For a small marketing team, a monthly calendar layout in Excel or Google sheets is just fine. For a marketing team with a broad range of programs, or more than a couple groups of stakeholders to keep informed, spreadsheets and other simple solutions fall short. An advanced marketing team has more information to convey to a larger variety of stakeholders, which necessarily requires marketing calendar software with more sophisticated capabilities – or a lot more work.

This post details best practices for marketing calendar software solutions for larger, more advanced marketing teams. These best practices were learned across hundreds of customers and prospects with varying sizes and types of marketing teams. Not all marketing teams need all these best practices, but, all larger teams need some of these for their marketing calendar software.

Before we look at the best practices for marketing calendar software, let’s first understand why a marketing calendar is needed.

“Marketing calendars for advanced marketing teams must be configurable, automated and real-time.”

Share on Twitter

Understanding Why Marketing Calendars Are Needed

The most common need for a Marketing calendar is to answer the question “What is marketing doing?” This seemingly simple question is actually a complex series of questions. Outside of smaller operations, “What is marketing doing?” actually means “What is marketing doing for me?” Meaning, what is marketing doing for my product, my region, my division, etc.

Therefore, marketing teams have to answer not just a simple, general question about what they’re doing, but instead answer a series of questions across multiple audiences related to multiple products, regions, channels, strategic focuses, etc. Marketing must also answer this question from both a high level big picture view down to a tactical view, depending on the audience.

Simple, one-dimensional marketing calendars are insufficient for more complex marketing teams. Marketing calendar software must be horizontally configurable to display programs across products, regions, channels and so forth, as well as vertically configurable to show different levels of marketing programs.

This is why simple, one-dimensional marketing calendars are insufficient for more complex marketing teams. Simple marketing calendar solutions either present not enough information for some audiences, or present so much information that stakeholders can’t find what they want. Likewise, producing a large number of tailored marketing calendars, and keeping them updated, is not tenable. The answer is a configurable, real time, marketing calendar that pulls from a repository of all marketing programs to satisfy the unique needs of each stakeholder.

Whether home grown, or a commercial product, the following are best practices to take into consideration when buying or building marketing calendar software.

Best Practice: Instant Updates

Marketing Calendars Must Be Updated in Real Time

More of a mandate than a best practice, all marketing calendars must always be up to date. Worse than having no marketing calendar at all is having a calendar that shows out of date or incorrect information. If no calendar exists, stakeholders will seek out program information and likely get the most current data (unfortunately, at the expense of bugging you or your team). If a calendar exists but is not current, stakeholders easily assume the programs, dates and other data are correct, which leads to big problems. Similarly, if a program is included in multiple marketing calendars, the details for that program must be the same on all calendars.

To keep multiple marketing calendars up to date, slave each calendar to a common repository of program information. Store details about each program in the central repository, not in the calendar itself. This way, multiple calendars share the same data, there is only one ‘master’ record that needs to be updated, and all marketing calendars are always up to date. Yes, this requires some technical work if you are going to build it yourself. However, publishing multiple standalone marketing calendars on a regular basis is a recipe for disaster. Even if the calendars are kept in a central intranet or Sharepoint site, continuously updating many calendars is both time consuming and risky.

Eliminate this risk and labor by investing up front in a marketing calendar software architecture that ties a front end calendar display to a back end repository, and all marketing calendars will always be up to date.

Best Practice: Horizontal Configurability

Multiple Marketing Calendars for Multiple Stakeholders

Because marketing serves many stakeholders, each with their own related set of marketing programs, marketing calendars must be horizontally configurable. Then, the stakeholder or marketing team can easily configure individual marketing calendars to show select sets of programs according to need. For instance, you may need a calendar to show only events. Or, you may want a calendar to show only programs for a certain region, or division, or product. This demands that your marketing calendar software be configurable, allowing it to display only the programs of interest to each stakeholder.

To deliver horizontal configurability, work from the front end and the back end of your marketing calendar software. On the front end, your marketing calendar software must have a configurable interface to select different sets of programs. This could be as simple as preset filters that list the necessary options for product, region, division, or whatever is important to your audience. Or, your interface could be more powerful, like a simple query builder that lets the user create their own Boolean filter conditions, like all programs that are in region X AND are this channel OR that channel.

On the back end, diligently categorize and record every program so your filters or query builder have a consistent data repository to pull from. It is imperative that you have a consistent set of categories and data options to make this work. In the database world this is known as data integrity. In practice, this means that you can’t label a program as a ‘trade show’ and expect a filter that is looking for ‘events’ to find it.

Decide on your categories, match your filter mechanisms to those categories and values, and record your programs consistently. Then, let your stakeholders select the data they need for their personal marketing calendar.

Best Practice: Vertical Configurability

Marketing Calendars for The Big Picture and The Detailed Plan

Just as marketing calendar software must be horizontally configurable to display programs across products, regions, channels and so forth, it must also be configurable to show different levels of marketing programs. For simplicity, consider marketing output in a vertical hierarchy. Major campaigns are at the top, such as branding, or customer retention. Underneath a major campaign may be many programs, such as emails, advertising or content creation. Underneath each program may be many tasks, such as copy drafts, creating artwork or procurement. Different audiences require information from different levels of this hierarchy in their marketing calendar.

