Marketing Project Management
Scrivener is a very useful tool for writers. It can be purchased for $40 and has a great little sidekick in Scrapple ( mind mapping software). It is offered at LiteratureandLatte.com (affiliate link). If you click on the link the landing page gives a great description with multiple screenshots of the product and a 30-day free trial is available. One of the key features is the storyboard which I have pictured below that allows you to organize your work, stacking and shuffling the cards (pages) around at will. If you are outlining and writing a book it will prove to be invaluable.
However, that is not the way Scrivener has created value for me.
I use Scrivener to manage my marketing clients and in fairness, I also use Trello as a project board but I only do that for outward communication with the client. My work is practically always incorporated in the Scrivener binder that I have created for them. The binder becomes my story of the client and their portfolio. I start out by scoping the project, determining the situation, building vision, core capabilities, and other project management type structure. We then typically move toward market segments, and/or personas or archetypes. Throw in a few SWOT and SOAR assessments, determine our objectives, a few scenarios, strategies and tactics and we are off to the races. However, that can all be done in a word processor or even an excel spreadsheet?
Scrivener will provide all the features of a full rich text editor: add tables, bullet points, images and format your text And it will capture your images, PDF files, movies, web pages, sound files—right inside Scrivener. Nothing special yet, right? It does have a notepad separate from the document itself and a scratchpad to capture conversations and notes on the client during the day but still nothing special unless you are writing a book.
The uniqueness of Scrivener for me is simple, it builds a story. We are inundated by the use of story in today’s marketing but few us to work with clients in a storybook fashion. Each project can become a chapter. Each archetype/persona can be created and captured like a character and tracked through the story. Think if your software encouraged you to write stories in lieu of line items for projects.Think if you created sales letters, autoresponders and other copy based on previous stories that were at your fingertips. Think of having these stories on a cork board that you could move around and sequence. Think of noticing what characters were missing from a conversation. Think of your customer and his customers all in one story, one application. And if the engagement ends, the entire project can be bundled up and shipped off as a PDF. That is the power Scrivenr for me.
I am not going to tell you that Scrivener is easy to use. I wish it was more intuitive. It is also not that shareable. I save it in Google Drive or DropBox to access from different computers. It is not a cloud base system. All my writing takes place in one application though I still use some Word functions and will copy and paste between the two. However, these are really minor drawbacks for me. The ability to have one system that incorporates the entire file structure for just about all of my client’s work is just a huge time-saver. And the ability to think of a customer, their markets, and processes in a story fashion makes me a better marketer.
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After you get started, join the Lean Marketing Lab and schedule a time that I can walk you through how I use it.