Teams that Make the Marketing Plan Work

PROJECT MANAGEMENT BASICS

Project Management is a beast, and most small businesses don’t need to employ a certified project manager. You do, however, need someone who can manage the basics. Here are the three core principles that will likely apply to the work you are doing.

1. Organizing the plan

The marketing plan you are creating will give you the due dates for your tasks. However, you will need more than that to make it happen. Say, for instance, that you are hosting a kick-off event. The marketing plan would list that event with a date. Your project manager would then need to create a plan that has all of the details that get you there – food ordering, décor, program planning, invite list and design, location booking, etc…

The project manager needs to be skilled at handling details and problem solving.

2. Communication

While your project manager doesn’t need to sell ice to an Eskimo, it is helpful to have someone who is a strategic communicator. In addition to keeping the team informed, she/he will need to be the point person for most external communication as well. The best communicators can synthesize information, eliminate unnecessary prose and make it interesting enough to read all the way through. That’s a tough task, but so very important.

3. Data collection

Unless you can track results of your efforts, it’s really difficult to justify the expense of doing them in the first place. It may seem frivolous to know precisely how many sales were produced from each attempt, especially when we’ve already established that it takes 7-15 points of contact and the one that makes the sale may not be the most important point of contact for the consumer. However, without this tracking, it is nearly impossible to know what works for your audience and what to repeat next time. Tracking and reporting results prevents teams from playing the guessing game, where the loudest voice most often wins but is rarely correct.

4. Reporting

The project manager needs to be able to create simple and easy-to-understand reports to share results with the team and other stakeholders. Reports should be produced as often as once a week and no less than twice a month for an active project.

5. Tools

There are so many good user-friendly project management tools. Most online platforms are easy to use. Multiple people can access them and keep information up-to-date. Using a tool like this is a great way to keep your team on track and accountable to the plan you create!