Why Prioritize Marketing Tasks

Let’s imagine you’ve already created your marketing roadmap, and decided on goals and measurements. Each step you’re going to take will mostly comprise of several options and dozens of tasks your team needs to accomplish. There’s no doubt that you’d want to gain value faster for fewer costs.

Aside from that, you need to equally develop each of the stages, because if your website attracts no visitors, it has no value. If you can’t engage those you reach, you’ll fail to convert them, and so on.

So, when all the plannings and mappings are done, don’t rush your team to randomly complete tasks, write texts, and create designs. Take the time to figure out which of them will influence your objectives more with less work done.

Prioritization shouldn’t take long in the first place. It must save you hours on doing unnecessary work and ensure you don’t jump in with a complex expensive solution when there is a cheaper one.

How to Prioritize with REAN

The best way to keep balance and highlight quick wins is by using weighted scorecard prioritization. This is when each idea is evaluated by criteria with prior determined significance. Transforming REAN or any other marketing funnel into a weighted scorecard is simple. Here are the steps:

1. Transform Stages into Criteria.

Think of the stages as your goals. Each task must help you achieve these goals. So you can describe your criteria as such:

• Reach → Will this task help us attract more relevant traffic to the website?

• Engage → Will this task help us encourage visitors to interact with the website?

• Activate → Will this task increase the number of conversions?

• Nurture → Will this task help us encourage customers to return to the website?

These are example descriptions of the criteria we have in our REAN template in Ducalis. You can adjust them to fit your marketing objectives more.

2. Decide on the Score Scale.

Next, you need to decide on scores each task can get. To determine which activity will bring more value, you need to evaluate how strongly it impacts the objective.

First, choose numbers to assign. It might be a sequence like Fibonacci or Exponential. We prefer a range from 0 to 3 for simplicity.

But numbers are just a half of a step. If you leave them as they are, your teammates will perceive them very differently thus making the estimation vague. You need to specify what it means when a task impacts the Reach by 2, 3, or else.

The simplest way is to use the MoSCoW method. We prefer this one when it’s difficult to predict the outcome in numbers. So you can explain the scores like:

• 0 = Won’t impact.

• 1 = Could impact.

• 2 = Should impact.

• 3 = Must impact.

Alternatively, we can borrow estimations from RICE’s Impact:

• 0 = Doesn’t impact

• 1 = Low impact

• 2 = Medium impact

• 3 = High impact.

The best way to describe scores for marketing evaluation is to use the exact measurements you expect to track. For example:

Reach → Will this task help us attract more relevant traffic to the website?

• 0 = no traffic.

• 1 = less than 100 visits.

• 2 = 100 - 500 visits.

• 3 = 500 - 1000 or more.

Activate → Will this task increase the number of conversions?

• 0 = no conversions.

• 1 = few conversions.

• 2 = about a dozen conversions.

• 3 = more than a dozen conversions.

In Ducalis you can explain criteria and their scores in the language of your team, and won’t need to memorize them or constantly peep into the notes in a separate doc—everything you write in the description will appear in a pop-up each time you need to assess the criterion.

3. Decide on Efforts

Prioritization makes no sense if you don’t take into account how much the activity will cost you. You want to work on the most valuable and cheapest solutions first. Thus you must calculate the expected expenses.

As we estimate Development Complexity for our product features, we evaluate Time and Price for the marketing.

Time → How long will it take for the team to complete?

• 0 = 0 - 2 hours.

• 1 = 3 - 6 hours.

• 2 = 7 - 10 hours.

• 3 = more than 10 hours.

Price→ How much will cost the promotion?

• 0 = for free.

• 1 = less than 100$/month.

• 2 = 100 - 500$/month.

• 3 = more than 500$/month.

These are our example criteria and scores descriptions. Create your custom efforts criteria and set them with negative weight.

4. Evaluate

Gather all your marketing tasks in a single place and evaluate them by the whole team. Collaborative prioritization has a whole load of advantages:

• You use the power of crowd wisdom. You collect all the diverse opinions and gather all the perspectives. Even if you know less, you add value as long as what you know is different. Thus, by averaging, you get the most accurate estimation you will ever be able to get.

• You break silos because everybody knows what the others are doing and what to expect in the nearest future.

• You avoid the HiPPO effect. Your product promotion won’t go wrong because of some emotional decisions.

• You motivate people because you empower them with decision making. You let them see their goals clearly and choose how they achieve them.

You can divide people into evaluation groups and give them specific criteria only they can estimate. Or you can make all the criteria common and evaluate them together even if it’s out of the person’s purview.

5. Find Gaps in Shared Understanding

Another valuable advantage of collaborative evaluation is the possibility to see where the team has disagreements and misunderstandings. Check your teammates’ scores scatter and discuss the most divergent. You may find that somebody doesn’t understand the task or a specific criterion, or vice versa has a unique point of view the whole team has missed out.

Key Take-Aways

• REAN model and RACE Planning framework don’t have considerable differences.

• Regardless of namings, you must ask questions to come up with clear goals.

• Marketing roadmap isn’t enough. You should also prioritize tasks and activities.

• You must take into account expenses to find cheap valuable solutions.

• You should prioritize by the whole team to build team alignment around the goals.

• You mustn’t spend too much time on prioritization, and it’s better to use tools.