Maria Fintanidou works as a Copywriter for email marketing automation software Moosend, having created the Help Articles (FAQs) and overseen the platform’s translations in Greek and Spanish. She loves exploring new cultures and ways of thinking through traveling, reading, and language learning.
Marketing project management is the Holy Grail of your marketing efforts. Even if you aren’t a project manager, you will inevitably dive into the project management process at some point.
The way you cope with it affects everyone in your team and is directly related to your project results. Imagine yourself as the first person in the project circle, who is responsible for the strategy through which you will get the rest of your team involved.
This process isn’t about just creating marketing content; it entails exhaustive planning and reviewing, delegating and completing tasks, meeting deadlines and objectives. Frustrating, right? Let’s take some weight off your shoulders by exploring how you can benefit from the following project management practices.
No marketing project management journey should ever begin without designing the roadmap. You have to know exactly where you’re headed and then pave the path to success. Here are the 5 key phases that every project manager goes through when planning a marketing project:
Once conceptualized, it’s time to start reaching the project objectives by specifying the components. This includes defining tasks, as well as resources and deadlines. If you have been in marketing long enough, you could define long-term goals that look at your marketing as a whole rather than having many short-term ones.
Plan into perspective, but don’t neglect to monitor what needs to be done on a daily basis, either concerning your tasks as a project manager or the tasks delegated to your team. Whichever the strategy, never forget the golden rule of creating SMART goals: specific, measurable, accurate, realistic, and time-sensitive.
Managing a project from start to finish involves a lot of energy. So, why not save effort by removing time-consuming tasks like crafting your campaigns from scratch? Instead of that, you can take advantage of the countless handy, editable templates for your email newsletters, provided to you by email marketing platforms.
Templates allow you to build on your project foundation. You can use them to enrich your newsletters with elements like logos, images, forms, or videos that will make a difference in reaching out to your target audience.
And you can actually do it in a fraction of the time needed to create a newsletter on your own. Make sure you’ll also keep a library containing reusable templates for different projects and leverage it according to your brand’s marketing plan.
When setting your priorities regarding your content marketing strategy, you should match them to your overall marketing strategy and your long-term marketing goals. Have you prioritized according to the importance of each task? Are smaller deliverables serving your business strategy?
Most marketing teams fall into the mistake of multitasking, which in most cases is a recipe for disaster. Having too many tasks in your project or assigning them to just a few employees could eventually exhaust your team.
Build boards containing all marketing tasks and corresponding timelines. This offers your team clarity as to how they must proceed. Make sure to continue one step at a time. The right order of completion should be unambiguous so that everyone can execute their tasks without waiting for other tasks to be completed.
It’s common knowledge that there is no team success without communication. Managing a marketing team means working with individuals that have strong and weak points. Therefore, clear, regular, and effective communication is a must-have.
Employees feel that they have guidance and are coordinated with the rest of the team. Also, you are able to monitor their progress by asking for updates regarding their task status.
Seeing that you need all your employees synchronized constantly, sharing emails and documents will get you nowhere. With the remote working gaining ground, there’s no better time to step up your game through top project management tools, which organize your projects and coordinate team members through various channels of communication.
Getting your workforce engaged throughout the whole process ensures they have access to the same up-to-date information and the big picture of your project.
Working on your project as an entity might be intimidating. So, right after fleshing out your project, break it down into individual tasks. Plan it out from beginning to end by investing in the following tactics:
Delegate smaller deliverables to different team members
Set the timeline for each deliverable
Ask for -and offer- constructive feedback
Track your team’s performance
When each small deliverable gets completed, proceed with the next step in your workflow. It’s important to get the time estimation for each task, in order to monitor which tasks have dependencies and should be completed before others.
This tactic increases your workforce efficiency and proves to be life-saving, especially if your company offers a remote working choice. It also decompresses your team because it gives you the option of shifting tasks between employees in case someone gets overloaded.
Through this scheme, you can easily detect potential issues and fix them before they impact your project’s success. Structuring your project adequately is vital for your workforce motivation and leads to better results in the long run.
We can’t stress it enough: project management is a process performed by a team, not separate individuals. So, your team’s consistency and hard work is your ticket to getting it right.
Your workforce must be on board right from the start. Include them in your planning phase so that they are aware of the steps required to execute the project within the timeframe you set. This type of planning ahead -and along- will help you run your project as smoothly as possible.
To go one step further, it leads to your employees’ sharing valuable ideas and creating strong bonds within the group. By getting their feedback on your project strategy, it gets easier for you to set realistic goals and better your decisions regarding timeframes and resource allocation. Keeping them engaged and celebrating their work is the ultimate motivation.
All the tips shared above can help you enhance your marketing project management; certainly, some of them will be more effective than others, depending on the nature of your marketing project and the needs of your business.
You may care for launching a product or service, setting up workflows, creating buyer personas, redesigning your website or social media accounts. No matter the purpose, your marketing team needs careful planning in the initial stages, collaboration throughout the project, and data collection after its finalization.
This guides your project to success, while also creating measurable outcomes that show you where there’s room for improvement. More importantly, though, it boosts employees’ confidence and makes them trust your overall marketing strategy.
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