For instance, a marketing calendar for senior executives and high level planning requires big picture items, like major campaigns or product launches, but certainly should not include detail items like the third outreach email in a nurture track. Conversely, a team delivering a major product launch will care about the lower level details. Their marketing calendar should display details down to the task level so progress can be monitored and work can be coordinated, but their calendar should not show other major campaign information.

Letting your stakeholders determine which levels of programs to display in their marketing calendar requires vertical configurability. The same front end solutions discussed for horizontal configurability work for vertical configurability. On the back end, your programs need another dimension of categorization to allow the front end to select programs by hierarchy level. Categorizing programs as level 1, 2 or 3, or campaign, program, or task, or create your own concept of program hierarchy.

Best Practice: Multiple Formats

Marketing Calendars Need Not Be a ‘Calendar’

A monthly wall calendar layout is a simple, familiar format for a marketing calendar, but this format does not serve all use cases well. Similarly, a quarterly or yearly format that conveys the big picture is also not always the best format. Offering a combination of weekly, monthly, quarterly and possibly yearly calendar views is a solid starting point for your marketing calendar. But, even combined, these typical calendar formats still don’t deliver optimum utility.

For example, if a stakeholder wants to see how many webinars are planned, scanning multiple months or quarters looking for webinars is a poor solution. For this, and many other use cases, a sortable table format is a much better option. Producing table based views of the same programs shown in a traditional monthly marketing calendar, slaved to the same central repository of marketing programs, is an ideal way to provide stakeholders richer information when required.

Additionally, other display formats like pivot table formats grouping programs into swim lanes is more useful than either a monthly calendar or table view for certain use cases. So, when planning your marketing calendar software, don’t limit your thinking to just a monthly or weekly calendar view. Think in terms of multiple views of the same data to turn that data into the most easily consumed information, and don’t limit your marketing calendar software front end to just a ‘calendar.’

Best Practice: Make Marketing Calendars Two-Way

Allow Stakeholders to Update Marketing Calendars

Primarily, you want only your marketing team to add or change the information that populates your marketing calendar software. Sometimes, though, you may want people outside of marketing to update the marketing calendar. For instance, you may want members of your product team to adjust programs which they own. Or, you may want contractor or agency personnel to enter or adjust PR events. New programs and updates from outside groups can always be funneled through your marketing team, and a team member can update your program data repository, but, this wastes cycles and introduces delays.

Avoid the wasted cycles and delays by granting trusted stakeholders the ability to update programs directly. Either grant trusted stakeholders access to the program data repository directly, or through the calendar itself.

The simplest solution is to allow trusted personnel to update the program repository directly. But, this introduces a data security risk. Ideally, segment data repository access such that users can only see and update controlled sets of programs. A more sophisticated solution is to allow updates directly through the calendar interface. If the calendars use preset filters, this limits the risk of data ‘mismanagement’ to whatever data a particular filter covers.

Whichever method you choose, enrolling trusted stakeholders to update program data both makes them more invested in content and quality of your marketing calendars, and lessens the burden on your team.

Sophisticated Marketing Calendar Software for Sophisticated Marketing Teams

No matter the format, every marketing team must have a marketing calendar. As the sophistication of your marketing team, programs and stakeholders grows, so do the demands on your marketing calendar software. If that software is a spreadsheet or other basic platform, your team will invest more and more cycles to make your marketing calendars serve their purpose. Eventually, manually maintaining multiple marketing calendars based on these platforms will fail. Before that happens, consider these best practices and your own requirements and build or buy marketing calendar software that gives your team, and your stakeholders, richer, configurable, real time marketing calendars that satisfy everyone with much lower investment and risk.

The post Marketing Calendar Software Best Practices for Advanced Marketing Teams appeared first on Markodojo - Marketing Management Software - Agile Marketing.

In this not-so-tongue-and-cheek blog series, we present 18 Marketing Management Survival Tactics for staving off common marketing management disasters. The first two posts in the series provided 12 tips for surviving marketing management natural disasters and man-made marketing management industrial accidents. This third post in the series provides 6 proven tactics for quelling public unrest.

Marketing managers have many choices. In particular, marketing managers must decide what they are going to do before they can plan how to do it. Should you improve your message or drive more traffic? Does your product need more capability or higher quality? Once decided, the real work begins. Without a clear strategy, each marketing manager chooses differently and you end up with marketing anarchy characterized by conflicting priorities, confusion, frustration and inconsistent, sub-optimal marketing results.

Your marketing strategy must be more than a plan. It should include clear cross-functional goals and priorities that facilitate everyday decisions by constraining marketing choices and clarifying marketing tradeoffs. You can’t just do a presentation or send out a memo. Marketing strategy must be baked into your marketing management process to link everyday work to strategic initiatives, keeping work in step with strategy even when priorities change. It should enable every marketing manager to make coherent choices and avoid wasting time on random acts of marketing.

