If you are a certified project manager or have recently fallen into this position, managing marketing projects is difficult. There’s so much to do that you might be like, “How can I do that?”
The good news: There are several proven strategies you can use to keep projects running smoothly. Marketing project management takes over the key principles of project management and applies them to campaigns.
Good project management allows teams to work more efficiently and also helps keep campaigns in line with industry trends and consumer preferences.
How to organize a marketing project?
The planning and organization of a project are the same as for any other project. This includes research, goal setting, and marketing strategy development. The difference is that your projects are marketing-specific.
All projects tend to have more moving parts, but marketing projects are more complex. This is because these projects require the collaboration of many professionals, such as:
- SEO professionals
- Subject experts
- Writers and editors
- Graphic designers
- Event planners, developers, and more
Most marketing projects require much more collaboration across teams. It is common for these projects to consist of teams remotely and internally, which can make it difficult to manage a project if you are not used to working with divided groups.
How to successfully manage your marketing projects
Being an effective marketing project manager requires special skills. You need to be flexible, adapt quickly, and resourceful enough to plan and implement different types of projects. One week you can review the project for future product launches and the next week you can update buyers’ personalities or expand your video marketing campaign.
You also need to work with people from different departments. Otherwise, it will be difficult for them to deliver projects on time and on budget. The good news is that we’ve created a list of tips to help your future marketing projects run smoothly from start to finish.
Explain your goals immediately
It is important to set your goals in the early stages of your project and measure what your project has achieved over time. General marketing goals include:
- Increasing market share
- Improving market awareness
- Get more subscribers to the mailing list
Monitor the marketing project management process
Despite the industry, projects are likely to follow the same 5 phases of the project life cycle. These phases include:
- Identify the purpose or goal of the business
- Plan a project that achieves this goal or goals
- Collaborate in teams
- Monitor performance and manage stakeholder expectations
- See the highlights and falls after the project
Marketing projects follow the same pattern known as the marketing management process. During this process, marketing projects are divided into five different phases:
- Research management: Examine aspects of groups such as industry trends, market data, and customer preferences
- Campaign planning: The project manager and stakeholders set goals and create a project plan
- Launch a marketing campaign: Once the goals are set and the project is planned, the teams will start working on the project
- Measurement results: Management seeks to create a sales quote by reviewing sales metrics and A / B testing
- Repeat: Always optimize your campaigns based on performance results and management recommendations
Assist teams in project planning
Involve teams in the planning phase, especially if your marketing project has multiple interdisciplinary collaborations. Because team members do the work, they need to have a better idea of what they can deliver within a certain time frame. This will help you set realistic timelines and budgets to help your projects run smoothly.
Consider taking an agile approach
Agile project management allows teams to divide large projects into smaller parts known as sprints. The work assigned at the end of the sprint was immediately checked and even:
Optimized for feedback
It’s a great approach for ongoing marketing projects such as content development and website optimization. Agile allows teams to continue working on these campaigns so that the company’s marketing initiatives remain in line with customer preferences.
Saving and pending ideas
Great marketing campaigns are built on creativity and good project management. When you learn how to improve project management, you can’t force creativity. Knowledge comes when it wants, not always when you need it. Instead of brainstorming about new marketing ideas, create a global backlog of ideas and add them every time you have a preview. Give everyone in your marketing department access to the backend and encourage them to do so.
Stop project management using emails and spreadsheets
The times of collaboration via e-mails and spreadsheets are long gone. Project management for marketing requires teams, managers, and stakeholders to work together at every stage of the project. Emails and spreadsheets make this impossible for two main reasons:
- It is more difficult to track information via email
- Project information in tables may vary between teams because the tables are not updated in real-time.
You can track your projects with state-of-the-art project management software for marketing departments such as monday.com, a business OS that allows you to easily plan and market projects, coordinate with teams and stakeholders, and share project-related documents under a digital workspace.
Create a project template library
There is a lot to project planning. Managers need to spend time and energy researching, creating budgets, holding introductory meetings, and so on. Preparing a project to run is a lengthy process, and the last thing you want is an unnecessarily long process of creating workflows. Project templates help.
Every effective marketing project manager needs to maintain a library of templates for different types of marketing projects, such as preparing to launch a product or publishing an e-book. Templates allow you to complete an entire project in a fraction of the time it takes to manually create a workflow. You can use templates to create the basis of your project. All you have to do is add specific details, such as assigning tasks to people and setting deadlines.