Monthly Archives: February 2023

Project management isn’t just about building software and hardware. Project managers distribute resources appropriately, manage timelines, and take care of stakeholders throughout the process.

However, that’s often easier said than done. After all, there’s a reason project managers are constantly tweaking their approaches and rethinking their processes.

In this article, you’ll learn project management basics and how you can implement them in your business. Let’s get started.

Table of Contents

What is project management?
Why is project management important?
What is a project manager?
The Project Management Life Cycle
Popular Approaches to Project Management
Project Management Best Practices

The process includes developing plans for meeting deadlines while maintaining quality objectives within time and budget constraints. This discipline can be owned by a dedicated manager or a leader on a project.

Why is project management important?

Project management processes are essential to successful projects. Research from the Project Management Institute found that organizations that don’t integrate project management will see their outright project failure rate increase by a factor of 2/3.

That’s a shocking statistic. So, let’s dig deeper into some key benefits that result from mature project management processes.

You’ll meet important deadlines.

Project management allows you to break large tasks into smaller-scale deadlines. By sticking to these milestones, projects can easily stay on schedule from beginning to end.

In fact, companies with mature value-delivery processes deliver projects on time more frequently than those without project management (63% compared to 39%).

You’ll increase buy-in.

Project management enables a team to build trust and credibility among peers, customers, and stakeholders. After all, if you’re consistently submitting high-quality deliverables on time, then you’re bound to win people over.

You can easily track spend.

You’ll be able to stay within your budget, or even under budget. PMI found that 11.4% of all resources are wasted due to inferior project management processes.

Saving money is especially important in a landscape where only 43% of companies report that they complete projects on budget “most of the time” or “always.”

You’ll improve your culture.

You can develop a culture of continuous process improvement through knowledge management. If you foster an environment that prioritizes optimization and learning, you’ll likely inspire others and attract employees with the same mentality.

Project Manager Responsibilities

A project manager plans, organizes, and leads the execution of a project. This ensures that it meets the expected goals while delivering the required features within time and budget constraints.

Project management professionals provide leadership through effective environmental scanning, synthesis of information into meaningful data, and objective analysis. That’s a broad set of responsibilities that require training and experience.

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We’ll discuss what skills — both trained and developed through experience — you’ll need for this role.

Project Manager Skill Sets

To ensure the teams stay productive and that projects are on track, project managers need a broad set of skills. Here are some of the most important skills that you need to excel in this role.

Interpersonal Skills

Project managers (PMs) have to interact with many people, including team members, stakeholders, and other project managers. Great PMs can work with a diverse group of people to achieve a common goal.

Stakeholders often have competing objectives. To create cohesion, PMs must be diplomatic as they manage professional relationships with people who may have different perspectives, skill levels, and personal politics.

Good relationships keep team members motivated and make solving team disputes easier.

Communication Skills

Project managers must schedule frequent meetings between collaborators and provide feedback on performance. Not only do you need to know who to meet with and when, you’ll also need to balance multiple communication styles.

For example, legal will want your update in terms of contracts and risk. Meanwhile, finance will be eager to hear about your budget and spend. Engineers and the marketing team will also have different interests that require different types of communication.

Decision-Making Skills

A project manager must make decisions and take responsibility for results. Being clear about objectives and setting high expectations helps maintain morale.

Decision-making skills include prioritizing resources, developing alternative estimates, assessing risks, and ensuring proper budget management.

Management Skills

Project managers are responsible for both leading a team and reporting progress to more senior plays.

You’ll need experience leading a team, holding one-on-ones, and addressing challenges as they arise. PMs should also be able to communicate with leadership on behalf of their teams.

In some cases, project managers need to build the team for their initiative. That may include finding the right internal participants or looking outside the organization. Ideally, a PM has some experience recruiting new team members.

The Project Management Life Cycle

It’s best to look at the entire PM process as a series of stages. Each stage has an objective. In total, there are five critical stages in the project management life cycle. We’ll offer a brief overview of each stage.

