Project Management Prevents Web Marketing Disasters
Web marketing is one area of business and marketing where the best made plans can go haywire and poor project management can lead to major problems. Many of these problems come from the nature of the work and the complexities of online marketing. Problems also come from conflicts in the varied skills needed to market online. Project management can become a major obstacle to online marketing results if it is not done well, as it is a key ingredient in successful online marketing.
The most common results of poor project management are a delayed website launch, sub-par web stats or poor results as measured in low website conversion rates. Poorly executed project management has resulted in the failure of many website development and marketing projects and the reason why many websites are hard to use or don’t make sense.
Discipline and Focus
Web marketing project management takes discipline and focus: discipline to track the overall goals of the project and focus to keep in mind the needs of your target market and users of the website. There are many options and various methods for being successful online, but the key is to stay true to your goals of increased sales and better marketing results. A guidepost to help in this area is to focus on decisions that will attract your target market to your strategic digital marketing channels and meet user needs. Project managers should keep true to the marketing goals and needs of users. This is easier said than done, but the results are well worth the effort.
Variety of Skills
It takes a project manager with a unique personality to bring together the variety of skill sets that are necessary to implement a website marketing project. Marketing, technology, design and other dissimilar skill sets must come together effectively to get results from strategic digital marketing. Project management is the glue that holds this all together.
Many project management challenges happen when one area dominates the others. It is very common for technology staff or designers to set strategic direction for your strategic digital marketing efforts. This may not be the best approach. Strategic direction should come from the company’s leadership and marketing directors.
The Four Steps and Project Management
The four steps to strategic digital marketing are strategy, design, traffic generation and results monitoring. Each of the four steps requires different levels of project management. Design, development and traffic generation are much more time intensive and include many more action items. This is where the project manager will spend the majority of time. Step four is almost entirely composed of project management and setting priorities. The four steps discussed on this website and on the pages of this blog help bring purpose and efficiency to the challenges of managing strategic digital marketing projects.
Summary
The key will be the development of a process following the four steps and hiring the right person to manage the strategic digital marketing work. The project manager does not have to be skilled in technology, programming, design or other areas of strategic digital marketing. In fact, it is a good idea if the project manager does not have a specific background in any of these areas because that may bring bias into his or her work.
