CXL Growth Marketing Review Week -12

Hey there!

Welcome back to the CXL Growth Marketing course review.

To give you a brief, I am taking this course on Growth Marketing by CXL. Every week, I publish my review on what I have learned from this course.

In this blog, I am going to walk you through Project Management by Alexa Hubley.

A little about Alexa Hubley in her own words:

I am a marketing leader, a writer a speaker. I love using both creativity and strategic thinking to deliver amazing digital experiences.

My work experience as a marketing leader includes managing marketing teams; developing and executing full-funnel marketing strategies; video marketing; PPC (Google ads) and paid social (YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin); project management; email automation and nurturing (Pardot, Intercom, Hubspot, Customer.io); demand generation; content and copywriting for landing pages, emails, ebooks, whitepapers, blog posts, and more; user research; and data analysis.

I speak about marketing and creative strategy at many international conferences, including Call to Action Conference, Webbdagarna, eCom360, Pulse, SearchLove and more. I mainly focus on how to infuse creativity into building full-funnel marketing campaigns that help brands stand out.

Simplify even the most complex marketing campaigns with a clear project management process

If you think to-dos falling through the cracks, misaligned goals and unrealistic stakeholder expectations are standard aspects of shipping marketing campaigns — you’re wrong. With clear project management, you’ll be able to complete every task, every tactic, and every to-do on time, within the scope, and without the headaches.

Have you ever felt like you were trapped on a marketing hamster wheel with no idea how to get off?

You keep writing blog posts, sending emails, shipping campaigns…without any true understanding of the impact, they’re having on the business. Or worse, you don’t have a clear framework for how to improve and optimize your efforts the next time around.

That’s where marketing project management comes in.

With a honed marketing project management process you’ll turn that hamster wheel into a lucrative money-making machine for your business. Marketing project management is a secret weapon for ensuring every project, every campaign, and every tactic aligns with your business goals and aspirations.

This course will help you understand:

• Have a marketing project management process that’ll help you ship more successful campaigns
• Understand the common pitfalls of a poorly managed marketing project and how to avoid them
• A framework you can follow to improve how you’re building, executing, reporting, and learning from your marketing efforts.

Project Management for Marketers

Lurking beneath every goal are dangerous assumptions. The longer those assumptions remain unexamined, the greater the risk.

– Jake Knapp, Sprint: How To Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just 5 days

Alexa Hubley explains project management using a 5 step process

1. Map. Set your targets and objectives for what you want to accomplish based on feedback and research.
2. Sketch. Ideate and pitch ideas for achieving your marketing goal.
3. Decide. Vote and decide on your campaign content, channels, and tactics based on ideas pitched in Phase 2.
4. Prototype. Build just enough of the campaign to get it ready for testing.
5. Test. Get feedback on every aspect of the campaign so you can go back, make changes, and launch.

Bottom line

Sprints are an effective and helpful project management process that you can apply to any and every marketing campaign. They ensure your work is data-driven and research-backed.

Ideally, sprints aren’t a one-and-done experience, either. A sprint lets you observe a campaign in the wild and, if it’s not hitting your targets, make tweaks and changes until it does.