5 Exercise: Project Progress - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v ->That's it for me for lesson five.</v> Now it's up to you. Let's get back to that project that you're working on. So one thing to ask yourself is what are your conversions? For your problem, for the problem you're trying to solve. How do those conversions play out on the website and how do they play out offline? What are the most important conversions for your plan? And can you estimate some type of monetary value for them, whether it's because you've been able to get real numbers and calculate them, or even because you're going to take a guess, because honestly taking a guess is better than having no estimate at all. And so focus on identifying what the important conversions are and how they can begin to help you drive monetary value for your plan. Then let's go deep in return on investment, and you might need help from people in the organization to understand how is the business case usually put together? How do we calculate ROI around here? How do we calculate the investment? How do we calculate the return? And how do you show that your plan is going to produce return on investment? So what kinds of ROI calculations have worked in the past and been persuasive and how do you follow the six steps that we gave you. Figure out what the new costs are. How do you estimate them? Who can you get help from? How does your project generate a return? How can you estimate that amount? And how can you be sure that you tie what that revenue is to the marketing plan that you put together? All of those things require thought before hand. It's not something you want to do after the fact, you finished a project. Now you're going to prove that it worked. No, that's not the way we want to do it. We want you to figure out ahead of time, what kind of value it's going to bring. That'll help you get the project approved. And it also helps you measure it once it's done. Now, I especially want to emphasize to think about what types of arguments have worked in the past in this organization. What has proven persuasive, and especially what has proven persuasive for your decision-maker. What types of arguments really make them decide to go for this project? And do you need approval of the finance team? Is it more than the decision maker? Do you have to get the finance team or the accountant or a CFO, someone with that financial authority to approve, not just the decision-maker that you've had in mind all along and what will persuade that person. All right, let's summarize what you've got in front of you. First, I want you to identify the most important conversions for your plan. Along with the monetary value for each conversion, come up with at least an estimate of what those conversions are worth. Then I want you to figure out what works in your organization for calculating ROI. What's the standard way that everybody does it. And not only what's the standard way they do it, but what are the arguments that are going to be most persuasive to your decision maker and to some financial person, if they have to approve as well. And so use that process to show the expected ROI of executing your plan. Think clearly about how you're going to prove that it was your plan that caused that return on investment. Not something that merely happened at the same time. So this is a really important exercise, figuring out how to take your plan and prove its monetary value is actually one of the most critical parts of getting it approved. So I wish you luck with it.