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Watch Kendall’s video (9 mins) to understand more about how an outsourced marketing team of strategists and project managers delivers results for accountants.
You’ve just signed on with monthly support from PF and wonder how your outsourced marketing team is going to deliver the results you want.
In particular, you’ve had contact from your marketing strategist and project manager and the difference in the two people seems unclear. You wonder who to contact when, and why. But most importantly, you’re wondering about the impact that a project manager and strategist have on your marketing.
When you sign up for monthly marketing support from PF your team will include a designer, a web developer, a content writer, a strategist and a project manager. The designer, content writer, and web developer roles are likely familiar and straightforward. As as an accountant, the concept of a project manager is particularly foreign. You’re not alone. A simple Google search will indicate that “Project Manager” is at the top of the most confusing job titles.
So what impact do a project manager and strategist have on your marketing results?
Your strategist gets you more value from your investment.
It’s very easy to spin your wheels and drop a lot of cash on marketing that doesn’t work.
The antidote? A marketing strategist.
A marketing strategist’s main concern is your business goals. By understanding your business goals and priorities, they are able to create a marketing plan that will support your progress on what is most important to you.
Your marketing strategist is embedded in the marketing world, stays up on trends, and can see the big picture about what marketing efforts will truly deliver on your priorities.
At PF, our marketing strategists have a minimum of five years experience designing campaigns, identifying realistic marketing goals, developing brand strategy, creating customer journeys, evaluating results, and ensuring that your marketing impacts your business in the way that’s most important for you.
Your marketing strategist is the high-level CFO-type work you do for your clients. They are the equivalent of the tax planner – knowing the impact each decision in your marketing will have and making sure short-term tasks lead to long-term goals.
To ensure that the marketing spend you make, and the time you commit to marketing, directly impacts your highest business priorities, your strategist will:
- Help you identify your goals and connect your business goals to your marketing
- Evaluate how your marketing can target your most ideal client
- Think through the entire customer journey and how your sales funnel will work
- Identify spots in your processes or systems that might slow down the prospect buying decision
A good brand makes marketing easier and more effective, and your strategist will make sure your brand is accurately portrayed across all your messaging and visuals. When you’re creating your brand, your strategist will:
- Dig out the deepest details regarding how your values impact the way you work
- Discover the biggest problems for your ideal clients and find out what keeps them up at night
- Match the marketing materials you’re putting out to the impression you want to make on your audience.
Your marketing strategist enables you to get the most “bang for your buck”. The strategy behind your marketing helps you choose where to spend your time and money to reach the highest-priority goals you have for your business.
Your project manager saves you time and brain-space.
How much of your time right now is spent on:
- publishing content…
- figuring out timelines…
- keeping track of your marketing to-do list…
- reviewing and making edits…
- and making sure all the bits of marketing are going where they need to go?
If you’re not a project manager, these things feel tedious, they drop to the bottom of the list, or they’re frustrating.
These types of tasks take away from the time you’d rather be spending with your clients or team, meeting with prospects, or spending time with family. What starts as a simple thing to do builds up over time and begins to feel daunting and never gets done. Or a social post doesn’t have the impact it could have because the blog post wasn’t published on time.
This is when marketing doesn’t feel fun anymore.
The day-to-day constancy of marketing is draining and you’re not enjoying the fun parts anymore:
- the highs of getting a lead
- the satisfaction from having a published blog post that answers a question you get from a prospect
- or the ideal client that comes in and says they read your website and already know they want to sign the proposal.
The day-to-day get-it- done stuff? This is your project manager’s job now.
Your project manager loves timelines and deadlines. They coordinate the whole team to move in the same direction, they plan all the details to get things done right, they keep you on task, remind you of your to-do list and send reminders when needed.
How often have you had an idea for your marketing but not gotten it out there? Or had a goal for your marketing but didn’t reach it for years?
A project manager’s strength lies in getting and keeping projects moving. They keep the content writer and designer on target with delivery dates. They remove roadblocks. They’ll always have the end-goal and timeline in mind and see all the pieces that need to be done in what order, anticipating project needs BEFORE they become a problem.
Ultimately, this means the timeline of projects moves along faster and the marketing you want out in the world is completed faster, and to a higher quality.
On the PF team, our project managers have at least 5 years experience in the field of project management and are professional multi-taskers.
The project manager lets you focus on what you do best, and relax knowing that everything is ticking along in your marketing in the way it should be.
What can I expect from my Project Manager and Marketing Strategist?
Now that you’re understanding why you need a project manager and marketing strategist, here’s a preview of what it will be like working with both on your team:
A marketing strategist is…
- Familiar with marketing trends
- Able to tie your business goals to marketing actions
- A big-picture analysis expert
- Obsessed with how to impact a particular audience
A marketing strategist will…
- Have regular meetings with you
- Serve as a marketing coach for you
- Talk about your goals
- Evaluate your marketing data
- Spend time in deep work strategizing regarding your marketing
A project manager is…
- Good at anticipating what is needed to get a project done
- Focused on timelines and processes
- Detail-oriented
- An excellent multi–tasker
- Obsessed with getting your projects out into the world
A project manager will…
- Know the status of all your marketing projects
- Work backward from deadlines and assign you tasks’
- Remind you of what we need from you
- Make sure your feedback is incorporated on projects
- Keep your team aligned and working toward the same goals
Your outsourced marketing team needs expertise in many different areas.
Your outsourced marketing team includes specialists in all kinds of areas. We make sure that your team is highly skilled in each particular skillset.
Your clients might have questions about who does what when they sign on with your outsourced accounting team. They wonder why they have a bookkeeper, account manager and a tax preparer. You’re unlikely to have someone working on both tax and bookkeeping. Usually, your team members are better in one area or the other because the skills and experience needed are so different. Your client’s ideal accounting team needs to include a tax manager, a bookkeeper, and possibly even an account manager.
One of the key benefits of an outsourced accounting team is having a whole team of experts in each area vs the same cost for ONE professional in-house.
Your outsourced marketing team works the same way. Your team needs professionals with expertise in each area you’re going to need for your marketing. This means your marketing is delivered faster, more efficiently, to a higher creative quality, and with less input from you personally – often for the same price you’d pay one in-house team member.
Imagine the difference between having a bookkeeper prepare taxes vs having these tasks split between two experts. The quality wouldn’t be as high. You’d lose efficiency. You’d not be able to deliver on time, or to a high standard.
It works the same way in your outsourced marketing team.
When you’re evaluating your outsourced marketing team, both your marketing strategist and project manager will be critical in creating marketing that delivers results and helps you reach your goals.
What’s the biggest gap in your marketing right now – project management or strategy?
If you’re already working with PF, have a chat with your Marketing Strategist about building a campaign that delivers specific results. If you’re not yet working with us on a monthly basis, fill out this discovery form and tell us where you most need help in your marketing journey.