Initiation. In this stage, project managers take a look at a project realistically. They estimate how long the project should take, which eventually determines the baseline budget and timeline for the project.
Planning. The planning stage involves analyzing technical details, assigning tasks to the right team members, and identifying risks associated with different parts of the project.
Execution. Here you start acting on the plan you created in the previous state.
Monitoring and control. This step ensures you meet your deadlines. Not only are you doing the work laid out in your plan, you’re also monitoring your progress. Here, you determine whether you comply with all governmental regulations and industry standards. You also track all of the project expenditures and progress.
Closing. Bringing a project to a close is its final stage. Here, you determine whether the project delivers its intended results and whether to cancel or continue the project.

Popular Approaches to Project Management

While most organizations agree that project management is important, there are many different styles PMs use. In this section, you’ll explore four popular approaches to project management.

Product-Based Planning

Product-based planning centers its approach around outputs and project deliverables. This approach focuses on launching a product or service from conception through completion, with the end-result being sales of the product or service.

Process-Based Planning

Process-based planning ensures all project activities contribute to achieving organizational objectives. With this approach, the project manager creates, manages, and improves projects aligned with the business’ core values.

Phased Approach to Product Management

This approach involves planning and implementing projects in phases due to external constraints. Each stage goes through the five steps in the product management life cycle. Because of that, this approach is ideal for small and well-defined projects.

Project Production Management

This approach uses operations science theories and principles to understand and optimize project delivery. Project production management uses activity data to predict limits and determine achievement levels.

Project Management Best Practices

Regardless of which approach you choose, there are universal tips that help everyone. Here are some of those best practices applicable to any project in any industry or domain.

1. Invest in project management software solutions.

Today, under 1 in 4 organizations use any kind of project management software. Instead, teams rely on a patchwork of spreadsheets, paper notes, and emails. This approach results in disorganization. There’s no way to see where a project is in real time.

Project management software will help you keep track of your projects and agendas, organize tasks and activities, communicate effectively with your team, and manage risks and issues.

You can also customize dashboards to track KPIs and create reports to help forecast based on historical data and current trends for future planning.

2. Anticipate change by maintaining a flexible schedule.

Most projects run into delays. Unfortunately, minor delays can snowball into significant problems when you follow a fixed schedule. On the other hand, a flexible schedule can handle most changes in stride.

While some deadlines have flexibility, others may be rigid. Keep a list of dates that cannot change. This allows you to meet external deadlines with set timeframes while allowing for flexible deadlines in other areas.

3. Keep track of communication styles.

At the start of your project, sit down with important stakeholders. Ask how frequently they want to hear from you and how they would like to communicate.

For example, some stakeholders will want a weekly Zoom meeting with your team. Others may prefer a daily Slack update or monthly email with progress.

You can organize this information into a spreadsheet or a section of your project management software to keep organized.

4. Know your metrics.

One of the biggest challenges with any project is measuring success. Because of this, you’ll need to set measurable points before and during the execution of your project. Know which metrics matter to your project and when.

Rember essential metrics will change over time. If your project is just starting out, you may just celebrate quickly reaching important milestones.

Over time, you’ll need to prove your project impact. That includes metrics like the number of leads or contribution to ROI.

Level Up Your Project Management

Taking a closer look at the basics, you can see project management is a broad field that requires a deep understanding of communication and industry-specific nuances.

By incorporating the tools and techniques mentioned above into your daily work experience, you can enhance your performance as a project manager.

To help you get the ball rolling, check out our free project management template now — it’ll help you save a lot of valuable time and resources.

Let’s face it – companies have a unique set of challenges ahead of them in 2023.

We’re all aware of the obvious ones. Adjusting to a post-pandemic world, a looming recession, geo-political tensions, the list goes on.

But while we plan around these macro events that are largely out of our control, a crisis brews within many companies.

It goes unseen because this crisis isn’t making global headlines – it hides in the spaces between us.

Between two co-workers who have never met in person. Between the countless apps central to our jobs that don’t integrate with one another. Between marketers and their customers, who understand and trust each other less, despite having more information than ever.

So how do you fix a crisis made up of invisible factors, many of which we don’t (yet) measure?

You start by calling it out for what it is – a crisis of disconnection.

The next step is figuring out whether it’s happening in your organization, and connecting the broken pieces.

Here are three tell-tale signs to watch out for.

3 Signs Your Company is Disconnected

1. Your marketing data isn’t fully integrated with the tools you use.

HubSpot researchers have found that 31% of marketers don’t have a single source of truth for all their marketing data — and only 27% say their marketing data is fully integrated with the tools they use.

