Building an effective marketing strategy is no easy task. There’s a lot of blood, sweat, and tears that go into the process and even then, there’s no guarantee you’ll have success. With so much riding on the process, it’s important that you prioritize the important steps.
There are a lot of things you could be doing with your marketing campaign, but should you? Can you? You’ll need to prioritize your process to maximize your chances of success.
Why Prioritize Within Your Marketing Strategy?
In a 2017 B2B Content Strategy and Operations Benchmark, a surprising discovery was made. Marketers, when choosing their top B2B marketing priorities, chose ALL of them! That means that marketers are really struggling with prioritization. And without the ability to prioritize, everything will be done half-baked, and nothing within your campaign will stand out and work for you as it should.
In order to understand what you need to prioritize, you need to take a look at what your typical customer journey looks like. It could be something like:
- The customer identifies a need or question.
- The customer begins searching for a solution to that need.
- The customer views and assesses choices and compares different product and service offerings.
- The customer narrows their choices down to one or a few different companies that can satisfy their need.
- The customer makes a purchase.
- The customer shares their experience (good, bad, or otherwise) with friends and everyone else on their social network.
Getting Started With Project Prioritization
Project prioritization isn’t supposed to drive you mad or take the spotlight away from your favorite part of marketing. It’s merely a process that will help you take on the work that will influence your marketing goals most effectively.
Not every marketing technique gives a direct boost to your sales, so you need to learn what to focus on, and what not to. Prioritizing is a skill that must be learned if you want to succeed and not go around in circles trying to decide where to put your focus.
In order to narrow things down, there are key points to keep in mind when prioritizing. Many people often make the mistake of not following these guidelines when setting their priorities.
- Understand that the prioritization process is critical.
- Don’t spend too much time thinking about things- write them down to get started on completing tasks.
- Don’t make huge, daunting to-do lists that are way too long and unrealistic.
- Don’t mistake your to-do list an “ideas list”.
- You must have clear goals in mind.
- Don’t assume that whatever pops into your mind or arrives in your email inbox needs to be dealt with immediately.
- Make a decision. Don’t avoid making decisions because you’re afraid of making the wrong ones.
Surefire Focal Points to Make Prioritizing Easier
Think back to your customer journey. Your process for determining where to focus should be completely dependent upon where within the customer’s journey you’re looking to speak to.
Not every method of prioritizing works well for everybody. It’s up to you to experiment and figure out what works well for you. The following tips will help you work through the process of getting your priorities straight.
Create a Clear Picture of What Your Goals Are
The more clear the picture of your goals, the easier the rest of the process will be. Your picture shouldn’t just be clear, it should be incredibly detailed.
In setting your goals, you need to be very specific. Just saying “I want to sell more of my products” isn’t good enough. Of course you do. But that’s a very wide, unfocused goal. Narrow it down. Which product will give you the greatest ROI? How many do you want to sell? How many do you need to sell per week to meet your monthly goal? How many per month to meet your yearly goal?
If you aren’t crystal clear and specific about your goals, it’s going to be impossible to prioritize.
Set Priorities For Every Day You Work on Marketing
Setting a plan ahead for the day helps you stay focused and on task. Take a few minutes at the end of every day or the beginning of the next to plan for the following day. Once you plan your day, you won’t have to make any more decisions about what to do. You’ll only need to complete your tasks.
Separate Your “To-Do List” From Your “Ideas List”
You need a vision to create your campaign, but ideas are not to be confused with tasks. Your ideas list is only a place you use to jot down ideas as they pop into your head so you don’t forget them.
You move your ideas onto a to-do list once they are given a priority. Some ideas will never make it past the ideas list.
Your to-do list is a concrete itemization of things that you actually plan to accomplish. It needs to be a realistic list of the things you need to complete in order to achieve your goals. It’s often a good idea to break that down into daily and weekly lists so you don’t get overwhelmed.
Focus On Projects That Will Bring the Fastest Results First
People often underestimate the time it takes to complete tasks. Focus first on projects that are likely to bring in the quickest results. It’s often easiest to maintain your focus on your end goals when you’re rewarded for your efforts sooner, rather than later. Seeing early success with shorter projects helps to keep you motivated.
Work on One Project at a Time
You may need to juggle projects sometimes, waiting for people to get back to you or complete things for you. However, focusing on completing one project at a time can help keep you on task, making it less likely you will become overwhelmed.
Effective prioritization can give you exponential benefits when it comes to a successful marketing campaign. Your precise method isn’t necessarily important, but you definitely need to formulate a system and stick to it. You’ll find you’ll have less stress. On top of that, you’ll see results more quickly because you now have the ability to focus and get more accomplished!