get_user_ip: 35.175.121.135

get_visitor_country: US

is_allowed_country: 1

4 Secret Ingredients That Will Make or Break Your Next Marketing Project

4 Secret Ingredients That Will Make or Break Your Next Marketing Project

By Andrew McDermott

4-secret-ingredients-that-will-make-or-break-your-next-project

 

“Well it’s not my fault.”

That’s one of the first things people say when a marketing project falls apart. When it does people are quick to chime in with their reasons why. It was due to decision by committee, or we were simply unable to do what you wanted, the way you wanted it.

Inevitably, we hear “I tried to tell you.”

At that point, none of these details matter. When your project is a complete disaster no one wants to take responsibility. What’s worse, failure is apparently a common occurrence with projects.

Yikes.

Many people are quick to cite the usual reasons. Conflicting goals, lack of visibility, unclear/conflicting goals, poor communication, etc. And you know what? They’re right.

These common problems are a great place to start. Find the problem, fix it. Easy peasy.

Just one problem.

4 Secret Ingredients That Will Make or Break Your Next Marketing Project

 

Fixing these common problems doesn’t always work. In fact, if you’re a seasoned marketing pro, you know these solutions usually don’t fix the problem. In fact, it seems the same problems keep cropping up. Meetings, memos, reprimands – none of it seems to work consistently. Our projects continue to struggle and fail.

Why? What’s the problem?

Are we missing something? What’s the real reason our projects struggle and fail?

A marketing project fails when its missing the right ingredients

When we think of the right ingredients we tend to think of something tactical. The right process, tool or resource. The right mix of all-stars and A players.

It’s true, successful projects use the right tools, processes and resources. It’s also true that projects are successful when we have the right people. But we’re still doomed to fail if we have the wrong set of ingredients.

Well, what are these ingredients and why do they matter so much?

Ingredient #1: Silence and violence

4 Secret Ingredients That Will Make or Break Your Next Marketing Project

 

Projects are stressful, messy and inconvenient on their own. Add people to the mix and things become… complicated. Where do these stressors come from?

  1. Responsibility. Everyone on a project has a role to play. Leading, creating, developing or managing. You’re expected to perform, to be a producer, to get things done without being asked.
  2. Expectation. Every project has expectations, but it’s so much worse for marketing. The work developers and designers do is object oriented. Our work as marketers is people oriented, our sole job is to get the customer to do something
  3. Your team. Being wrong feels right. The vast majority of our team can focus their time and attention on the wrong thing simply because it feels right. You may be the only one who can see a problem for what it truly is.
  4. People. Some of the people you’ll work with on a project are toxic. Selfish. Dysfunctional. Some are wimps and others are controlling. Work on projects long enough and you’ll have to deal with people who create stress and anxiety.

People respond to stress in three different ways.

  1. Violently. These people use name-calling, verbal abuse and emotional blackmail to deal with and relieve stress.
  2. Silently. These people withdraw, choosing to fume and pout silently. This naturally leads to gossip, sabotage and power struggles.
  3. Transparently. These people speak freely without fear. They’re open, honest and effective communicators.

That’s the problem, isn’t it? Most people respond with silence or violence. We’re not really taught to respond with openness and honesty. So, how do you fix this?

Make mutual respect and mutual purpose the foundation for all communication.

  • Mutual Purpose. A shared goal everyone is working towards. Lose that and silence or violence becomes a problem.
  • Mutual respect. Everyone on the team is treated with respect and value.

A great way to do this with a project is to create a mission or goal you can rally everyone behind. Let’s say you’re part of an in-house marketing team. You’re the underdog going after a dominant competitor. You focus everyone’s time and attention on an external threat to create mutual purpose.

Then, you prime your team with a reminder of their specialties, talents, abilities, etc. They’re on your team for a reason – amazing AdWords hacks, brilliant copy, outreach skills etc. Maintaining mutual respect is easier when genuine admiration is in place.