Marketing Management Survival Tactic #13

Improve alignment and integration by linking campaigns and projects to strategy. Publish a real-time marketing roadmap that presents your marketing plan by strategic initiatives, such as “increase awareness”, “drive new business” and “build loyalty”.

Marketing Management Survival Tactic #14

Task lists are great for getting things done, but they don’t help you decide if you are doing the right things in the first place. Don’t just make a list of marketing projects. Create roadmaps, calendars, campaign plans and charts by market segment, channel, product, buyer personae, strategic initiative, customer value, and other critical marketing dimensions to see if your marketing work and results are properly balanced, prioritized and integrated.

Everybody wants something from marketing. Sales wants leads. Support wants a community website. The CFO wants more revenue with less budget. And, every CEO has a pet marketing project. Keeping stakeholders happy, particularly when they have conflicting priorities, is a never ending challenge of every marketing department. If you consistently miss stakeholder expectations, you’ll find yourself facing a frustrated and angry mob.

You can’t please all of the people all of the time, but you can build buy-in and co-opt your critics. The best approach to quashing marketing stakeholder problems is to involve stakeholders in the solution. First and foremost, keep stakeholders apprised of marketing plans and performance. Marketing blackouts encourage stakeholder riots. Proactively solicit feedback on marketing plans and source suggestions for future marketing programs. Collaborate directly on important marketing projects, so your stakeholders are as committed to success and own the results as much as you.

Marketing Management Survival Tactic #15

The best way to avoid angry mobs is to set the right expectations in the first place. Communicate key marketing strategies, priorities, plans and decisions broadly to all interested stakeholders on a regular basis.

If you like these marketing management survival tactics,
then check out the complete Marketing Manager’s Survival Kit and get all 18 tactics.

Marketing Management Survival Tactic #16

People tend to take care of their own. If you want real stakeholder buy-in to your marketing plans, then you should include them in your planning process. In fact, you should collaborate with stakeholders on the actual work to tap into their ideas and perspectives. When you co-opt your critics, they don’t just buy into your plans, they co-own the results.

Rapid organizational changes can wreak havoc on marketing productivity. High growth, corporate reorganizations, acquisitions and sudden turnover can create scenarios where the marketing department is full of new, inexperienced and potentially unmotivated marketing managers. Even the most senior marketing managers can freeze up while coming up to speed on entirely new surroundings. Welcome to the marketing zombie apocalypse, where the blind lead the blind and nothing gets done except trying to keep yourself from being eaten alive.

When ramping new or inexperienced marketing team members, it’s best to be more explicit about what, when and where things need to get done. While experienced, senior marketing managers are proficient team leaders, more junior team members need to be led. They are also less likely to raise the alarm when they are stuck or overloaded, and have no internal benchmark for good performance. Priorities and tasks should not only be explicit, they should be visible to the entire team, so marketing managers can detect and resolve individual problems before they impact other team members and marketing deliverables.

Marketing Management Survival Tactic #17

It’s hard to tell if you are doing great if you don’t know what great looks like. When everyone has a clear picture of superior marketing performance, then it easy to tell when marketing managers are living up to their true marketing potential.

Marketing Management Survival Tactic #18

When tackling an entirely unfamiliar project, even the most experienced marketing managers appreciate a little detailed instruction. Also, unmotivated and underperforming staff need to realize that they are bringing down the entire team. The best way to handle both of these difficult marketing management situations is to define specific task plans and monitor progress until the suffering individuals are back up to top performance.

The post Marketing Management Tactics for Quelling Public Unrest appeared first on Markodojo - Marketing Management Software - Agile Marketing.

In this not-so-tongue-and-cheek blog series, we present 18 Marketing Management Survival Tactics for staving off common marketing management disasters. The first post explored how to survive marketing management natural disasters. This second post in the series provides 6 proven tactics for avoiding common man-made marketing management accidents.

If no one knows what marketing is doing, then the natural conclusion is that marketing isn’t doing anything terribly important. Moreover, when different groups within the marketing organization don’t know what other groups are doing, it is impossible to provide a unified experience for your customers. Unfortunately, most marketing plans, projects and performance reports are hidden away in spreadsheets, documents, email inboxes and other poorly lit locations.

Ending a marketing blackout requires systematic collection, integration and publication of marketing plans, projects and performance. Current marketing plans, status of work-in-process and marketing performance reports for each marketing area should be available to everyone in the marketing department. High level roadmaps, monthly marketing calendars, and regular updates should be published to all marketing stakeholders. Without an integrated marketing management system, consolidating and communicating marketing activities is pure overhead and can be quite labor intensive. However, the alternative marketing blackout is far worse.

Marketing Management Survival Tactic #7

Real-time visibility across the entire marketing department requires detailed project tracking. Consider implementing a marketing project management system. A rigorous and automated approach to marketing project management increases the probability that reality mirrors your marketing plan, and eliminates busy work. If you systematically collect information at the project level, then higher-level views, such as marketing roadmaps, calendars and progress reports can be completely automated.

