Working in digital marketing, creating online strategies that will help the visibility of a certain brand, can be both difficult and exciting for project managers. Given the ever-growing and ever-changing nature of the virtual world, the demand for highly – effective project managers in this advertising sphere is on a constant rise.
Whether you’re about to kick start your first project or you already have experience in the area of digital marketing, the learning process never stops. Benjamin Franklin said:
“Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.”
Here are a few suggestions that can make your digital marketing projects run more smoothly.
Flexibility in Planning
No matter what kind of project you manage, planning is going to be important. However, the digital marketing sphere is part of the creative industry and as such, its approach to planning is a bit different from traditional project management.
First of all, for everything to go as planned, you need to understand the type of people you’re working with on a project. Bear in mind that your team consists of designers, art directors, copywriters, and other creative professionals and that they function in a different manner and speed than let’s say, engineers. After all, creativity cannot be forced. So, you’ll need to be more flexible in your approach to improve the creative project management process.
Still, just like every assignment, creative projects are restricted by milestones and deadlines. So, as a manager, you will have to find that fine balance between giving your team enough room and time to grow ideas while also demanding they complete their tasks on time.
For this to work, your communication skills have to be stellar. You don’t have to think only about the needs of your team members but also about what your clients want as well. This position of the mediator is very important and it will reflect on the smoothness of the workflow. Pleasing both these groups can be changeling at times but no one ever said that the project manager role is easy. As Cornelius Fichtner, a renowned project manager, once said:
“The P in PM is as much about ‘people management’ as it is about ‘project management’.”
It’s crucial for you to stay realistic when formulating a project plan. But to be realistic, you need to know your coworkers – how they function during these procedures, how they cope with the pressure of a deadline, etc. Since we are talking about artistic types, make sure you take into account their creative sensibility, encourage their imaginative impulse, built an environment where they feel their ideas are heard and discussed, design a flexible schedule but be clear about the deadlines.
The Importance of Search Engine Optimization
One of the most important tools of every project manager operating in the world of digital marketing is without a doubt a Search Engine Optimization also known as SEO. atter of seconds, you will get dozens or even hundreds of results containing the information you need. However, given the big number of results, the majority of us won’t go through all of them but stick to the first and maybe second page. So, knowing this, it is extremely important to secure a high search engine ranking. That’s where SEO comes in!
Search Engine Optimization is simply put a process of adjusting your digital content in a way that will propel a search engine to display it as one of the first results on the organic (unpaid) listing. The algorithm used to ensure this is always changing, trying to meet the needs of the users and you will probably have to work with SEO Specialist to increase the traffic. There are 3 types of SEO that can help you increase your visibility:
- On-Page: focuses on content (keywords, high – quality content creation)
- Off-Page: focuses on high – quality backlinks
- Technical: centers around non – content elements (speed, indexing, security, mobile-friendliness, etc.)
Balancing the Resources
Before you even begin your digital marketing project, you need to know if you have enough resources to bring it to completion. You don’t want to stop midway because you realized you cannot deliver what was required. It will cost you and your team precious time and energy.
So make sure you have an accurate assessment of the budget and resources needed (time, tools, team, etc.) before launching a project.
Understand the Target Audience
You are leading a marketing campaign and whatever you’re offering needs to reach its target audience. You must understand who are the potential buyers, and what’s the best way to market for them.
Having these questions answered will shine a new light on your project and make things clearer for everyone involved in bringing this process from start to finish and making it successful. For example, when it comes to marketing on social media, Facebook allows you to define your audience by their 10 interests. If you already did the necessary research, you will know what those interests are and will be able to appeal to the right group of people.
