Marketing Project Management: How Data Analytics Can Help
With the growing competition, it has become challenging for businesses to thrive. With so many businesses offering the same set of services and products, consumers have got a lot of options. But it has become overwhelming for the brands to perform seamless business activities as it takes a lot to attract and retain customers. It is simple for customers. If you cannot offer what they want, they will look for an alternative, which they will easily find. This is where data analytics and reporting comes into the picture. They have become an integral part of project management, letting the marketers know the risks as well as control and estimate project schedules and costs accurately for delivering seamless results to the consumers.
Effective management of projects leads to the timely delivery of the results. However, it is easier said than done. There are uncertainties and risks on the project that are most probably unforeseen. For project managers and campaign marketers, it becomes extremely important to perform project-based data analytics so that they can observe, analyze, and measure project performance objectively, and thus make commitments and decisions based on facts.
Creating a comprehensive report using real numbers and analytics can help project managers improve project performance and outcomes.
This post is designed, keeping in mind the importance of data analytics and reporting for marketing project management. Keep on reading to understand its benefits and why your business needs to approach this model.
Let’s get started.
Understanding Marketing Analytics
The practice of analyzing, managing, and measuring marketing performance in order to maximize the effectiveness of the project and optimize the ROI (return on investment) is known as marketing analytics. Understanding marketing analytics allows you to be more efficient with project management and significantly minimize the upfront project cost and the wasted web marketing dollars.
Simply put, if you don’t measure your data, how are you going to optimize or manage your business with?
Beyond the obvious lead generation and sales applications, reporting can offer profound insights into user preferences and trends. A simple report with quality graphs and infographics can help you determine where you stand at the moment. After all, the numbers don’t lie, and putting together all the data into a single place will make it easy for you to measure the scope of the project on a much broader scale.
Most marketers get confused about how to create a report that speaks. Well, there are plenty of reporting tools available online. We recommend that you use Whatagraph because it is a comprehensive solution for all your analytics and reporting needs. It doesn’t matter what project you are working on, from email to SEO, PPC, social media, and more, Whatagraph allows you to create and automate marketing reports with a few clicks. And the best part is that your reports will have a nice visual touch. It can provide a hassle-free approach to marketing project management.
Why Is It Important To Understand Marketing Analytics?
In this era, it is vital for every executive and marketer to realize the promises of marketing analytics. If you fail to do so, you or your clients won’t be satisfied with the project outcomes. In order to keep your business thriving and customers happy, you need to take a big step towards analyzing the whole project and come up with pleasing solutions.
With the advent of search engines, search engine optimization, paid search marketing, and robust new products, managing marketing projects with analytics and reporting is more powerful and easy to implement than ever.
How Can Data Analytics Benefit Marketing Project Management?
Huge amount of data is produced every second. For improving the efficiency in marketing project management, every business collects related information. However, only a few of them have realized the importance of analyzing and reporting this data that leads the project, and ultimately the company in the direction of change or improvement. Nevertheless, for a marketer, there are certain questions that they find difficult to find solutions to. They are:
• How to implement the analysis findings?
• What technologies and tools to choose for analysis?
• Which data to use and where to source it from?
When you are starting a project, data trends can help you provide hidden insights for determining problems and help figure out alternative ways of approaching the project. Moreover, it can make your team more productive, efficient, and even help forecast future market trends.
Implementation Of Insights and Data analysis — The Crux Of The Matter
In order to apply data analytics and reporting into marketing project management, you need a strategy or a plan. For example, if you want to improve the project’s efficiency and effectiveness, it is important to manage the performance of processes and resources. However, you have to keep in mind that the measures you take need to be meaningful and easy to understand, and ultimately, they should be linked to the desired project outcome or goal.
The Competitive Advantage Of Data Analytics
The primary approach to data analytics is collecting data and information from across your business and industry. This will give you a competitive edge in seeing where sales trends have decreased or increased or where improvements are needed in the development of marketing project management. It enables you to determine potential gaps in the industry. Today, data is a lot more accessible than ever before, and it can be used by everyone within your team for increasing productivity and enhancing decision-making.
It is no surprise that reporting and data analytics has become the most crucial aspects across businesses. By bringing together information from across the business into a single report, you can get real-time insights into product development, marketing, sales, finances, and other processes. These insights allow you to collaborate better with your clients, achieve better results, and outperform your competitors. Reporting enables your team to view data in a simplified context, allowing them to make smarter decisions to achieve quality marketing project management success that leads to improved services and products.
Visualizing The Analysis
Marketing project management becomes a lot tougher due to the cluster of unstructured and structured data. There are possibilities that you may skip the analysis of relevant information. Reporting tools are capable of handling multi-channel data and provide insights out of them. Including screenshots, infographics, charts, bars, etc. in a report makes it more visually appealing. Therefore, your report becomes more delightful as you can present those insights in numerous meaningful charts and graphs. It allows you to see connections between multi-channel and multi-dimensional data sets and provides efficient ways to interpret information through graphical representations.
How Data Analytics And Reporting Benefits Marketing Project Management?