Ingredient #2: Creating a creative and productivity prison

4 Secret Ingredients That Will Make or Break Your Next Marketing Project

 

Our projects and campaigns set us up to fail. The copywriter, designer or marketer wants full creative control. They often feel stifled, unhappy and hurt when they don’t get it.

Management wants a particular outcome but refuses to trust their team to get it. So they micromanage. They change the project scope. They add new requirements and features. They take away features and requirements. Then they lose their cool when projects are late and wildly over budget.

This is bad, but it isn’t the real problem.

The real problem is boundaries. Every project needs to have good boundaries. Trouble is most do not.

Most of the time, customers, clients, bosses – are free to change their mind. They change their mind over and over and over again. Creative and marketing teams struggle as well. It’s incredibly common for them to treat their work as a portfolio piece or resume builder instead of an opportunity to serve.

Boundaries eliminate that problem.

A creative and productivity prison is a boundary. It’s a set of rules and guidelines both sides agree to follow before the project starts.

If you’re a…

  • Marketer (e.g. analysts, copywriters, specialists, designers, etc.) you can follow a style guide that outlines the important parts of your marketing project and how you’ll do things.
  • Manager (e.g. client, boss, leader, etc.) you could agree to share any and all feedback at the beginning of the project. Then, when the project starts, you hold off on sharing or changing anything until project work is review ready.

Disagreement is inevitable.

Managers wonder, what happens if my feedback is really important? What if I absolutely have to share it to avoid the project failing in the first place?

It means you’ve already failed.

Sounds harsh, until we really take the time to think about it. If you’re launching a new marketing campaign, it makes sense to track the results of that campaign, right? Which naturally means you need to know what to track, right?

If you get to the end of your project and you realize the metrics you’ve selected don’t answer your questions, the project is already a failure.

It’s an oversimplification, but you see my point?

Boundaries, a creativity or productivity prison in this case, creates freedom. They give everyone constraints to work within. That’s the problem for many projects. These boundaries are minimal or non-existent.

This lack of boundaries creates stress, which for many people, leads to silence or violence.

 

Ingredient #3: The missing fall guy

4 Secret Ingredients That Will Make or Break Your Next Marketing Project

 

Most people want a fall guy. When a project goes wrong, most people want someone or something to blame. An escape hatch that allows them to avoid the punishment and blame for things going wrong.

And you know what?

They’re right. Healthy teams need a fall guy. We need to hold others accountable and vice versa. Most of the time blame is unstructured. Things fall apart and then teams take turns blaming each other.

The executives blame management, management blames their support teams and so on. But blame is the silent project killer, it…

  • Destroys relationships burning bridges with the very people you need to fix the problem.
  • Makes blind spots bigger. When we blame no one’s really sure which side is right, though every side believes it’s their side. Meanwhile, the real cause of the problem continues to grow out of sight.
  • Prevents learning. Blame hides the real problem. When that happens we can’t observe or reproduce the problem. We can’t trace the problem back to its origins because we don’t know it exists.

The solution?

Create a fall guy to take the blame ahead of time. A fall guy can be anyone. A person or group that’s responsible for a specific area.

When I share this the automatic response is usually pretty sarcastic.

Duh! Isn’t that common sense?

Not really.

We’re great at making people responsible for their job, the stuff they do. Hey, copywriters are responsible for copy, designers create designs, etc.

That’s usually what most people think of first.

Here’s the part they miss. High performing fall guys are responsible for outcomes. Every great fall guy has a mission…

  • Copywriters achieve a 3 to 30 percent lift in conversions.
  • Brand specialists achieve a 40 percent increase in impressions across top 500 sites.
  • Optimizers achieve a 1 to 3 percent conversion increase every month.
  • Designers create a design that allows customers to checkout in 3 clicks.

These fall guys are able to break these outcomes down into smaller bite size to-dos that they work on themselves or they distribute to their teams. Each outcome is a smaller part of a much larger story.

