Great marketing attracts, engages, and converts your ideal prospects. It’s a result of individual projects that are planned and executed step by step, working toward a common goal. All aspects of marketing–social, content, advertising, email, etc.–work together as a cohesive unit that has a single objective.
So, knowing the influence of great marketing on your bottom line and how it all boils down to carefully planned and execute project management, it’s important that we understand how to manage projects to get the best results out of them.
How to keep track of marketing campaigns for better outcomes?
Here are seven key tips that’ll help you manage and track your marketing campaign projects from start to finish.
1. Define your marketing workflow
What steps do you run through from the beginning until a project is completed? Clearly outlining your marketing workflow makes it easier and faster to get results over and again without having to reinvent the wheel.
2. Continuously improve your processes
It’s important that you make it a priority to keep analyzing your processes to see what they’re doing well, where they could be better, and parts that are broken and should be changed completely. When analyzing your marketing workflows and processes, ask analytical questions such as:
- What does this part of our workflow help us do? Can it be removed or replaced?
- What part of the workflow takes more resources than average?
- At what stage of our marketing do we usually encounter bottlenecks?
With a proactive outlook towards improving the systems and processes that power your marketing teams, you’re a step closer to running a better marketing machine that attracts, engages, and fills your pipeline with high-quality leads.
3. Assign tasks to individuals
Members of your team should never be in doubt regarding where their input is required or what part they’re to play to move a project from to-do to done. Assigning each task to a team member ensures there is accountability and clears any confusion.
And don’t forget to try our Free and Customizable Templates:
– Marketing Plan Template to Streamline your Marketing Efforts
– Social Media Calendar Template for Social Media Planning
– Content Calendar Template for Strategic Content Planning
– Competitive Analysis Template for Strategic Content Planning
4. Periodically keep track of results
Whether it’s daily, weekly, or monthly, a periodic tell-all session gives you and your team an avenue to break down ongoing projects into what’s working, what’s not working, what could be adjusted for better results, plus any emerging issues that were previously not planned for.
Project tracking software can help you keep track of project progress makes it easy to determine whether you can hit targets on schedule, what needs to change to hit your targets, etc., so you can make appropriate changes when it’s early enough.
5. Define what success means and double down on measuring it
A popular management axiom states that what gets measured, gets managed.
What that simply means is that if you’re aiming to consistently get A-class results from your marketing, you must clearly define what success looks like so it’s possible to pursue your key results with clarity.
Otherwise, you’ll be stuck trying to improve a vague notion, an idea no one can put their hands exactly on, and as a result, fail repeatedly to mark an improvement.
You need to:
- define what exactly success means to your team, i.e. at what point exactly will we say we’ve met the targets of this project/particular campaign,
- establish metrics that define your success i.e. what data point can we look at and conclusively say that we’re either moving closer to our desired outcomes or drawing back towards project failure?
- gather all your data points into one place, a project dashboard where you can see how they’re changing as the project progresses, and how they affect each other,
- periodically review our data points to clearly define how well we’re doing—this can be in our daily scrums, weekly, monthly, etc., and,
- hold sprint retrospectives where you can analyze whether you hit your key targets, why or why not, and what needs to change for better future results.
6. Bring all your data into one place
Data holds a huge place in your journey to marketing success since it provides the only trackable and manageable way you can look at your marketing projects and conclusively say that you’re either succeeding or failing.
And glancing through a dozen excel sheets at once can help, but for maximum productivity, you need a marketing project management software that brings all your key data points into one dashboard where you can analyze them from an actionable viewpoint and clearly visualize how they affect one another.
But, beyond that, coordinating all your data in one place makes it easy to visualize everything from a high-level perspective.
Most especially if your marketing project management tool makes it possible to connect two or more data points since now you can visualize how one changing value influences the others. As a result, you know what exactly to change in your strategy to get a specific result.
7. Use a project management tool
Managing marketing projects are demanding enough as they are, involving creating content, optimizing it for better user engagement, keeping your fingers on the user experience pulse so you can gauge how your marketing efforts are being received on your prospects’ ends.
A good project management tool must:
- organize all your marketing data as much as possible
- create one source of truth where all your team can unite
- offers project management templates, intuitive functionalities, and customization
- have a simple learning curve so you focus more on getting work done
If you’re looking for project management software to manage your marketing projects, take Kissflow Project for a spin.
Marketing is both a creative art and a science that requires that specific laid-down rules are applied if you want to get the best results possible. Follow these simple steps and see how you’ll be to manage and track your marketing projects for better outcomes.
And don’t forget to try our Free and Customizable Templates:
– Marketing Plan Template to Streamline your Marketing Efforts
– Social Media Calendar Template for Social Media Planning
– Content Calendar Template for Strategic Content Planning
– Competitive Analysis Template for Strategic Content Planning