Clever and informed analysis/reporting yields in developing a deeper understanding for marketing project management, and building it into a service, product, or business model. Data is an integral asset of any marketing strategy that helps in building a competitive advantage.
1. Assessing Feasibility
Analytics and reporting can be used for accessing the feasibility of numerous alternatives so that you can pick the best option.
2. Enhancing Data Visibility and Control via Focused Dashboards
Using analytics and reporting tools gives you access to sophisticated dashboards that can provide you a single view to look at the big picture and identify how each project and the teams associated with the projects are doing. With this information, you can prioritize project tasks and move the team members around based on their knowledge and efficiency to maximize productivity.
3. Managing Data Overload
Nobody will be surprised if you say that data overload has crippled your ability to capture meaningful information from clusters of data, especially in this contemporary internet age. Reporting and analytics can help you overcome this issue by only retrieving the data you need to for the project and discarding unwanted information.
4. Analyzing Marketing Project Portfolios for Project Prioritization and Selection
You should know that multiple marketing projects compete for finite resources. When you are handling multiple marketing projects at the same time, it becomes difficult to assign resources for executing the campaigns. It can be anything from assigning particular employees to specific projects to the usage of data. Reporting and analytics can help you categorize each project based on the following criteria:
• Political, legal, economic, technical, capacity and capability constraints
• Cost-benefits evaluation resulting in prioritization based on the financial models like Breakeven analysis, Payback period, Return on Investment (ROI), and Net Present Value (NPV)
• Resource requirements such as internal resources like cross-organizational resources, cross-functional resources, or only functional department resources. It also includes external resources and a combination of both external and internal resources
• Training requirements
• Project risks
• Project complexity
5. Improving Client Management
Client management is a highly data-driven process. You cannot just tell the client what will happen next and how it will happen. You will have to show them numbers of sorts. With so many projects and so many clients, marketing project management can become a lot tedious and could make you groan as well. Analytics and reporting can also help you improve project client management by allowing you to predict client responses to the marketing project decisions. Analytics allows you to create separate reports for different projects that you can send them with ease. This way, the clients will be able to stay in the loop so that they can:
• Compete
• Co-create
• Compound
• Connect
• Contribute
• Communicate
• Concern
6. Manage Marketing Project Risks
When you are handling a marketing project(s), there are certain entities that can influence its life-cycle. Analytics helps with risk management, so that you can avoid that from happening. Project prioritization, ranking, and risk identification depend on a plethora of factors, including the following:
• Competency of the marketing project and the risk manager
• Risk horizon, impact, and probability
• Client’s risk tolerance
• Size and complexity of the marketing project
Reporting allows you to perform predictive analysis where you crunch numbers and focus on these factors for making rational decisions. This way, you will be able to manage risks quite effectively.
7. Targeted Content
When you are starting a marketing project, knowing what your customers want beforehand can make your campaign more customer-oriented. It allows you to customize and personalize your advertisements to target a specific segment of your target market. It also allows you to figure out which segment of your target market will respond best to the ads and campaign. Most importantly, it will save a lot of money that you or the client may spend in convincing the customers why they should buy this particular product or service. As a result, it will improve the overall efficiency of your marketing project efforts.
8. Product Development
Data analytics and reporting enable both knowledge discovery and prediction. It can help you and your team, including your client, understand the current state of the business and even provide a base to predict future outcomes and opportunities. Reporting enables you to determine the best time to develop a product, the best time to launch the product, and the best time to start marketing for the product. Analytics and reporting consist of all the information about the current market scenario. So managing marketing projects becomes quite easy as you can implement change any time as the scenario demands.
9. Operational Efficiency
One of the great ways how reporting and analytics help managing marketing projects is by letting you know the other potential opportunities that can be streamlined into your current marketing strategies. This is called operational efficiency, which can help you identify potential problems, getting rid of any unwanted processes, and taking necessary actions to implement a new strategy. It gives you the ability to see which operational area needs improvement and which are error-prone. Marketing project management is not just about gathering tons of data and form it into a report. It requires taking certain actions as well that makes the management quite easy both for you, your team, as well as your client.
10. Optimize Efforts
The last benefit that reporting and data analytics offers to marketing project management is giving you the ability to optimize efforts. Essentially, it is about translating findings into actionable market research objectives. Analytics helps in bridging the gap between the insights, activation, and marketing strategy. As a marketer handling numerous projects, the last thing you would want to see is all your projects plummeting to the ground just because there were differences in terms of creatives, strategies, and more. Analytics helps you to optimize the efforts of the entire team behind the project. This will ensure that the project is on the right track as needed.
Final Words
As a marketer, you are advised to use data analytics and reporting tools for marketing project management. This will push you a little further and enable you to understand different projects from different perspectives. This is important because the trend is always changing, and in the end, consumers are only attracted to those campaigns that present value. So, make sure that you use the right set of tools to overcome any issues with marketing project management and keep your team on the right track.
Author Bio: Wendy Gooseberry is a copywriter at Whatagraph — an online platform that offers Facebook reporting tools and digital marketing analytics. With over 5 years of marketing experience under her belt, she has a strong understanding of marketing and data, and continues to hone those skills every day.
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