What happens when a fall guy fails to achieve the outcome?

He experiences the natural consequence of his actions, whether that’s missing out on a quarterly bonus, being replaced, making things right, etc. The consequence depends on your organization.

But the outcome tells everyone where to look.

It directs the team’s attention to the source of the problem. It tells everyone where to look and how to approach the problem. What does that mean?

Everyone learns and grows.

 

Ingredient #4: Fluid requirements and restrictions

4 Secret Ingredients That Will Make or Break Your Next Marketing Project

 

Fluid requirements and restrictions are deadly. They seem innocent at first. It goes like this.

Your team runs into a problem on your marketing project — via feedback, disaster or changes – everyone seems to think things aren’t going to work out so a decision is made. We’re going to change our approach.

Sound familiar? No?

These fluid requirements have another name.

Scope creep.

Fluid requirements are more than just scope creep. It’s the policy, the attitude that all feedback is welcome anytime, anywhere. That your project will just take the hits and “roll with it.”

Scope creep is the result of fluid requirements.

Let’s say you’re working on a big project. A new marketing campaign for a large personal training company. You’ve got a client who “knows marketing.”

In fact, your client believes he knows more about marketing than you do. So much more that he’s willing to second guess each of the decisions you make. It’s annoying but your company’s policy is to “roll with it.”

So you do.

3 months later you’re over budget, the project is delayed and your team has gone through 18 rounds of revisions, creating 64 different pieces of material.

You’re exhausted. Your team is burned out.

Your project is a failure.

Now imagine that you’re able to create static requirements.

  • You ask for very specific things
  • Your project focuses on specific outcomes
  • Your client or manager knows what you expect
  • You know what they expect
  • Both of you establish a time and place for feedback, requests and changes
  • You state how the work will be done

See the difference? Static requirements don’t make the project less fluid. It gives your project structure.

You’re no longer blown back and forth by the last minute problems that crop up. You aren’t forced to deal with your boss’s feature request 12 hours before launch.

Your project has structure.

Everyone knows when it’s appropriate to share and discuss. They know when and how changes should be done. This reduces the odds of your project breaking apart.

These are make or break ingredients

The vast majority of projects break down because of people. Our issues, lives and differences get in the way. Well trained teams are able to recognize and work around these issues.

But what if you’ve never been trained?

4 Secret Ingredients That Will Make or Break Your Next Marketing Project

 

These ingredients create chaos, fear and dysfunction. As people we need very specific things to achieve results. Successful projects aren’t accidents. They come from a few very important but often ignored ingredients.

I’ve made these mistakes and my project turned out fine.

Success and failure isn’t an either or proposition, it’s a continuum. You achieved the level of success you did and you’re satisfied; but that doesn’t mean you weren’t cheated out of more.

That’s the problem though. Most people aren’t willing to fix a problem until there’s pain. Until the problem is so painful that they’re forced to fix it. The trouble with that strategy is that pain often means it’s too late. That damage has already been done.

Some of these ingredients will hurt your project

Naysayers and skeptics are quick to point this out. But here’s the truth. All of these ingredients will hurt your project – if they’re misused or misapplied.

4 Secret Ingredients That Will Make or Break Your Next Marketing Project

 

Ignore these “soft skills” and at some point – the bill comes due.

When you hear “It’s not my fault” it’s too late

It’s one of the first things people say when a marketing project falls apart. When it does fail people are quick to chime in with their reasons why.

All of these details matter, at the start of your project.

We all fear failure. The last thing we want is for our project to fail. These problems are typically very simple – if we’re looking in the right place. When we find the right ingredients and we use them the right way project success moves from unlikely to the routine. Follow the right formula and each and every one of your projects can be a smashing success.

No blame necessary.

Do you have any secret ingredients that has made a or broke a marketing project? Tell us in the comments.

 

[text-blocks id=monster-newsletter]