Most of the time, marketers are believed to be creative geniuses who are able to produce ideas by putting their innovative skills to work, without possessing too much organizational or project management talents.
While this can be true in some cases, as even John William Gardner once said that “Creative minds are rarely tidy”, it is precisely creativity that can help the creative content marketers turn into strong project managers. With a little bit of discipline, planning, and teamwork, combined with your creativity, you can turn project management into a piece of cake.
Below are some tips to help you achieve your goals and keep your team focused.
Don’t Over-complicate Things
The road to reaching the best results is often the simplest one. When developing a project, you don’t have to come up with complex charts and plans, but simply create a formula and stick to it. A simple only needs to contain an outline of the entire development of the project, split up into steps. This is as simple as it can get:
- Initiate: Determining what type of project is best for marketing your business, based on your goals;
- Plan: After deciding on your project, it’s time to outline how you are going to develop it;
- Execute: This phase involves putting everything into motion towards creating the project;
- Monitor and control: Constantly reviewing the team’s progress;
- Close: Reviewing how the project helped your business grow.
Have Clearly Defined Goals
In order for you and your team to know what type of projects are worth putting your effort into, you need to have clear goals and be aware of what you want to achieve. For example, if your main goals are to increase traffic and subscribers, while also build a larger customer base, you need to put all your time end effort into projects that will help your business achieve that.
Make sure to keep your goals reasonable and realistic, otherwise, you might find yourself biting more than you can chew. If you present your team with a list of 15 projects that need to be accomplished by the end of the week, they might not know exactly where and how to start working towards them. And, most importantly, they might not know which of them are going to better help the business achieve the set goals.
This is why prioritizing is extremely important. To prioritize your project, you can choose a simple rating method, where you can list all your projects and rate them on a scale of 1 to 5. “5” means the project will significantly help you achieve your goals, while “1” means it can probably wait a bit more.
Evaluate Your Resources
After you have decided on a project, it is time to determine what resources go into its development. This includes tools and budget, as well as talent. Your project should not be influenced by the resources, but the other way around.
“Projects that could really impress your audience should not be set aside, just because you don’t consider you have the necessary resources. Instead, work towards obtaining them. This is where the creative genius inside you has to come out and do what it knows best: get creative,” says James Daily, head of the content department at FlashEssay.
Keep in mind that sometimes, it is better to concentrate all your resources towards a project that could drive immense growth for your business, rather than divide them into multiple projects that will only drive moderate growth.
Schedule Your Tasks
When working at a project, you might find it more effective to break the project into separate tasks and set deadlines for them. This way, you can focus on finishing them in order of importance for the main project.
Hold a meeting with the entire team involved in the project execution and start splitting the tasks based on each member’s skills. This way, you can make sure that everyone is contributing to the project in the best possible way. Make sure to ask for time estimates as soon as everyone knows what their task is, in order to make sure you will hit your deadline.
It might be best to plan everything with a calendar that everyone has access to, in order to get things done in a more effective way. This will ensure that everybody knows exactly when the deadline is, what their tasks are what other important events might happen along the way. On the other hand, this will give you a clear view and, in case something does not go as planned, you will know whom you need to talk to.
Plan Constant Reviews
In order to avoid unplanned situations, such as one member of the team not completing their task, you need to constantly review the progress.
“Simply asking everybody where they are with their task can sometimes be enough to give you a clear idea, but it is better to schedule regular meetings, in order to gather the whole team and receive updates on their progress. Based on the deadline, the meetings can be scheduled daily, twice a week or even weekly,” advises Veronica Wright, CEO at Resumes Centre.
Good creative content gets done better when you have a clear strategy in mind, and by applying project management methodologies, you can achieve exactly that and much more. This way, deadlines will not be a scary date on a calendar anymore, but a clear milestone towards your final project.