Marketing Management Survival Tactic #8

An easy way to keep everyone informed about upcoming marketing promotions, projects, and events is to publish a monthly marketing calendar and update it weekly. Share the marketing calendar with marketing, sales, other departments and the executive team to keep everyone informed.

Sometimes big problems come in small, well-intentioned packages. For example, when the VP of Sales makes a simple and reasonable request that threatens to blow up all your well-thought-out marketing plans and committed marketing goals. Can we upgrade the website next month? Let’s start doing webinars once a week. And, so forth. Then there are the super urgent, yet conflicting requests. The VP of sales wants a website upgrade, but the VP of customer success wants a community portal, and, you only have one web team.

The ability to defuse potentially volatile situations involving hard-charging, single-minded executives is an essential marketing manager skill. Life is easier, however, if skill is also supported by process and a few facts. Executives ask marketing for things they think they need to be successful. However, exactly what they need and when they need it allows room for negotiation. What is the priority of the request relative to projects on the current marketing roadmap? Does it all need to be done yesterday, or can it be broken up into smaller projects and rolled out over time? Or frankly, is it sufficient to just capture the idea for future consideration.

Marketing Management Survival Tactic #9

The secret deactivation code to defuse every explosive executive situation is the word “YES”. Manage project scope, not just resources. By breaking big project requests up into smaller increments, you can provide immediate satisfaction without derailing current marketing plans. Say “YES” to something small today, and deliver the bigger vision incrementally over time.

If you like these marketing management survival tactics,
then check out the complete Marketing Manager’s Survival Kit and get all 18 tactics.

Marketing Management Survival Tactic #10

An executive request that looks important and easy in isolation, might be foolish and difficult when weighed against current marketing plans. Everyone wants marketing to work on the most valuable ideas, so keep a prioritized backlog of all potential marketing projects and publish it for stakeholders to see. Build consensus around your marketing plan and backlog priorities. Now handling a new request is just an exercise in reordering the backlog.

Most marketing departments are under-resourced and over-committed. There is no time for do-overs. Fuzzy objectives, fuzzy assignments, fuzzy agendas, fuzzy hand-offs and fuzzy communications lead to endless marketing rework and countless hours spent in useless staff meetings. Busy work that eats up precious marketing cycles without moving things forward is a toxic waste of time that can seriously undermine marketing performance.

Cleaning up waste from rework requires clearing up day-to-day marketing management activities. Luckily, it doesn’t require a lot of overhead. Rigorous work habits and simple process rules will often do the trick. Make sure strategic marketing goals are clear, so you don’t waste time on unimportant projects. Don’t start a new marketing project without clear objectives and requirements. Create modest project plans with a special focus on deliverable hand-offs to coordinate cross-functional teams. Make sure every project and deliverable has a single, clear owner. Bring an agenda to every meeting and record issues, decisions, and action items.

Marketing Management Survival Tactic #11

Email, chat, and social tools are great for one-off conversations, but they lack the context, depth and continuity required for purposeful collaboration. Consider a marketing collaboration platform that links conversations, documents, and decisions directly to projects for greater efficiency.

Marketing Management Survival Tactic #12

Streamline team meetings by eliminating updates on work that is going according to plan—just make sure the plan is up-to-date before the meeting. Focus instead on coordinating hand-offs, resolving issues, helping stuck team members, and removing obstacles from blocked projects.

The post Avoiding Marketing Management Industrial Accidents appeared first on Markodojo - Marketing Management Software - Agile Marketing.

In this not-so-tongue-and-cheek blog series, we present 18 Marketing Management Survival Tactics for staving off common marketing management disasters. This first post in the series provides 6 proven tactics for surviving marketing management natural disasters.

Creating demand and driving sustainable revenue growth is the primary charter of every marketing organization. However, they are much easier said than done. There are times when increasing demand is as simple as ramping advertising spend. Sooner or later though, every ad campaign and media channel runs dry. Ending a demand drought requires marketing innovation, and marketing innovation requires the ingenuity of skilled marketing managers.

The problem is ingenuity doesn’t scale. Sustainable revenue growth cannot rest entirely on the shoulders of a few creative marketing managers. To prevent recurring demand droughts, you must systematize marketing innovation. New marketing ideas, both big and small, must be sourced, brainstormed, prioritized, tested, measured and assessed on a regular basis. Successful new ideas then become ongoing marketing programs, and innovation shifts to marketing program optimization. If you want to be a revenue rainmaker, you must build a marketing innovation machine.

Marketing Management Survival Tactic #1

Source new marketing ideas broadly and routinely by conducting regular surveys of customers and sales, publishing request and feedback forms, and soliciting suggestions from throughout the entire company. The wider the net you cast, the better your chances of catching that next great marketing campaign idea.

Marketing Management Survival Tactic #2

Create a running backlog of all marketing ideas that you can draw on at any time. Set a standard for prioritizing ideas based on relative value and level of effort required to implement them. Groom the backlog on a regular basis to refine good ideas, remove outdated ideas and reprioritize those that remain. By keeping a running idea backlog, you simplify marketing planning and make sure you never lose a good revenue generating idea.

