Eight marketing project management tips from the pros
You’re in the marketing department of a business, with seemingly endless demands on your time: ads, PR, written collateral, events and so on. That’s a lot of projects to keep track of and a lot of potential headaches if you miss a deadline. So what do our experts think you need to do to manage those projects successfully?
- Keep a firm hand on version control and approvals
Every project has a workflow that needs to be managed, particularly when it comes to multiple drafts of marketing collateral. Email trails and Excel spreadsheets provide one way to manage the approvals process, but are not always 100 percent reliable.
- Create a place to share knowledge
Whether clouds, intranets or dedicated systems, sharing makes projects work – particularly when it comes to on-boarding new people. According to our research, around one in five organisations believe that they would save more than a day for both existing managers and new staff members if they had their organisational know-how and processes organised in one place.
- Connect your agencies and freelancers
Just as your employees need a place to share knowledge, marketing projects often involve third parties. Sharing information and resources online helps smooths out those working relationships.
- Maintain visibility on the moving parts
The pace of change means spreadsheets can struggle to keep up. A dashboard approach may help create a more effective level of visibility.
- Manage resources by role and project
Know who is working on what and who has the capacity to take on additional activity. You need to know where your resources and constraints lie.
- Standardise your processes
Marketing teams need processes that everyone understands and are easy for new arrivals to pick up. Convoluted systems for getting signoff or managing workflows do no-one any good.
- Employ agile thinking
Agile marketing means working outside traditional boundaries, with methodologies such as Scrum becoming increasingly popular. The idea began in IT, but marketing teams can also benefit from an agile working approach.
- Break each project down into metrics
Every project has milestones, deadlines and constituent elements that need to be completed in order. Dedicated software tools are one of the most common ways organisations keep control over that workflow – as without it the whole project can collapse.
