In the last few years, marketing project management has become popularized as companies realize that even marketing needs to follow processes and projects to ensure specific larger company-wide goals and objectives can be reached.
Project management processes lend themselves to marketing quite well. Like software development, marketing requires logical progressions (tasks broken down into manageable parts), resource coordination, and measurable outcomes. Many marketing initiatives also have a specific scope, well-defined resources, and a budget.
That’s why it’s essential to have some project management best practices in place within your marketing team. It will help you, as a manager, organize groups and expectations and help you achieve defined goals with ease.
Project management can be applied to all sorts of marketing initiatives as well, including:
- PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns
- CRO (conversion rate optimization)
- Email marketing
- SEO (search engine optimization)
- Digital content creation (blogs, whitepapers, social media, etc.)
- Product launches
With a project management framework in place, marketing managers can quickly knit together the people, resources, and tasks needed to launch, track, and review campaigns.
Be SMART
Any project management best practice needs to have SMART (Specific, Measurable, Accurate, Realistic, and Time-sensitive) goals. Next, have your SMART goals outlined at the outset of your project, and be aware that the SMART method can be tailored to both smaller and more significant tasks. Using the SMART approach also allows you to create actionable and transparent parameters.
Look for Project Management Tools to Make Project Management Easy
Project management has come a long way in the last decade. Multiple platforms can help you better manage projects of any size and scope and can help you communicate with teams. Project management tools can help you track work, progress, tasks, and deadlines while helping team members stay on track and accountable for their contributions.
Depending on the project, some unique (and popular) project management software solutions include:
Some of the platforms work in tandem with each other. For example, Trello, a kanban board-style task manager, can plug into Slack, a team communication tool. Slack can plug into Jira, which is great for task management and bug tracking. Many have apps and add-ons to help you customize your platform to your specific project management needs.
Having the right tools on hand or at your disposal will help you measure and report more readily and give you the KPIs you can use to show progress.
Be Flexible – But Realistic
Be ready! Things never really go exactly as planned, and marketing project management is no different. Whatever your approach, make sure you’ve baked in a certain level of flexibility. For example, you may have a great marketing campaign ready to drop only to find that there’s been a bug discovered in the product. That might mean pressing pause on advertising, press releases, or other announcements. When managing your marketing projects, be ready to reassess and readjust. Having contingencies in your back pocket will help you manage any coming storms.
Be Ready to Listen and Learn
Project management in marketing is often a murky, undefined area as it’s not exactly a part of traditional marketing. However, if you put the tools in place and remain flexible, you’ll already be ahead of the game. Having an open approach also helps. Listen and learn from others, and keep an available line of communication open – especially with the development team – so that you can see what’s coming on the horizon and can craft marketing plans around things like upcoming releases, UI/UX changes, or other notable advancements. Ultimately, by being open with other departments, you’ll find that you’ll have access to even more potential content for digital outreach in the form of blogs, newsletters, social media, press releases, and more.
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