Not only does this waste marketers’ time as they manually collate data from various sources and plug it into disparate tools, but it harms data quality, leaving marketers with an incomplete story.

With patchy data, marketers struggle to understand and compare the performance of marketing activities across various channels.

Even worse, disconnected data makes it harder for marketers to understand and locate their target audience, so it’s no surprise many companies are saying their usual marketing channels are becoming less effective. This brings us to disconnection symptom #2.

2. You aren’t seeing the same ROI you used to from marketing efforts.

If marketers don’t have the data they need on their target audience, the ROI of their marketing activities suffers. And this is already happening — in our survey of professionals tracking Customer Acquisition Costs, 49% say CAC has gone up from 2021 to 2022.

It’s not so much that the marketing channels you’ve been using became less effective, but that consumers’ lives have changed drastically over the past few years. Their habits, preferences, and relationships with brands will continue to shift throughout 2023, and it’s up to marketers to keep up.

Marketers need holistic, real-time data on consumer attitudes/behaviors, especially as major global events like pandemics or recessions become more common.

This data is key for marketers to understand their evolving audience and pivot their marketing activities and messaging in alignment with what their customers are experiencing.

Integrating your data and tools opens the door to connecting with your customers in a way that helps your marketing strategy flourish, regardless of the channels you use.

3. Your teams (and their data) work in silos.

Let’s start with the human side of connection – has your company offered employees the chance to meet in person? How often does your team interact in fun, non-work-related settings? Do employees get the chance to get to know people from other teams?

Not only are these crucial to employee satisfaction and morale, but incentivizing employees to interact leads to unexpected, spontaneous ideas and collaborations that used to happen naturally before remote/hybrid work models took over.

Of course, once they get to know one another, teams need to be able to share data to collaborate effectively.

Sadly, 22% of marketers say data isn’t accessibly stored at their company, and the same amount struggle to get the data they need from other teams.

Even when it comes to alignment between sales and marketing teams, just 31% of marketers say the two are strongly aligned at their company.

The biggest challenges to sales and marketing alignment also point to disconnection. Among the top obstacles are a lack of accurate/complete customer data, the fact that sales and marketing teams use different tools, and difficulty sharing data between sales and marketing teams.

Where to Go From Here

If any of these signs of disconnection resonate with you, know that you aren’t alone. We’ve dedicated an entire blog series to calling out the crisis of disconnection and laying out the steps to fix it.

We won’t sugarcoat it — there are significant challenges ahead. The playbook for creating meaningful connections will likely change often, along with the lives of our employees and consumers. But isn’t that how it should be?

To read more on The Crisis of Disconnection, check out our previous posts and research:

– A Crisis of Disconnection: 3 Workplace Trends Slowing Growth

– A Crisis of Disconnection: Why it’s Time to Rethink Your Growth Strategy

– Solving the Crisis of Disconnection: How to Unite Your Brand Around Growth [Expert Tips & Data]

Fully informed on disconnection crises and looking for tools to help your company get better connected? Check out HubSpot tools like our free CRM.

Meta launched Facebook Reels in February 2022 as a follow-up to Instagram Reels and as a competitor to TikTok, whose short-form videos changed the social media landscape. If you’re active on Instagram, you likely know how to create an Instagram Reel, but you may not know how to post Reels on Facebook.

If you’re unsure how to create and post Reels on Facebook, keep reading for a step-by-step guide and information on Facebook Reels’ best practices.

How to Create Facebook Reels

How to Edit in Facebook Reels

Facebook Reels Best Practices

How to Create Facebook Reels

Creating a Facebook Reel is very simple. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Launch the Facebook app.

2. Access the Reels feature on the app by clicking the Watch icon near the bottom left corner of your screen.

3. Tap the Reels tab on the Watch page.

4. Click the camera icon in the top right corner of the Reel to create your own.

5. To start creating your Reel by adding video or filming within the app, tap Camera. Suppose you want to start by adding music; tap Music. And if you’re going to start with a green screen, tap Green Screen to superimpose yourself onto a background or to import your images as a background.

Once you’ve selected the content you want, you can start editing your Reel together. Read on for more information about Facebook Reels’ editing features.

