When it comes to marketing, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. As you dive deep into the bottomless pit of marketing ideas, you take more and more of the time you ought to spend doing other productive things, not knowing which one to work on. But there is a sure way to identify the best marketing project for you to work on.

There is Little Time to Decide on Your Project — You Have to Get to Work

In today’s business, you have little time to decide. Yet, according to a survey conducted by Attest in 2020, one of the five most significant challenges for marketers is the need to make decisions very quickly. So how do you navigate your way out if you find yourself in this decision paralysis circle? And most importantly, how do you choose the best marketing project to work on?

In this piece, you’ll learn a scientific approach that’s helped me put my entire marketing project into perspective and make the right choice.

5 Steps to Identify the Best Marketing Project

Choosing which marketing idea to prioritize is not easy, but the choice doesn’t have to be made haphazardly.

Here is a step-by-step guide on knowing which marketing project should be put first.

Set a marketing goal

Let’s begin by acknowledging the fact that there are two types of marketing goals:

• Day-to-day goals, e.g., progress in the content calendar, leads, engagement, and so on.
• Management level metrics, e.g., ROI, CPA, CLV, etc.

For the purpose of this article, we’ll be focusing on the management metrics as that’s what suits the objective of this article.

Are You Looking to Generate ROI or Build Brand Demand?

So, your goal may be to increase ROI or generate demand — generally, your business goals are stated something like that. Usually, these goals are tied to the business stage. For example, a new product-led SaaS brand needs a lot of user signups because they can afford to let users try out their software for free.

What About eCommerce Essential Goals

An eCommerce storefront, on the contrary, doesn’t have this luxury. And that’s where goal setting becomes essential.

You should be able to set a specific goal before diving deep into the marketing ideas that will enable you to achieve this goal.

You may decide, for instance, that you want to bring in 1,000 user signups by the end of June. Now, that’s specific, and narrowing it down this much will help you stay focused on what’s likely to get you there.

And that takes us to the next step.

Brainstorm marketing ideas

Now that you know what you are up to, the next thing is to make a list out of the endless sea of marketing strategies coming to you. Then, get your team together and brainstorm.

Some marketing ideas are

• Social media Ads
• SEO
• Content marketing
• Email marketing
• ABM
• SEM

And so on — your team will be able to give you some other ideas that you haven’t thought about. In this case, some ideas may be ridiculous, while some would be good. List them out, regardless.

Once you are done with your list, assign each one of them a position as you deem fit. These positions should be based on three classifications:

Review your ideas again and use these classifications to weed out the poor ones. But, of course, you can also remove the good ones and keep the great ones if you like.

Once you’ve already made a list of marketing ideas you feel could help you deliver your goal, the next thing to do is to assess them based on the available resources, which we will discuss next.

Assess the available resources

No matter how awesome your marketing ideas are, you are limited by the available resources based on the four items of project parameters: time, cost, quality, and quantity.

As you now have a goal and marketing ideas, you need to gauge them against the available resources, which will help you put everything in perspective.

Some of the resources to consider overall are

• The number of available team members
• How much time do they have
• Their levels of skill
• Budget
• How long it would take for the project to be completed

And any other resources you feel you might need.

Once you have done this, the next you should try to know is which of these projects can be matched to the available resources in order for you to achieve your goal.

Let’s see how to do that.

Weigh the potential impact of each idea against the available resources

Having done your resources assessment, you now want to know which one of your marketing projects your available resources can execute successfully.

 To do this, use a weighted decision matrix. 

Let me show you how to do that step-by-step.

Put your marketing ideas in a row

Say, for example, you work in a link-building agency, and you have a goal to bring in 10 clients within one month. Put your marketing projects in a row.

You could have options like this:

• Write and publish 10 blog posts
• Send cold emails
• Write content to drive traffic from Google

Now, that’s one row. The next thing is to establish what the influencing factors are, that is, the surrounding situations that you must consider before choosing one of these.

Let’s see how to do that.

Establish the factors that influence your decision and assign each one a weight

This is where you try to establish what are the most important things to you at the moment.

For example, your company may need to save money at the moment more than it needs to bring in these new 10 clients.

Perhaps, profit is the most important thing to you right now, and getting these 10 clients will bring you that.

In most cases, you’d have more than one influencing factor. So, you should list out these factors and assign a weight to each of them based on their influence.

To do that, score these factors using numbers 1 – 5 or more, depending on how many factors you have to consider. For example, five would stand for the most essential factor while one would be the least important.

Here is an example:

• Getting 10 clients: 5
• Saving cost: 2
• Getting them in one month: 5

This example shows that both the first and the last factors scored 5 each, which means they are equally important, while the second factor scored 2, making it the less critical factor.

For a better perspective, let me put this on a table.

Assign a weight to each marketing idea

Having given your factors their scores, it’s time to add scores to your marketing ideas, too, based on how likely they are to impact each element.

See an example in the table below.

Now, all you have to do is multiply the number of each factor by the number of each project. See the table below.

Writing ten guest posts carries the heaviest weight, having earned the highest score, 60, and that’s the project you should work on.

What we did here was weighed each marketing project based on how much it can influence our goals.

Getting 10 clients isn’t the most crucial factor here, and saving cost isn’t, but getting 10 clients in the span of one month.

As such, I tested all the marketing options against each of these factors, and it turns out that writing guest posts is the one option that’s most likely to get me there, and the matrix showed that.

Create a workflow

“Why is workflow part of this?” You may be wondering.

Creating a workflow isn’t part of the decision-making process, but it’s essential if you are going to be successful in executing your marketing project.

Part of the reasons why I asked you to make a resources assessment is to help you envision how your execution would go forward.

Without a proper workflow put in place, your project might suffer a lot of friction, and you may miss your mark.

And that’s why you should have one in place.

To do this appropriately, you’d need two things: 

• Your team 
• Automation tools

You’d assign each member of your team a task and a deadline. That will enable you to keep tabs on each task you are working on and who’s doing what.

Also, you may need some automation software, such as collaboration tools (Think Trello and Asana), blog writing software (Think Jasper AI and Grammarly), and social media scheduling tools (e.g., Hootsuite).

If you can do this, you’d be able to execute fast and move on to the next important project.

Image Credit: by Anna Shvets; Pexels; Thank you!