Marketing Strategy and Project Management for Marketers (Review)

Week 12 of a 12 Week Series on Growth Marketing

Each week for 12 weeks, I am writing about what I am learning through the Growth Marketing Mini-Degree from the CXL Institute. This week, I worked through the last two courses in Module 7: Marketing Strategy and Project Management for Marketers.

Marketing Strategy started off with a simple predication: “In a for-profit company, your company’s goal is to live out its mission, and in order to live out its mission, we need to generate revenue from selling products or services.

Although marketing remains simply a powerful tool for reaching people and achieving business goals, there are many misconceptions about the nature of marketing (some that I was previously guilty of thinking).

Common misconceptions about Marketing
● The goal is to trick customers!
● It’s all advertising!
● It’s a soft skill!
● Marketing is dead!
● Works in a silo from product, sales, engineering
● It’s just managing the website and twitter account, right??

So, what is marketing REALLY?

The 8 Core Areas of Marketing:

1. Product Marketing: Conducting user research, helps us understand who the user is & also identify market opportunities (“what should we be selling next?”), product price points, messaging and packaging, product timelines and launches, strategizes how new products fit into your suite of products and services, and performs product analysis.
2. Brand: Asks the question, “how do we want to be perceived?” so it comes up with voice, tone, message, positioning and what differentiates you from the rest, and awareness: how will we make an impact? This is what we associate with our favorite brands and what we have an affinity towards.
3. Demand Generation: Or lead generation or growth marketing, sometimes digital marking, and it focuses on generating leads and nurturing them to sales. More specifically, they create a pipeline of leads for sales, optimize lead funnels, and experiment with channels.
4. Events & Community: How do we connect with not only prospects, but other valuable connections and customers in the community? How do we connect offline? How do we build a movement? Also involves nurturing influencer relationships and other power users.
5. Sales Enablement: Creating collateral like presentations, email templates, trainings, marketing campaigns, writing case studies to show how others have been successful with your products or services.
6. Public Relations: This is sometimes outsourced. Helps us understand where customers consume information, secure coverage in relevant media, nurture media and analyst relationships, and maintain calendar of newsworthy content.
7. Content & Creative: They bring ideas to life from other marketing areas like like demand gen campaigns, polished sales enablement collateral, promotional content, PR Media kit, thought leadership pieces, and polished brand materials because that is how you are viewed out in the market.
8. Operations & Analytics: This team manages the software tools necessary for successful marketing activities such as a marketing automation platform, optimizes workflows through tools and best practices, tracks key performance indicators, ensures data health, and conducts in-depth analysis of campaign elements.

All this being covered, marketing overlaps most closely with the sales team, and they are often working on the same buyers journey, so it’s important that they should be working on things that are mutually beneficial. The overlap where marketing ends and sales begins is not a clear cut point, so you should always be working on this with your sales partners to further work together, and align your goals.

Project Management for Marketers began with asking the question: “what is project management and how do we get it wrong?” There are three main ways we get project management wrong:

1. Resources: If you don’t have a good process, you don’t have the necessary people on the project or time to work on the project (rushing) or just creating too much context swishing. Output gets cut short or becomes too big and becomes way out of scope.
2. Scope Issues: Overcommitment or under-commitment to a project, missing timelines and deadlines, and scope creep (something never ends and you don’t have a sense of where you are on your project timeline.)
3. Attribution: Not knowing your metrics, your target, and not knowing how to achieve your goals. Not having actionable learnings and thus, stunted in growth, and and overall lack of strategy.

It’s really important when setting objectives for campaigns to only pick ONE overall objective. Is it difficult? YES! But objective setting is all about picking one path, sticking to it even though it may slight another, and operationalizing everything in order to achieve that goal without trying to achieve all the other potential goals at one time.

So if marketing project management coordinates people, priorities, and processes, what does it look like in the field?

People: You need a launch squad. If we follow the DACI framework, it means we want four types of people on that launch squad: Drivers, Approvers, Contributors, and Informers. By assigning these roles, you create a framework for a successful campaign because everyone knows what they’re responsible for and what they’ve set out to achieve. The only thing that cannot have more than one person doing the job is the Approver.

Priorities: You need to make really calculated campaign steps. Start by looking back and figure out what you we done that has worked, what lessons we learned and what we’d do differently, and overall wisdom gained from running previous campaigns. Then, deep dive into the details of the marketing that you want to do for the next year or whatever timeline you’ve chosen. Don’t focus too much on the details, but get further into great ideas and create steps, draw diagrams to get to the next steps so we can score them based on estimated urgency, effort, and feasibility. Then build your objectives and key results based on the aggregated scores! Objectives should be ambitious, quantitative, and actionable. Likewise, your key results are how you plan to execute and measure in order to accomplish your overarching strategy.

Processes: Having a process and a framework to execute campaigns is the last step, and we can draw from the previous three steps. We need to figure out how to operationalize and make less assumptions, which is what leads us astray to begin with. We use the Sprint framework to help eliminate assumptions from our campaign: Map, Sketch, Decide, Prototype, Test.

Project management helps us launch things that are impactful and creative by coordinating people, priorities, and processes that move toward one critical objective. The Sprint structure is a key way to be able to bring campaigns to life and help us reach our targets.