Project Management for the Digital Space

I work for a digital marketing agency that specializes in SEM, SEO, and paid social. We are an agency that is growing fast and churning out a lot of success stories, but growth demands adaption, so we’ve worked out a new way to better manage our clients in the ever-growing digital space.

Budget – Make sure everyone knows what’s going on

Our clients have ads running on multiple platforms, including Google, Bing and Facebook, and each client has a certain way they want their budget to be spent, by the total campaign, monthly, or even yearly. As we added clients with bigger and more complicated budgets, I built a Google spreadsheet that is accessible to all team members.

In this small snapshot of the document, you can see that we track the current spend on each platform and compare it to the monthly budget, that the document uses to then calculate a percent-remaining amount and color codes accordingly. Using this method, we’ve been able to reduce extra expenditure and provide a total overview document of every client. With this method, everyone is happy. I’m happy because I get to play around in Google spreadsheets, my boss is happy because he can easily access a snapshot of our total business, and the clients are happy because their money is being closely monitored.

Reporting back – Remain accountable

As much fun as spreadsheets are, the driving force behind our agency is accurate and truthful reporting. We provide our clients with a complete monthly report that includes data collected from all platforms we are advertising on.  A crucial element to being an accountable project manager is to always make sure, even if the numbers are not so awesome, to not sugarcoat your reports or dress them up. Don’t forget that clients are intelligent, hardworking people and can sense when something is amiss.

Our reporting style is matter-of-fact, and we make sure our clients fully understand any implications of a small budget, a niche audience, or rare search terms. If we know a campaign is just not working, we will remain accountable and let the client know that we need to take a new direction with their search engine marketing.

Happy team members make good results – Don’t stress over time management

One of the reasons I love working at Adshark Marketing is that we like fun. We share our space with some other fun lovers at Myriad Mobile in a repurposed old brick building in downtown Fargo, North Dakota.

Our team works tirelessly every day in front of double computer screens tracking and tweaking keywords. To avoid burn-out, it is so important that everyone gets to have a break. Our favorite team pastime is foosball, and I’ll admit that I am probably the least talented of us all. We’ve got a space on the fourth floor that we share with our buddies at Myriad with a kitchenette, foosball table and ping-pong table.

Remember, clients can have fun too! In the past, we’ve invited new clients upstairs to try out the foosball table and solidified the relationship between client and agency. If clients love your work and your results, then you’ve got a great partnership and you’ve done your job as project manager.

If you’re looking for an agency to manage your online advertising campaigns, contact us for a free customized consultation.