As anyone who has worked on a marketing campaign can relate to, it is very rare that you can exclusively focus on that one campaign or project at a time. You are likely working on multiple campaigns at once, with each one having different goals, KPI’s and marketing freelancers that are bringing it to life. Knowing this, each campaign or project that you are working on requires its own set of “admin” related tasks related to managing the individuals and budget that are tied to that campaign. 

Managing each campaign requires separate work streams including tracking, monitoring and paying any contractors and freelancers that are involved. And as your campaigns scale, this becomes much more challenging to keep track of and manage as the tasks only multiply. 

Owning control and visibility into the budget and spend for each campaign that is running is a must across both your marketing and finance teams. Knowing how important this is, Lumanu created a new module to revolutionize the way that you manage campaign finances: Projects. 

What is Lumanu Projects and who does it impact? 

With Lumanu Projects, organizations gain unprecedented control over their spending. Each individual project allows you to set a target budget, ensuring that you stay on track and avoid overspending. As you create, approve, and pay payables related to the campaign or project, the amount spent automatically tracks against your target budget. This is done in an effort to give you the guardrails needed to stay on budget without any complicated manual process or system. 

Having these systems in place is helpful to two teams in particular:

• Marketing teams - put yourself in the shoes of a Marketing Manager managing three different campaigns, with each campaign having five marketing freelancers involved with a defined budget. Without projects, the Marketing Manager would need to manually track the budget, spend and note which marketing freelancer has and has not been paid. However, with Projects, a Marketing Manager can easily group all of their expenses related to a particular campaign into one specific budget and track against that budget - allowing them to cleanly manage each campaign separately. This translates to them saving them time and money, while delivering a better experience to all to the freelancers involved in the campaign. 

• Finance teams - Similar to Marketing Managers, when working with multiple different campaigns involving several different influencers and marketing freelancers, tracking, paying and reconciling which marketing freelancer was involved in each campaign is challenging. This makes attributing ROI at the campaign level a challenge and ensuring that each marketing freelancer is paid on time a potential headache. However, with Projects, a Finance Manager can assign a custom field to all individual project payouts tailored for data tracking to make this process simple.

Lumanu Projects has been designed to benefit all parties that touch a campaign (or project) to make their lives easier by streamlining the entire process for both marketing and finance teams alike.

How does Projects make it easier to manage spending and track an individual campaign? 

At any point in the campaign process, a budgetary summary is available to any Lumanu user so they can drill down into the Project’s total budget, allocated funds, spend and total available funds. 

This is helpful to both the marketing and finance teams. It allows them to get a real-time understanding of a campaign snapshot at any point during the campaign. Let’s walk through how this would work during a campaign. 

Say that you are a Marketing Manager for a swimwear brand that is putting on a campaign with five influencers to promote your new summer swim line. At the outset of the project, the finance team would allocate the total budget to you as they are creating the Project within Lumanu. This would be the total budget that you had to spend for the entire campaign (known as a Project within Lumanu). The finance team would then allocate funds to the project, which in this case is $5,000. 

As you work through the campaign and pay marketing influencers and contractors, the total amount spent would go up, while the available funds for the campaign would go down. As a Marketing Manager of the campaign, you used to need to manually track this, but with Projects all of this is done in real-time as you spend out of the campaign’s budget. 

This is only the start of what Projects will enable for Lumanu users moving forward. Stay tuned to see how Projects will continue to streamline your team's time and make it easier for you to deliver a strong experience to your marketing freelancers and contractors. In the meantime, if you’d like to learn more about Projects, explore our documentation here or set-up time to chat with our team.