How to walk the critical path

SalonGeek

Help Support SalonGeek:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

BizGirl

Well-Known Member
Joined
May 9, 2011
Messages
225
Reaction score
2
Location
Australia
Ensuring your best laid marketing plans make it off the page and into reality comes down to your ability to walk the critical path.

Your critical path – or marketing map – is essentially a step-by-step action plan that lists the sequence of activities you must complete to bring your marketing campaign in on time and on budget.

It provides an effective way to track your progress towards a deadline, but most importantly it gives you a visual roadmap of exactly how you’ll arrive at your goal.

Think of it like a trip to IKEA. To assemble your new flat-pack coffee table, you need to complete a set of tasks in a specific sequence. But skip a step in the process and chances are your new coffee table won’t have a leg to stand on.

In a marketing sense, your critical path operates on the same principles. Each task relies on the successful completion of the one before it, and if there’s a link missing in the chain, your end product will fall flat.

So we see that following a critical path is, well, critical to getting your marketing campaign up and running. But how do you design your own action plan that will send you marching down the critical path, and not the garden path?

Like any journey, it begins with a single step.

First, you must break down your marketing campaign into a series of achievable tasks. Ask yourself what needs to be completed in order to launch the campaign and list all the tasks on paper.

Then, assign the tasks to your staff or call in outside help.

For example, you may need a graphic designer to layout a flyer, a photographer to shoot your salon in its best light, and a printing company to produce the flyers.

Next, you must schedule the tasks in a logical order. For example, a designer can’t layout your flyer without images, so your photographer must do their part first. Likewise, a printing company needs a finished design to work with so they come last in the chain.

Now, with a list of appropriately delegated tasks sorted into a logical sequence you can set an achievable timeline for your project. For each task assign a realistic time frame for completion – the sum of which will give you an overall project timeline.

Working backwards from the launch date of your campaign, it now becomes crystal clear when you need to start the first task in order to hit your deadline. And closely monitoring your critical path and timeline throughout the project will illuminate any mole hills before they become mountains.

Best of all, your critical path need not only be applied to a single campaign but can -- and should -- be used to schedule your annual marketing activities. Done right, you’ll never again find yourself launching a Christmas promotion when Santa is already in his sleigh, or completely missing Valentine’s Day like one of Cupid’s errant arrows.

Please post a comment (or ask me a question) below and let me know what you think.
 
Last edited by a moderator:

Latest posts

Back
Top