On this page
Think marketing project management is tricky? That’s because it is. Armed with the right tips and tactics, project managers can find ways to manage and make their projects work better.
Read on to learn about the right strategic decisions, an agile marketing approach, how team management softwares can help and more. It's important to create a digital advantage to get ahead.
Stop! Watch out for these red flags in marketing project management
A good marketing project manager knows it’s more than just creating tasks, assigning work and setting deadlines.
Most marketing campaigns need extensive cross-team collaboration from different departments. It can get tricky to manage such projects manually, as it can get time-taking and expensive. Project management sounds like a challenging job role, and it is. But it doesn't have to be an uphill battle all the time—you just need the right strategies. Before you create a strategy for your marketing project, be aware of the potential challenges so you can deal with them.
1. An unclear brief
Poorly briefed marketing projects lead to confusion among teams. Missing vital information related to workflows, tasks, deadlines and reporting can be a time-waster for your team before the project has even started.
2. Vagueness over marketing resources
If you have a new project but aren'tt sure who the best people in the team are to complete tasks, that's a problem. Make sure you don't spend time choosing the best resources and then find out the chosen people aren't available. Aim for transparency in marketing resource management.
3. Multiple platforms to manage marketing projects
Project managers often execute multiple projects simultaneously, but don't have a single, centralized location to do so from. This means communication gets delayed, project reporting slips, task statuses aren't updated, emails get long and confusing, and so on.
4. Lack of collaboration
Many businesses still rely on spreadsheets to manage both projects and resources and this hinders efficient team collaboration. The problem is that colleagues from other departments cannot view spreadsheets if these are saved on the server. As a result, they have no idea about the capacity of other teams and individuals when briefing new projects and tasks.
5. Unproductive project meetings
Unnecessary project meetings can drain your marketing resources in no time. Accumulating WIP reports manually before scheduled project meetings can take hours and meetings can lose their purpose.
Now that we know the challenges, let's find out tips to deliver great marketing project management outcomes by allowing your teams to work more efficiently.
6 marketing project management tips for success
Check out these tips for better control over your projects and teams by adding efficiency to your whole work process.
1. Define quantifiable marketing goals
Any project should have clearly defined, quantifiable goals and objectives as your start. Without this, the project can so easily lose its direction and team members can lose motivation when they see their efforts going nowhere.
This list doesn't have to be very long. Focus on ones that can will impact your business. Prioritize your marketing goals and commit yourself to achieve the top three goals. For example, your top three marketing project management goals can be:
Driving 20% more organic traffic through content marketing
Increasing annual subscriptions by 10% in three months
Improving conversion rate from 1% to 3% in six months
2. Review strategy
Your primary goal is to deliver projects successfully, on time, and within a set budget in a way that you can repeat your success.
Bringing scale and repeatability to operations is key. When drafting your strategy, think about if it has:
Scalability- whether you plan to execute the same process to projects of varied size and scope
Repeatability- whether you plan to implement the same PM process across several projects
Flexibility- whether the process can be used across various industries and clients
Now review what's one component out of these three that you want to implement most across your marketing project management processes?
3. Embrace agile marketing approach
Agile project management allows teams to break up large complex projects into smaller and manageable chunks, which are also known as sprints. Work delivered under each sprint is reviewed and then executed or optimized with feedback.
An agile marketing approach can boost marketing output, reduce project delays, and make sure that there’s continuous improvement too. Agile marketing can be of great use for marketing campaigns like website optimization and content marketing that are ongoing.
Here's a beginner's guide to agile marketing.
4. Manage standards for each deliverable
Set up some pre-defined requirements for each deliverable. If you're producing content, think about a minimum word count, tone and voice, keywords and uniqueness. Next, consider some more standards for your content marketing project, such as:
All content deliverables have to go through 2 rounds of review and approval (universal)
All content deliverables should include client branding (project-wide)
All blog posts should be minimum of 800 words and not more than 1200 words (project-wide)
All accompanying social media imagery must include the client’s Instagram handle (deliverable-focused)
Consider if you can automate or simplify any parts of the process to make it easier in the long run.
5. Skip spreadsheets and use a team management software
Emails and spreadsheets can restrict real-time collaboration. It’s difficult to track information in long, messy email threads. Email recipients could also take a long time to reply. That's why you should use a top-rated project management software. A centralized project will be easy to track.
Team members, stakeholders, and project managers can be in sync during every stage of the project under a single roof.
A feature-rich project management software like Workast, ClickUp, Chisel, Monday.com, nTask, teamhood.com or ProofHub can offer all the tools that your team needs to plan, manage, and execute projects effortlessly. With useful features such as group chat, notifications, discussions, Gantt charts, Kanban boards, and more, just skip the old-fashioned spreadsheets and emails!
You need to pick a management software that will really optimize your business, so you can consider getting it trialed by a software testing company to make sure the features and uses are right for you.
6. Break projects into manageable subtasks
Create individual tasks or assign tasks to a group of people in one place. Here’s how project managers can go about it:
Hold a project planning meeting with all team members who’re supposed to be a part of the project. You can go over all the tasks you need to perform to deliver a project successfully. You can also encourage people to come up with their opinions on how you can manage the project more effectively.
Set start and finish dates, and set time estimates for different tasks. Prioritize tasks in order of importance, in the order you want them to finish first to hit deadlines. A resource management software can help you plan and measure the workload of your team.
Get started with these surefire tips for a successful marketing project
Here's hoping a clear roadmap and these tips will help you tackle your project better and achieve amazing results. Good luck!