How to Edit in Facebook Reels

If you’re filming directly in the app, you’ll notice the following features to edit your video to your liking:

Audio
Speed
Effects
Timer
Green screen

Audio allows you to select the music you want as the soundtrack to your Reel. Speed can be used to speed up or slow down your video. The Effects feature adds a filter or other visual effects, such as sparkles, to your video.

The Timer feature allows you to set a 3-second or 10-second countdown for when you want to start recording, and you can set your duration for up to 60 seconds. And Green Screen adds a background to your video.

Once you’re happy with your settings, you can hit record to create your Reel. When you’re done recording, hit next, add a caption, and tap Share Now to post your Reel.

If you’re using pre-recorded videos from your phone to create your Reel, you’ll notice the same Audio and Effects features along with Text, Trim, Captions, and Stickers.

With Text, you can add text to your video. Trim allows you to shorten your imported video. The Captions feature adds closed captioning to your Reel, and the Stickers feature adds icons and small images on top of your video. Once satisfied, just hit next, add a caption, then tap Share Now to post.

Facebook Reels Best Practices

To boost the chances of your Reel getting discovered, follow these best practices:

Create relatable and engaging content that captures your audience’s attention.
Start a trend that other users can easily participate in.
Always use vertical videos and avoid using horizontal videos.
Add music from Facebook’s music library, other Reels, or your music that you create.

Your content also needs to be of excellent quality, which means avoid posting Reels that are:

Blurry due to poor resolution
Recycled from other apps and contain watermarks
Uploaded with a border around the video
Filmed horizontally

Now you know how to create, edit, and upload your first Facebook Reel. And with the best practices we’ve shared, you now have everything you need to make your Reel a hit.

TikTok’s got the “For You” tab, Instagram has the “Explore” tab, and YouTube has Shorts. Now, Snapchat has the “Spotlight” tab.

Discover what Snapchat’s latest Spotlight tab is, how the algorithm works, and how it can help brands double their reach.

What is Spotlight on Snapchat?
Spotlight Snapchat Features
How to Use Snapchat Spotlight
How Snapchat Decides Which Content to Feature on Spotlight

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Where it differs from other social platforms is that it doesn’t give users free rein to post comments on the videos shared on Spotlight. When first introduced in November 2020, users could only like and share.

Then, Snapchat introduced Spotlight Replies, which allows businesses and creators to only display comments of their choosing from a pre-filtered pool.

In addition, display names only appear for public users who are 18 years of age or older but private users can also share select videos to Spotlight.

To encourage adoption, Snapchat created the Spotlight reward fund to pay its top creators – though, according to a recent Techcrunch report, that fund has gone down considerably in the last two years.

Spotlight Snapchat Features

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In-app music library – You must use your video’s original sound or use a sound from Snapchat’s internal library.
Topic setting – When sharing your video to Spotlight, you have the option to add a topic in the form of a hashtag, which can help you reach your desired audience.
Replies – Businesses and creators can filter through comments left on their Spotlight videos and choose the ones they want to display.
Trending – When on the Spotlight tab, you can view videos under trending topics (hashtags), Lenses (i.e. filters), and sounds.
Challenges – Snapchat users have the chance to win prizes when they submit Spotlight videos that meet certain criteria, like a trending Lense, sound, or location.

How to Use Snapchat Spotlight

Businesses, creators and everyday users can use Spotlight to reach new audiences and boost their engagement.

There are two ways to post on Spotlight: on your mobile device and on your desktop.

Before you can send off your video, you’ll have to meet Snapchat’s guidelines. Your video must:

Be between five and 60 seconds.
Be vertical, aspect ratio of at least 3:4.
Have clear sound and video.
Only feature original content and music from the licensed library.
Not feature sponsored products or services, including links and attachments.
Feature content appropriate for a 13+ audience.
Be free of watermarks from other social platforms.

How Snapchat Decides Which Content to Feature on Spotlight

You know how Snapchat Spotlight works but the question is, how do you get featured on it?

Well, Snapchat said they created Spotlight to reward creativity, regardless of follower count and profile access. This is why any user can create content for the Spotlight and follower count is not considered as a ranking factor.

What is considered is the following:

Watch Time
Likes
Shares
Skips
User interests

If you’re already leveraging Snapchat, this new feature opens up another avenue for you to meet your marketing goals.

