When running omnichannel integrated marketing campaigns, several factors come into play. Aside from creativity, project management is just as crucial for success. A project priority matrix is one marketing tool that can significantly enhance your team's efficiency.
In this article, we’ll explore various priority matrix templates and their applications in marketing management.
Eisenhower Matrix
Best used for: Daily task management and quick decision-making
The Eisenhower Matrix, also known as the Urgent-Important Matrix, categorizes tasks into four quadrants based on their urgency and importance:
- Urgent and Important: Do immediately
- Important but Not Urgent: Schedule
- Urgent but Not Important: Delegate
- Neither Urgent nor Important: Eliminate
This matrix can help you prioritize daily tasks and decide resource allocation.
Urgent and Important
Urgent and important tasks are things you need to do immediately. They’re fires that need to be put out, tasks that might escalate if they’re not attended to immediately. Examples can include responding to an irate comment on social media or fixing a technical website issue impacting functionality and crucial KPIs.
Important and Not Urgent
Important but not urgent tasks are typically investments for the future, such as researching new target demographics for potential expansion or building relationships with industry influencers for future collaborations. While it’s tempting to keep delaying their completion, scheduling them in is best to ensure they’re attended to and the team can reap their benefits.
Urgent but Not Important
Urgent but unimportant tasks are usually administrative and upkeep-related, which is why it’s best to be delegated. Examples are routine checks and admin upkeep.
Not Urgent and Not Important
Finally, when a task is neither urgent nor important, it’s best to consider eliminating it from your task list. These typically revolve around tasks that tackle unimportant matters or metrics.
The level of urgency and importance of tasks would change throughout the project. How fast it changes can be based on days, weeks, or months. As a marketing manager, identify the best cadence for this exercise to help manage priorities.
Impact vs Effort Matrix
Best used for: Project selection and resource allocation
The Impact vs Effort Matrix plots potential projects or tasks based on their expected impact (or value) against the effort required to complete them:
- High Impact, Low Effort: Quick wins
- High Impact, High Effort: Major projects
- Low Impact, Low Effort: Fill-ins
- Low Impact, High Effort: Money pit
A variation of this matrix is the “Time Invested x Money Generated” matrix, which is particularly useful for evaluating potential marketing campaigns or initiatives.
High Impact, Low Effort
Quick wins are initiatives that are best to tackle as soon as possible. They can give the team a good head start with minimal effort. Examples can include optimizing a high-performing blog post or adding call-to-action on website pages.
High Impact, High Effort
Initiatives in this area are typically projects rather than tasks. While they will require more skills and resources to execute, they can also provide significant benefits for your brand or company. Efforts within this quadrant may include launching a new product or service, redesigning and improving your company website, etc.
Low Impact, Low Effort
Tasks in the lower-left quadrant of the Impact-Effort matrix are typically administrative tasks. These may include cleaning up email subscriber lists, creating simple graphics for social media posts, or organizing digital asset libraries.
While they won’t significantly impact the success of your marketing campaigns, they’re also helpful little initiatives that make work a little faster. They also won’t require too many resources to pull off.
Low Impact, High Effort
Tasks or projects with low impact but require high effort are recommended to be re-evaluated.
While there may be projects that are tempting to do—maybe because they’re trending or a relevant competitor is doing them—they will ultimately come at a large cost and are likely to yield insignificant impact. Examples may include creating detailed reports on minor metrics or attending non-essential industry events.
As a marketing manager, part of your job is to evaluate which initiatives will be worth your team’s effort and resources. So, if you currently have upcoming projects that fall under this category, it would be wise to re-think if they’re still worth pursuing.
Decision Matrix
Best used for: Comparing multiple options against various criteria
The Decision Matrix allows marketing managers to evaluate different options (e.g., marketing channels, campaign ideas) against weighted criteria.
Parts of a Decision Matrix:
- Options: The rows in the decision matrix represent the different alternatives that the team is considering
- Criteria: The columns of the table consist of relevant criteria that need to be considered in picking the most viable option
- Weight: Weight is assigned to each criterion, which represents how important it is in terms of consideration, with 5 being most important and 1 being least important. These can be indicated at the top row, in the same cell as the criteria.
- Scores: The table is filled in with scores on how each option would measure up against the corresponding criteria. This can be on a scale of 1-10 where 1 is the least and 10 is the best.
Once all information is filled in, scores are multiplied by the criteria weights, and total scores per option are computed. This template is excellent for making data-driven decisions with multiple factors to consider.
PIE Framework
Best used for: Prioritizing growth experiments
The PIE framework evaluates potential projects based on three factors:
- Potential: How much improvement can this project drive?
- Importance: How valuable is the area this project affects?
- Ease: How easy is it to implement this project?
Each component is typically scored on a scale of 1-10:
- 1-3: Low
- 4-7: Medium
- 8-10: High
The final PIE score is calculated by multiplying the three scores:
PIE Score = P x I x E
The higher the score, the more viable the option is.
This framework is particularly useful for marketing teams focused on growth hacking and continuous improvement.
RICE Framework
Best used for: Prioritizing product features or marketing initiatives
The RICE framework is excellent for prioritizing larger marketing initiatives or product features that require cross-functional collaboration. RICE stands for:
- Reach: How many people will this impact?
- Impact: How much will it impact each person? (usually scored on a scale of 0.25, 0.5, 1, 2, and 3)
- Confidence: How confident are we in our estimates? (50% is low confidence, 80% is medium, and 100% is high)
- Effort: How much time will it take? This can be measured in man-months or man-days, whichever applies.
The formula to calculate the RICE score is
RICE Score = (Reach * Impact * Confidence) / Effort
The higher the score, the more viable the option is.
While the RICE framework provides a quantitative approach to prioritization, it’s important to consider other factors such as strategic alignment with overall marketing goals, budget constraints, timing and seasonality, and potential long-term benefits not captured by the framework.
Engagement-Opportunity Matrix
Best used for: Content marketing and social media strategy
The Engagement-Opportunity Matrix plots content ideas or social media tactics based on their potential engagement (likes, shares, comments) and the business opportunity they present (lead generation, conversions):
- High Engagement, High Opportunity: Priority content
- High Engagement, Low Opportunity: Viral content
- Low Engagement, High Opportunity: Conversion-focused content
- Low Engagement, Low Opportunity: Filler content
This matrix helps content marketers and social media managers balance between creating engaging content and driving business results.
Wrapping Up
Project Priority Matrices are invaluable tools for marketing managers, just like Workamajig, the best project management tool for creative and marketing teams.
By selecting the right priority matrix for each situation, your team can maximize its benefits for productivity, decision-making, communication, and business impact.
Originally published March 24, 2025.
