The Frontier Of Marketing Project Management

Why are other business functions such as finance, fulfilment and development more organized than marketing?

With today's business efficiencies, the marketing department may represent the best leverage opportunity in your company for increasing overall revenue expansion and company innovation.

Your marketing people feel the pressure - yet lost at sea amongst promising new fads and new opportunities such as web 2.0, social network marketing, Facebook advertising...

But it's no one's fault. Business must mature to absorb marketing as a centre piece of modern strategy, rather than leaving it strategically floating. Only then can the marketing function do what it can and must.

"Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two-and only two-basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business." - Peter Drucker

And what is the obvious option for marketing to improve by? Marketing Project Management.

MPM can come from books on project management... or it can extend into formalised academic project management (most of which I would not recommend), or a comprehensive study and implementation of critical chain (CCPM)which is light years beyond standard critical path techniques.

The Way Into Marketing Project Management

Regardless of the approach taken for marketing project management training, or the scale of MPM required in your company, there are 6 components for MPM.

1. Preparation - Including team selection, customer orientation focus

2. Research - Market, customer, product, company competencies, etc.

3. Development - Web presence, product development contribution, team development, etc.

4. Conversion - Promotion, advertising, landing pages, sales videos, events, etc.

5. Traffic - Search engine optimisation, affiliates, list procurement, social marketing.

6. Tracking - Web tracking, ROI analysis, etc.

These six areas of practical MPM are guided by the trialectic of management:

1. Outcome - Get clear on what results are possible and are needed for better marketing performance.

2. Process - Understand the bottlenecks that exist both within the marketing team environment as well as the external market environment.

3. Performance - Guiding daily productivity and tracking ROI of all marketing projects.

With this protocol any marketing manager can begin building a tailored approach to marketing project management.