Review: CXL Institute Mini-degree in Growth Marketing 12/12

This is my last review of the CXL institute Mini-degree in Growth Marketing. It’s the 12th review on this blog and I’m sure it can help a reader deceiding to join the program.

This was another busy week and I was glad I only have one last course to finish. The last course of the 7th track of the CXL institute Mini-degree in Growth Marketing is Project Management for Marketers.

The term project management is not a new practice across industries, but how about in the marketing field. How do marketers juggle projects and deliverables while making sure that their attention to detail does not swindle? You’ll agree that digital marketing has a whole lot of nuisances when it comes to the functions and tasks to be done. A social media marketer in company x might be in charge of developing a content calendar, blog posts, simple designs, and media assets and at the same time be responsible for email marketing. The role of digital marketers is not perfectly aligned like a cookiecutter. Hence, having a formula or playbook for project management for digital marketers becomes so important and paramount. This will enable digital marketers to keep staying focused while paying attention to the task at hand in a very organized way. Enough of sermon! Let’s get to it.

There are three categories of issues that arise as a result of a lack of solid project management.

Resources

People: Many at times that project fails to live up to its expectation, it’s usually because those in charge of the project lost focus, and then reduced the level of attention and energy that the project should have gotten. This problem is linked to the loss of priority and can be rectified if there is a project plan with a timeline in place.

Time: Time management is an important skill that every living soul must have :). In executing a project, knowing how to effectively allot time frame for tasks and being disciplined with those deadlines will help ensure that projects are adequately carried out in a short timeline.

Output: This follows the simple law of thermodynamics. Your output cannot outweigh your input. The level of effort (time, energy, finance, etc.) put into a project is measurably proportional to the quantity of output that is derived. A project that suffers from resources will also have an output that is not well matured.

Scope

Over-commitment: Sometimes a project might look very difficult to round up, and in the quest of ensuring that deadlines are met, cost us the extra efforts both in time and resources, and this eventually leads to other tasks to suffer an ample amount of time.

Under-commitment: The inverse of over-commitment. Happens when a project or task is not receiving enough resources (time, money, materials, etc.). An example of this could be when a task is perceived to be less trivia, hence making the team pay less attention to it.

Attribution

Vague goal: When project goals are not clearly defined, it becomes more difficult to evaluate efforts and output in order to determine impact. Hence goals need to be clearly defined, succinct, and should capture measurable metrics.

Per-asset performance: A project is a broader term that consists of chunks of all activities combined. All the sets of activities should have a clear goal and a way to assess their performance. A project that is not approached in this way would end up having a bunch of activities with unmet goals.

Actionable learning: Every attempted project whether succeeded or failed, must have key takeaways. This would form the playbook for subsequent projects.

Setting Objective

Setting an objective is very crucial when it comes to project management. The bottom line of every project management is to achieve a set-out goal, and so objectives are the assumed goals that guide a project.

A marketing project manager coordinates people (marketing team), priorities (project scope), and processes (functions) in order to achieve a unified objective. He ensures that all sub-teams are properly aligned and share common interests.

How to Manage a Project as a Growth Marketer — A Case Study of Sprint Framework

Sprint Framework is a highly structured and well thought out approach to solving problems. It disregards assumption, but rather base actions and approach on facts and data-driven insights. The Sprint Framework consists of Map, Sketch, Decide, Prototype, and Test. Follow me as I attempt to use the sprint framework to answer questions.

Problem: High bounce rate on product Z landing page.

Map Approach:

• Do quantitative research using web analytics tools to reaffirm the problem
• Perform heuristic analysis for the landing page to know what might be broken
• Carry out qualitative research such as user testing to understand user realtime challenges.

Sketch Approach:

• Develop a storyboard of the discoveries through research.
• Outline possible fixes on the storyboard
• Pitch possible solution to the internal team
• Vote on which idea should be prioritized

Decide Approach:

• Map out different tasks involved, and strategies to be executed
• Design project scope that contains each finesse tasks and the timeline for execution

Prototype Approach:

• Optimize landing page based on what issues were detected through research: could just be changing message copies for the product landing page, using a more descriptive product picture, adding specific product features and social proofs, including testimonial video on the product page, etc.

Test Approach:

• Place what was implemented under scrutiny, and carefully watch the impact and result recorded to know if there is any possible lift in metrics
• Interviews and user testing to understand if users’ barriers and friction are no longer there.

Lastly, you want to closely watch the results that are generated to see the level of the impact made. The process of optimization is a continuum process, therefore, paying attention to what is working so as to improve what is not working must be a core responsibility for the project manager, until the project objective is attained.

This post is my final series of series on the 12 weeks growth marketing challenge. Really grateful to everyone who has encouraged, supported, and blended a helping hand at one point in time.