To capture the attention of busy buyers, marketing managers plan global campaigns, product launches, seasonal promotions, and spectacular events that routinely fill marketing departments up with a deluge of work. If you don’t brace yourself for these foreseeable floods, quality will suffer and marketing teams will drown in a sea of work. Marketing management at scale is a process, not a project, and marketing managers must master important process management principles to open the floodgates when the tide runs high.

If you like these marketing management survival tactics,
then check out the complete Marketing Manager’s Survival Kit and get all 18 tactics.

Handling a deluge of work with limited marketing resources requires scalable, efficient marketing production processes based on increased standardization, automation and quality. The more your marketing production processes resemble a factory, the more marketing output you can generate per marketing team member. Most marketing projects from websites to trade shows require the coordination of cross-functional marketing teams. While these people-centric processes cannot be fully automated in the same sense as sending an email, their production capacity can be dramatically increased by implementing a marketing project management system with standardized workflows, formalized hand-offs, deliverable templates, reusable assets and proactive management of resource bottlenecks. Once standardized, routine tasks can be automated and end-to-end processes can be optimized through continuous improvement.

Marketing Management Survival Tactic #3

Increase the efficiency of people-centric marketing processes by focusing on the handoffs. Define specific process stages, such as draft, copy, design, proof, etc. and create outlines and templates for deliverables that get handed-off at each stage. Track marketing projects by stage to ensure a smooth work flow. Just like you do with the purchase funnel!

Marketing Management Survival Tactic #4

If you monitor marketing projects by workflow stage, then you can identify bottlenecks in your marketing management process when a particular stage backs up. Bottlenecks in any stage reduce the output of the entire process. Remove bottlenecks to keep your marketing projects flowing and increase efficiency.

Budget cuts, competitor moves, PR crises: sometimes unexpected bolts from the blue shock a well-organized marketing plan into complete disarray. When things change rapidly, does your marketing organization absorb the shock and rebound nimbly? Or, does it end up in a panic that puts everything else on hold until the crisis passes? Insulating your marketing organization against sudden shocks requires a flexible marketing management process that expects change and adapts quickly.

If you find it difficult to plan because you are constantly dealing with unforeseen changes, then you should consider adopting agile marketing best practices, such as working incrementally. When you know your marketing plan will change each month, then you should not commit to projects that will take longer than a month to implement. Break big projects up into smaller ones that fit into your known time horizon. Don’t make rigid plans that extend out several quarters. Set long term goals and prioritize your backlog of projects accordingly. Focus on producing a steady stream of work based on your backlog. When lightning strikes, you just have to adjust your priorities, not your plans.

Marketing Management Survival Tactic #5

Big projects reduce flexibility, while small projects increase it. Implement big projects incrementally by breaking them up into smaller ones. When lightning strikes, you can easily shift to something else without lowering productivity.

Marketing Management Survival Tactic #6

Once you start working incrementally, you can fit projects neatly into weekly, bi-weekly or monthly work ‘sprints’. Each sprint cycle, you strive to complete projects assigned to the current sprint, then realign priorities for any changes as you plan the next sprint. Sprints increase your flexibility, strengthen your focus on tangible results, and establish a regular heartbeat within your marketing organization.

The post Surviving Marketing Management Natural Disasters appeared first on Markodojo - Marketing Management Software - Agile Marketing.

Marketing management is a dangerous job. Stalled revenue, sudden budget cuts, and political finger pointing are constant threats to even the most talented marketing management professional. Marketing management disasters come in three general forms: natural environmental shocks, self-inflicted man-made crises, and socio-political unrest. To survive, you must be prepared.

Click to Download Now

Click to Download Now

The Marketing Manager’s Survival Kit presents 18 Marketing Management Survival Tactics for staving off common marketing management disasters, including demand drought, floods of work, executive explosions, marketing blackouts, stakeholder riots, and more.

The post The Marketing Manager’s Survival Kit | Ebook appeared first on Markodojo - Marketing Management Software - Agile Marketing.

Who has time to master it all when you have to get that email campaign out the door? As a career CMO, I’ve had to think a lot about how to produce great marketing without getting bogged down by management. Here are ten marketing project management tips to help you get the job done.

Marketing Project Management Tip #1

When building a ship or implementing a software system, the project manager’s primary goal is largely self-defining, i.e., build a ship or implement a software system, respectively. However, the marketing project manager’s goal in building a website or producing an industry event is never the project itself. A marketing project is always a means to a larger end, such as generating new business, driving upsells or increasing brand loyalty. Given the fast-paced, frantic nature of most marketing departments, it is easy to get bogged down in the details of day-to-day project management and lose track of the higher strategic goal. Over time, this kind of “strategic drift” can kill your marketing performance. Campaigns lose cohesion, messages wander, and managers spend too much time on low impact projects. Link marketing projects to marketing strategy to reinforce strategic alignment, while maintaining agility and autonomy.

