on five important phases:
- Planning
- Initiating
- Executing
- Monitoring and Controlling
- Closing
Need for Project Management for Marketing Managers
The marketing managers are at the forefront of taking a proactive and subdued approach towards issues regarding project management. There are a few basic, yet complex skills that marketing managers should possess because they are more responsible for the creative aspect of the job. So, the essential project management skills that are specifically carved out for the marketing managers are; planning, detail, orientation, risk assessment, and task delegation.
Project management, however, has a number of other benefits for the organization and the people involved in delivering the project. It provides:
- Ensure use of resources
- Provide the best way to get the desired goal
- Provide satisfaction to the projects’ stakeholders
Project management is a way to control spending and improve project results. Many companies accepted that economic crisis underscored their project management shortcomings and forced to do better.
“Good project management discipline stopped us from spending money on a project that fails,” says Ron Kasabian, General Manager at Global IT Giant Intel, Folsom, California, USA.
Project management requires a standard process and automation. It requires all the skills of professional project management.
Here are some project management hacks to help marketing manager:
1. Monitoring and Controlling Your Marketing Project
The process of tracking, reviewing and reporting project progress is done on this process. Using this process marketing manager can analyze that projects are going according to plan and on right track.
“Monitoring & controlling is a very important stage of project management that consists of activities used to observe the process after project implementation,” stated by Kedy, project manager at MR10 India.
There is a thorough identification of problems and risks followed by the deployment of mitigation strategy to control the new process. At the end of this stage, the marketing managers require corrective action.
This process can be split into three areas:
- Monitoring Project Plan
- Monitoring Project Budget
- Monitoring Regular Status
This process involves many key tasks:
- Scope verification and change control
- Quality control
- Performance Reporting
- Risk control
- Cost control
- Schedule control
- Reviewing all phases
- Contract administration
2. Executing Your Marketing Project
Marketing experts believe that there is no point in making a strategy without execution. So the execution of the marketing project may need a lot of thinking and re-thinking on the part of managers like putting together all the tactics, eliminating redundancies, and assigning available resources etc.
In this execution process, a plan is executed into action that will reach the correct audience. Budget and practical limitations are the only barriers when placing a plan. Here are some ways of executing marketing project in the right way:
- Use comments to communicate the progress of the project
- Create your content directly using marketing tools
- Review the tasks thoroughly
- Complete the tasks on time which are assigned
3. Planning Your Marketing Project
The purpose of creating a plan for your marketing project is to efficiently coordinate the uncertainties that are going to arise and to coordinate the activities of your resource requirements. The rationale behind this is if unpredictability is predicted to a certain extent, the likelihood of success is increased.
A marketing plan consists of traditional marketing techniques and digital marketing platforms. Spending time on planning is a good thing to avoid any surprises that cope later in the project. You know what you want to do for your project. So it is important that you should plan your optimal project requirements first before considering the resources available.
Planning includes a number of elements:
- How you will track and monitor the project
- Roles and responsibilities of team
- Risks, dependencies, and assumptions
- Budget
- Time schedule of a project
- Metrics
- How will you train and acquire staff
The plan can be implemented with the help of:
- Digital Marketing
- Event Marketing
- Telemarketing
- Direct Marketing
- Influencer Marketing
- Promotion through Print, TV and Radio media
- Public Relations
4. Initiating Your Marketing project
Initiation of marketing project is a crucial phase that is carried out with a calculated manner to avoid complexities regarding time, budget and resources. It requires the marketing manager to set goals, to identify and manage risks, to analyze the step-by-step results and to make a marketing research report.
Marketing manager and business owners have only one attempt to execute a project successfully. So the process should be thought and planned carefully. The initiation process in project management includes several key phases:
- The objective is the first process of initiation of project management and it is essential to obtain from completing projects.
- Determining the approach includes listing the methods and tasks required for project management.
- Time scheduling estimates the amount of time it takes to complete an individual task as most projects have deadlines.
- Budgeting is the process to stay within certain parameters of the project.
- Delegating the work during the project initiation before any work commences.
Marketing projects cone in a broad variety through multiple channels and this variety requires marketing managers to enhance their marketing skills for a good result in a fix time period. Use the above-mentioned tips to effectively manage your project and generate better ROI.
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