It only takes a few scrolls on Instagram to see the platform as we know it is dead. Photos are out, Reels are in. Chronological feeds are out, algorithm-selected feeds are in. And the list goes on.

But are these changes enough to cause users to jump ship? And if so, what does this mean for your social media marketing?

Let’s take a closer look at where Instagram could be headed in 2023 and beyond.

Is Instagram dying?

What does it mean when a social media platform “dies?” Typically, it means falling behind in several key areas — namely, user growth, engagement, and relevancy.

Is this the case for Instagram? The short answer is no. Instagram isn’t dying. At least, not for everyone.

Now, I’m not saying Instagram is the hottest platform out there, or that it’s free of any issues. But the platform itself is far from over — and here’s why:

User growth

Instagram has a massive user base, and it’s still growing.

It recently surpassed two billion monthly active users, joining an elite club with Facebook and WhatsApp. It continues to climb year-over-year, expecting to reach 1.44 billion users by 2025.

While its growth isn’t at the same level as years prior, it’s still inching in the right direction for the foreseeable future.

Influence with Millennials

Instagram is the sweet spot for Millennials. It’s not as mature as Facebook — but not as trendy as BeReal or TikTok.

Unsurprisingly, a high concentration of Instagram’s audience belongs to Millennials, even securing first place as their favorite social media app last year (Gen Z agreed).

Compared to other platforms, Instagram still holds influence with those under 35. The challenge, however, is appealing to its primary audience while evolving the platform enough to appeal to younger generations (but more on that later).

What about low engagement?

Across the board, brands, influencers, and every day users report low engagement on Instagram. While disheartening, it proves that what used to work on Instagram is definitely dead.

Instagram has made no secret that short-form video is a top priority these days. After all, it’s competing with the likes of TikTok and Snapchat. But if you’re still using Instagram like it’s 2012 (valencia filter and all), your engagement will continue to suffer. 

We’re in the next evolution of Instagram, where static photos are out, and Reels and Stories are in. In fact, engagement for static photos has decreased by 44% since 2019, around the time Reels made its debut. 

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For those pivoting to Reels, engagement has remained consistent — even skyrocketing for some creators.

HubSpot spoke with one such creator, Kar Brulhart, who gained 13,000+ followers within a month by posting Reels. She estimates 75% of her audience comes from this type of content.

All this to say, Instagram is a different platform than it was a decade ago. The algorithm is evolving, along with the content that sparks engagement — and marketers must keep pace.

Okay, but is Instagram still cool?

Every social media platform needs some degree of relevance to survive. I call it “the coolness factor.”

Many people think Instagram has lost its “coolness factor,” so it must be dead. While Instagram is no longer at its height of popularity, it doesn’t have to win the popularity contest to stay in the game.

Take a look at Facebook. For the past decade, people have said Facebook is dead. Yet, it’s the most popular social media platform worldwide right now, attracting more than 2.89 billion monthly active users. Yes, it’s losing steam with younger demographics, but it’s maintaining relevance with its key audience: Millennials, Gen X, and Baby Boomers. 

In fact, a whopping 91% of Baby Boomers, 88% of Millennials, and 83% of Gen X-ers have visited Facebook in the past three months, according to HubSpot’s 2022 Consumer Trends Report.

To stay afloat, Instagram must maintain relevance with its key demographics while, at the same time, evolving the platform enough to stay competitive and attract the next generation. Only time will tell if they can pull this off.

Is Instagram an effective marketing channel in 2023?

Back in the early days, Instagram kept its platform primarily ad-free. When Facebook bought the platform in 2012, however, its advertising machine shifted into high gear.

The commercialization of Instagram, while disappointing to some, has made it a marketing goldmine. 

90% of Instagram users follow at least one business, and a growing number of consumers are starting to shop via social media. It’s no surprise that Instagram is ramping up its e-commerce capabilities.

Instagram is also thriving in the influencer marketing space. Last year, it was the most-used platform for influencer marketing in the U.S. – and more marketers are planning to use Instagram for their campaigns in 2023. 

To top it off, more than half of video marketers ranked Instagram as the best platform for ROI, engagement, and lead generation last year.

Putting It All Together

It’s too early to ring the alarm bells on Instagram. Its user base is still growing, and it has great reach with people under 35. However, there’s no denying that Instagram as we know it is dead, and marketers must adapt.