Marketing Project Management Tip #2

Modern marketing departments live and die by the numbers. While each marketing project rolls up to a higher strategic goal, those lofty strategic goals invariably have hard numbers attached to them, such as leads and revenue. And, those numbers invariably roll back down to individual campaigns in the form of impressions, clicks, attendees, articles and so forth. Whenever possible, you should link marketing work to marketing performance. I say “whenever possible,” because frankly sometimes it is simply impossible to do this. Brand awareness, trial and purchase are more often than not the result of many marketing interactions. That said, sometimes it’s pretty clear exactly how many leads and orders you got from an email campaign or a trade show. And, to the extent that the ultimate marketing results are not clear, there are almost always meaningful interim metrics such as visitors, attendees and clicks that can be linked directly to the marketing projects that produced them.

Marketing Project Management Tip #3

In many businesses, as much as 50% of marketing as a discipline happens outside the marketing department. Sales reps convert leads to sales. Engineers design products to meet customer needs. Support reps build brand loyalty. As a result, everybody wants something from the marketing department and marketers cannot do their jobs without broad collaboration throughout the company. Facilitate collaboration with marketing stakeholders by publishing marketing plans and marketing results. From a marketing project management perspective, it’s essential to build buy-in up front, so that stakeholders are motivated to work with marketing to produce better results and have fact-based expectations about marketing performance.

Marketing Project Management Tip #4

Innovation is essential to great marketing. However, you can’t rush creativity. Just because you need a breakthrough campaign idea doesn’t guarantee that you will have it. Alternatively, great marketing ideas routinely fall by the wayside, because on any given day most marketing managers already have more work to do than they can possibly get done. Keep a global backlog of marketing ideas, so that you don’t lose track of the good ideas, and you are always working on the best ideas. Plus, you can harness the creative power of your entire organization by encouraging people outside of marketing to contribute to the marketing idea backlog.

Marketing Project Management Tip #5

Agile marketing is a new marketing management approach that encourages you to break big projects up into smaller incremental optimizations that are organized into weekly or monthly “sprints.” Applied correctly, agile marketing can dramatically increase marketing output, reduce project delays and enable continuous improvement. Agile marketing is a powerful tool, but like every tool you need to know when and how to use it. Agile marketing projects must naturally break up into independent increments and they must be executed either by individuals or tightly integrated work teams, otherwise your agile team will constantly get bogged down in bottlenecks and delays. Ongoing marketing campaigns such as website optimization, content marketing, and PR story pitching are perfect candidates for agile marketing methodologies. Major trade shows and product launches, not so much. If your marketing team is small, agile marketing may apply to just about everything you do, because the size of your team puts a natural constraint on the size of your projects.

If you like these ten tips, and are interested in more advanced education in marketing project management, check out the latest Markodojo Marketing Project Management eBook on building breakout marketing teams.

Marketing Project Management Tip #6

Marketing projects often involve the contributions of many individuals with diverse skill sets. A marketing deliverable, such as a brochure or email campaign, is built up one step at time by each contributor, e.g., strategy, copy, design, production, and delivery. Bad hand-offs create useless iterations, rework and delays. Clean hand-offs increase marketing agility and efficiency. Standardize the information, timing, deliverables and expectations around each critical hand-off to eliminate miscommunication. By focusing on the hand-offs, you can gain immediate control over the entire marketing management process.

Marketing Project Management Tip #7

Many marketing projects, such as publishing an Ebook, creating a print ad, or managing an event are simply variations on a common theme that occurs over and over again. Why waste time reinventing the wheel? Keep a library of reusable project templates that can be quickly modified to fit each variation. A project template that includes a standard schedule, detailed task lists, important hand-offs, and deliverable outlines allows marketers to focus more on marketing, and less on repetitive managerial chores.

Marketing Project Management Tip #8

The higher the volume of marketing projects, the more marketing project management becomes marketing process management. Content creation, creative services, media production and online campaign execution all scale into continuous marketing process workflows as a marketing department grows. After standardizing the handoffs and deliverables for these workflows, it is far less important to track every individual task. Define clear process stages and monitor the flow of work by stage, not by task. Management by stage allows you to identify bottlenecks, balance workloads and develop performance benchmarks, such as productivity and cycle time.

Marketing Project Management Tip #9

Most marketing departments have many diverse functional groups; however, each function tends to gravitate in one of two directions: segments or services. Business segment functions focus on a specific product, customer, or geographic region and have direct accountability for marketing programs, leads and revenue within their respective segments. Marketing services functions consolidate specialized skills and production processes to increase marketing efficiency, while supporting support multiple business segment groups. Marketing programs tend to originate within the segment functions, fan out as interdependent projects to multiple services functions, and then recombine into integrated campaigns for the relevant target segment.

If that sounds complicated, it is. Segment managers must orchestrate execution across many moving parts throughout the marketing organization, while services managers need to balance workloads, minimize rework, ensure quality and meet tight deadlines. Don’t try to do it by punch lists and spreadsheets. To integrate the work, you must integrate the systems that track it, so you will need enterprise-class marketing project management software. Create a request form and capture project information at the source. Then, automate project tracking, collaboration and reporting, so that all stakeholders can stay in sync and aligned on expectations and performance.

