Marketing Your Project 101
From the The Money Files Blog
by Elizabeth Harrin
A blog that looks at all aspects of project and program finances from budgets, estimating and accounting to getting a pay rise and managing contracts.
Written by Elizabeth Harrin from RebelsGuideToPM.com.
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Date
Stakeholder engagement doesn’t just happen. You need to work at it, and marketing your project is one way to do that.
What?
OK, let’s start with a definition of marketing as it relates to projects.
Marketing is a planned series of tasks with the objective of promoting your project to a wide audience.
It goes beyond project communications planning because it’s not just about sharing status updates or communicating because you have to. Marketing is the promotional activity to get people to believe in what you are doing and to want in. It’s making sure that your communications plan has an impact beyond the paper it is written on and beyond what’s simply communication on a functional level.
Taking a marketing-led approach to projects does impact project success. In research done by Peter Taylor in 2014, 87% of respondents said that marketing activities have an impact on project success, with nearly half saying it’s a critical activity.
You’ll see that there’s one typical response missing from the graph – the ‘no impact’ response. That’s because no one replied saying that marketing was unimportant. I thought that was interesting – generally people believe marketing is a good idea.
Tools for Marketing in a Project Environment
So if that’s what’s marketing is all about, what tools have we got available to us to do it?
The tools I use most often to communicate with my team and stakeholders are:
- Web conferencing
- Instant messaging
- The good old project status report
This is the one I use to communicate project status to my sponsor. It’s a weekly report. I still send it in a Word document format and it’s one big table, even though I know that tables don’t display well on BlackBerries and the people who are reading it are likely to be travelling and using their BlackBerries a fair amount of the time.
Despite technology moving on, in many respects the way we communicate with our project sponsors follows the tried and tested route.
These tools are good, and form the backbone of any project communication strategy. But there are dozens of ways you can communicate and you don’t have to only rely on them.
Here are some other tools that you can use, many of them are free or at least low cost, so they won’t have too much of an impact on your project budget.
Even if your communication plan and stakeholder analysis tell you that a particular stakeholder likes to receive information by email you should vary your tools from time to time. It helps keep the message fresh. It helps reach a greater audience – and marketing is about reaching a wide audience to spread information about your project.
You can also look for less obvious sources of good PR such as providing information or resources to other teams at short notice – activities that don’t have a blanket reach and might not feel like traditional communication activities but they will create positive engagement on a much smaller scale. That engagement is likely to be deeper than in the case of receiving a mug with the project’s slogan on, so that’s the benefit.
However, you should also bear in mind that communication is a two-way street. Just because you tell someone to do something or ask for their involvement doesn’t mean it will happen. Project communications and marketing can’t just be about pushing messages out there – your tools should include ways to receive messages too.
Some of these tools, especially the ones where you are meeting face-to-face, give you the opportunity to get those messages back. In my experience you’ll still have to ask for them, so ask for feedback and then act on it.
For more information on project marketing and the tools you can use to communicate about your project, watch my PMXPO talk on the topic. You can get it here (and claim a PDU at the same time).
Posted on: December 19, 2015 11:59 PM |
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Comments (8)
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Thilo Wack
Head of Existing Product and Test Lab| optimed
Tholey-Hasborn, Germany
Great concept! Thinking things through from a marketing perspective to make sure that the actions from the stakeholder management and communications plan actually give the results you want. This allows me to much better understand how to actually treat stakeholders as customers. Looking forward to watch the video and get some more details. Thank you for sharing!
Interesting a small project can take shape of product.
Rami Kaibni
Community Champion
Senior Projects Manager | Field & Marten Associates
New Westminster, British Columbia, Canada
Elizabeth, thanls for sharing this interesting article. I totally agree with what you mentioned above in terms of tools and techniques but I would add that there is an effective marketing tool which works well most of the time which is: Prototype or Model. Being a tangible marketing tool, it would enhance the marketing strategy and stakeholders involvement.
Prototypes might not be the most feasible tool but its all about Cost / Benefit Analysis.
Can you please advise your expertise opinion on the above mentioned ?
Thanks.
Excellent post Elizabeth! Project Marketing is an under-used and probably an "under-marketed" concept! Several low cost alternatives you highlighted are great. Thanks.
Thanks Elizabeth for the post
Thanks everyone for the comments.
Rami, I agree that prototypes have a value for demonstrating benefits and being a great marketing tool. Where it's cost effective, you should definitely look at using them.
Rami Kaibni
Community Champion
Senior Projects Manager | Field & Marten Associates
New Westminster, British Columbia, Canada
Elizabeth, this is exactly what I was trying to say, where it is cost effective but sometimes even if it is not ghe most cost effective way, the value that it will bring might cover the cost if there is allowable budget for a prototype of course. Example: A model home might enhance the blue print sales significantly.
Markus Kopko
AI Enabler for Project & Program Mgmt | Founder PMotion.ai / The PM
AI Coach| PMotion.ai
Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
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