How to manage your marketing with Kanban

When implementing a marketing campaign – there are lots of things that you need to juggle at the same time for everything to go off properly.

There are often strict deadlines that need to be met to go with optimum times, and within that there are lots of different elements and subtasks that you need to take into account.  It also often means that you need to liaise with different teams in order to make this happen.

This can result sometimes in a bit of chaos if it’s not managed effectively, but thankfully there are software and tools out there that will allow you to get to grips with this and have your marketing campaigns run without a hitch.

A Brief Intro to Kanban

Kanban is a workflow visualisation process that allows you to track the effectiveness of your campaigns.  By using Kanban software – your organisation can reduce waste by repeating processes, increase efficiency of your team, and identify any issues within the process that needs to be improved.   You will be able to have a clear insight of the progress of tasks, limit overflow of work, and to improve the collaboration between internal and external teams.  Overall, it’s a great way to track what’s going on with your marketing to meet those deadlines.

How do I Use it to Track my Marketing Campaigns?

You can start things off by creating what is known as a master portfolio for large marketing campaigns.  Within that you can track where you and your team currently are within those tasks.  You can use this as a reference as to how long it takes to complete this task, to manage this more effectively moving forward.

You can then break this down to daily work boards.  This is where the larger campaigns will be broken down even further to smaller tasks.  For example, if the overall task is to have 10 blogs live on a website, the sub tasks could be to get them written, to get them proofread, and to upload. The more detail you give, the better.  There are different swimlanes within your tasks that you can use to detail all of these stages.

How to Make People Accountable

One of the biggest issues with marketing campaigns is tracking who is accountable for what elements of the project. If you use Kanban software you will be able to assign tasks to certain individuals as opposed to simply groups.  So, going back to the 10 blogs example, it could be that you want to assign tasks to the copywriter, the proofreader and the uploader.  This will allow you to track where you are at with every stage of the process, and at which point it’s perhaps hit a bottleneck and missed a deadline.  It also means that there is the element of accountability there – so everyone knows what they should be doing and when.  It also means that you can quickly see if there are any teams falling behind.

Keeping Track of the Timing

The time cycle to complete a project is invaluable information that you can make use of moving forward.  It means that you can identify exactly how long it will take to complete that project moving forward and to set goals accordingly.  It also means that you can make sure that you don’t overburden anyone within your team.  Time management is essential in making sure that any project goes without a hitch.  This way, you will know how much prep time you need for any marketing campaigns going forward.

Other Advantages of Using Kanban

Kanban has other advantages too.  Effective project management can do wonders for reducing stress levels within your team.  When they aren’t sure who is accountable for what – or in which time cycle things should be completed, it can make things a little bit more difficult for them.  Having a clear visualisation as to what’s expected of them and what tasks need to be completed in order to achieve that, makes for a much healthier office environment.

It also means that certain departments within your organisation can communicate more effectively.  As progress notes can be added as soon as things have been completed, it eliminates the need for further unnecessary communication.

Kanban isn’t a tool used solely for marketing, it can be used for any project where there is the need to enlist several teams or individuals within separate teams.

If you are running some time sensitive marketing campaigns either working with an agency or as part of an in-house marketing team, and you want to make sure these go off without a hitch, introducing Kanban could be a great way forward. 

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from TheMarketingblog http://www.themarketingblog.co.uk/2018/09/how-to-manage-your-marketing-with-kanban/