Marketing Project Management Tip #10

Marketing projects require marketing managers to work with a broad array of external contributors outside the marketing department, including customers, agencies, journalists, industry analysts and social media influencers. These relationships are a core asset of any marketing department. However, they are usually very poorly managed. Unlike virtually every sales and support organization on the planet, most marketing departments don’t even maintain a rudimentary contact management system. Who was the designer for this website? Who is our contact at that newspaper? Who was the customer contact for this case study? When was the last time we spoke to them? Does anyone remember? Centralize marketing relationship management into a single department-wide system to keep important marketing relationships intact. In the end, every marketing project is only as good as the people that contribute to it. Don’t lose your best people.

The post 10 Marketing Project Management Tips appeared first on Markodojo - Marketing Management Software - Agile Marketing.

Markodojo Marketing Management Process Series

Marketing teams come in many varieties and they employ an even broader variety of marketing programs. In the end, however, all marketing managers are tasked with the same goal: deliver customer value that drives revenue growth. There are countless great marketing blogs, e-books and indeed textbooks on tools and techniques to drive revenue growth: once. Unfortunately, you don’t create sustainable revenue growth by stringing together a hodge-podge of marketing programs. Sustainable revenue growth requires a marketing management process that empowers marketing teams to discover, optimize and scale new sources of revenue, again and again.

Click to Download Now

Click to Download Now

Sustainable revenue growth requires innovation to optimize new marketing programs and high production efficiency to scale mature ones. However, the skills, org structures, and processes that foster program innovation are often in direct opposition to those that increase production efficiency. Efficiency without innovation results in flat-lined revenue as existing marketing programs run out of gas. Innovation without efficiency results in low marketing ROI and un-scalable random acts of marketing. This new Ebook helps aims to help you achieve the right balance for your marketing organization by deploying marketing teams that fit your specific challenges and drive sustainable growth.

The post Marketing Teams that Drive Growth | Ebook appeared first on Markodojo - Marketing Management Software - Agile Marketing.

This is the last post in a Markodojo marketing management blog series on marketing management process. Earlier posts in the series focused on common marketing management pitfalls, the importance of marketing leverage in driving sustainable revenue growth and organizational options for scaling marketing teams. This final post provides a leg up for marketing managers that want to accelerate their careers with seven marketing management lessons that usually take many years of experience to learn.

Marketing Management Lesson #1

The fundamental goal of marketing is to drive revenue growth by increasing customer value. Every single job in marketing contributes to this goal. If it does not, then the job should not exist in marketing. As a marketing manager, you are by definition accountable for revenue, so you should always act like it. If you are a marketing manager at a non-profit, then you can take the equivalent stand of being accountable for customer value. Every decision you make should be examined from the perspective of customer value and revenue impact. Every budget line item you propose should contribute to this goal. And, don’t shy away from revenue-based compensation; it demonstrates your accountability.

Marketing Management Lesson #2

Business schools teach that marketing provides leadership grounded in a deep understanding of customers. In the real world, marketing is an isolated corporate function that can easily lose touch with the customers it serves. Whether you are crafting a new message, building a better product or justifying your marketing budget to the CEO, your credibility always comes from the customer. The more you can back your opinions and your numbers with customer opinions and customer numbers, the more compelling your business case. The corollary to this lesson is that you should include your customers in every stage of the marketing management process: generating new marketing ideas, collaborating on marketing programs, and providing feedback on marketing results.

Marketing Management Lesson #3

Anyone can spend money; successful marketing managers make money. While the primary goal of marketing is revenue growth, the primary goal of marketing management is to increase marketing leverage: revenue growth at the highest possible marketing ROI. The more marketing leverage marketing managers create, the more money a business has to invest in new products, new channels, and new markets. Set yourself on an endless quest for marketing leverage that uncovers new sources of revenue growth, innovates to optimize current marketing programs, and increases marketing production efficiency at scale.

Marketing Management Lesson #4

Marketing managers live lives of contradiction. What matters more: a market survey percentage point or the unique insight of a single customer? Clicks-through rates or brand loyalty? Despite the recent explosion of online analytics, marketing reluctantly remains equal parts art and science, quality and quantity. To succeed in marketing management, you must use both sides of your brain. Only your creative side will drive marketing innovation, while only your analytical side can optimize and scale marketing programs for maximum marketing leverage.

Marketing Management Lesson #5

Marketing managers have too many choices. A sales manager must close deals. A manufacturing manager must build a product. In contrast, marketing managers must decide what they are going to do before they can plan how to do it. Should you improve your message or drive more traffic? Does your product need more capability or higher quality? Once you decide, then the real work begins. If no one decides, nothing happens. Your marketing strategy must be more than a plan. It must provide a framework for everyday marketing management decisions by constraining marketing choices and clarifying marketing tradeoffs. Strategic alignment starts at the top, but you can’t just do a presentation or send out a memo. Marketing strategy must be baked into your marketing management process to enable every marketing manager to make better marketing choices every day.

