subject: The Biggest Opportunity For Marketers Today [print this page] Why are other departments such as finance, fulfilment and operations better managed than marketing?
Given today's business efficiencies, the marketing function may represent the highest opportunity for increasing overall revenue expansion and company performance.
And the marketing people feel the pressure - yet overwhelmed by tantalizing new fads and genuine new tactics such as web 2.0, social network marketing, twitter...
Don't try to point blame though. Business must take more responsibility to absorb marketing as a central pillar of modern strategy, rather than leaving it silo'd. Only then can the marketing function truly shine as it should.
"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.
Training in MPM can come from books on project management... or it can come from formalised academic project management (most of which I would not recommend), or a comprehensive study and implementation of critical chain (CCPM)which is way ahead of traditional project management techniques.
The Solution to Marketing Project Management
Regardless of the approach taken for marketing project management training, or the scale of MPM required in your business, there are 6 components for MPM.
1. Preparation - Customer focus orientation, productivity training
2. Research - Market, customer, product, company competencies, etc.
3. Development - Web site, NPD, teamwork training, etc.
5. Traffic - SEO, affiliate marketing, email marketing, social media marketing.
6. Tracking - Web analytics, financial ratios, etc.
Those 6 areas of practical marketing PM are unlocked by the trialectic of management:
1. Outcome - Being crystal clear on what results are possible and are needed for better marketing performance.
2. Process - Understanding and controlling the bottlenecks that exist both within the marketing team environment as well as the external market environment.
3. Performance - Managing activity and overall ROI of all marketing projects.
With these outlines a marketing manager can begin building a tailored approach to marketing project management.