Marketing Management Lesson #6

It takes an experienced marketing manager to shape a raw idea into a great marketing program. However, you don’t need to come up with every cool marketing idea yourself. Successful marketing managers create an environment where creativity thrives, and then they channel that creativity into the marketing management process. The best ideas are likely to come from your customers, your sales team, industry influencers, and so forth. Maximize your chances of finding the absolute best marketing ideas by casting the broadest possible net. Focus your marketing management energy on finding and refining ideas into marketing mix improvements that drive revenue growth.

Marketing Management Lesson #7

The marketing manager’s quest for marketing leverage never ends. Marketing managers create leverage by adding layer after layer of repeatable, revenue generating marketing programs. If you don’t manage the marketing management process and simply jump from one marketing campaign to the next, your revenue will be flat and you will have no marketing leverage. Successful marketing managers don’t just market, they manage. Create a marketing innovation engine that continually sources and optimizes new marketing ideas. Increase production efficiency as marketing programs mature. Define your core marketing management processes, codify best practices, and deploy marketing management software and systems that enable break-out marketing teams to drive sustainable growth.

The post 7 Marketing Management Lessons You Don’t Learn in B-School appeared first on Markodojo - Marketing Management Software - Agile Marketing.

Markodojo Marketing Management Process Series

Startup marketing is incredibly challenging. Finding product-market fit, building a brand from scratch, and ramping revenue from zero to millions, these fundamental startup marketing problems are absolutely daunting. As if they weren’t enough though, the difficulty of scaling startup marketing is compounded by incredibly tight marketing budgets, changing market conditions, rapid organization growth, high expectations and an uneven understanding of marketing’s role in the business.

Click to Download Now

Click to Download Now

As a career CMO and now CEO of Markodojo, I’ve repeatedly confronted the startup marketing challenge. Yet, it doesn’t get any easier. Every startup is unique and the individual startup marketing challenges vary accordingly. However, there are some common themes that startup CMOs and CEOs can rely on as the business scales from A-round to B-round to C-round and beyond. These are the ABC’s of scaling startup marketing.

The post The ABC’s of Scaling Startup Marketing appeared first on Markodojo - Marketing Management Software - Agile Marketing.

This is the fourth post in a Markodojo marketing management blog series on marketing process management. The first three posts in the series focused on the importance of marketing leverage in driving sustainable revenue growth and the organizational options for scaling marketing teams as a business grows. This fourth post highlights five common marketing management process pitfalls that you should avoid at all costs.

Marketing Management Pitfall #1

“I manage by hiring the best marketing managers and getting out of their way.” While a seemingly grand sentiment, this quote implies an abdication of marketing management leadership. The flip side is that if you lose one of these great managers, then that area of your marketing department comes to a screeching halt. If you manage by walking around and then simply hire great marketing managers who also manage by walking around, then your marketing organization will not adapt and will not scale. Hiring the best is always a good idea, but it is the senior marketing manager’s responsibility to provide an environment in which the best can thrive, including a robust marketing management process where performance is not dependent on a specific marketing resource.

Marketing Management Pitfall #2

You can’t growth hack a trade show. As your marketing organization scales, it’s essential to deploy marketing management processes that fit the strategic needs of your business, which can vary dramatically by market, product, geography, etc. Globally applying a single marketing management process methodology, such as agile marketing, optimizes some areas at the expense of others. Similarly, over-reliance on simplistic tools, such as spreadsheets, constrains marketing performance because they don’t enable creativity, efficiency, automation or adaptability in your marketing management process.

Marketing Management Pitfall #3

Marketing managers usually think a lot about customer communications and very little about marketing management communications. Effective communication is the oil that keeps your marketing machine running, whether it is creating budget buy-in with upper management or motivating sales reps in the field. If no one knows what marketing is doing, then even successful marketing programs can fail to meet management expectations. Each audience that contributes to marketing success: marketing teams, agency partners, sales reps and mangers, engineering teams, executives, etc. should get the right marketing management communication to meet its needs.

Marketing Management Pitfall #4

In theory, marketing provides leadership grounded in superior understanding of customers. In reality, marketing is a corporate function that can easily lose touch with customers as it scales. Moreover, the increased focus on marketing analytics brought about by online marketing makes it easy to forget that customers are real people. When it comes to understanding customer needs and motivations, clickstreams just don’t cut it. Your marketing management processes should encourage personal customer relationships and funnel customer feedback directly into marketing programs to enable continuous improvement.

Marketing Management Pitfall #5

Without a clear marketing management process and dedicated marketing management systems, marketing has no organizational memory. Knowledge evaporates on flash drives and important marketing relationships lie hidden away in email boxes. Without history, it is impossible to establish benchmarks. Without benchmarks, it is impossible to improve. Staff turnover compounds this lack of marketing memory. Onboarding is slow. Mistakes are repeated. Rework becomes the rule. And, critical marketing relationships with customers, vendors, and industry influencers erode. Without marketing memory, marketing is always reinventing the wheel.

The post Five Marketing Management Pitfalls appeared first on Markodojo - Marketing Management Software - Agile Marketing.