Like any company, marketing agencies require project management to ensure teams execute tasks and objectives to meet deadlines. Marketing project management requires a solid grasp of marketing tools, processes, planning, trends, and people/resource management.
This article explores seven tips for marketing project management and how managers can ensure campaigns operate smoothly to reach their end goals.
Marketing projects often require teams to share credentials for tools, software, and applications. Protect your project's assets with a secure password management solution from TeamPassword. Sign up for a 14-day free trial today.
What is Marketing Project Management?
Marketing project management is the role of planning, delegating, and managing tasks and objectives for marketing campaigns. A marketing project manager will usually set and monitor KPIs to ensure teams meet goals and requirements for each project.
At an agency, marketing project managers act as the company representative when meeting with clients to relay goals and expectations with team members.
Core Marketing Project Management Responsibilities
- Project scope: Outlining the tasks and KPIs to meet a project's objectives and end goal.
- Resources: Selecting the people, tools, equipment, and other elements required to complete the project.
- Timelines: Planning the project's timeline and delegating tasks to meet the project's final goal.
- Budgeting: Planning and monitoring the project's budget—including managing the team's hours.
7 Tips for Marketing Project Management
1 - Use a Project Management Tool
Using a project management tool might seem like a no-brainer, but many companies still rely on spreadsheets to plan and execute tasks.
While spreadsheets are cheap and somewhat effective, a dedicated project management tool can significantly increase efficiency with features to automate mundane tasks and communication.
Here are five popular project management tools for marketing agencies:
- Asana: One of the most popular project management tools for startups and agencies. It's a comprehensive project management tool with fantastic features to streamline campaigns and communication among teams. You also have tons of integrations relevant to marketing, including email software, Adobe Cloud, Zapier, and cloud storage, to name a few.
- Monday.com: Monday.com is a simple yet powerful project management tool with many of the same features and integrations as Asana. You also benefit from integrations like Typeform, Hootsuite, and Facebook Ads, which are beneficial to marketing projects.
- Basecamp: An affordable yet comprehensive project management tool for agencies, with an emphasis on remote teams. You can also automate check-in messages so team members can report back daily with progress or flag issues. You can also invite clients to projects so they can check-in without the usual back and forth emails.
- Notion: A unique yet simple UI that feels more like navigating through a website than a traditional project management tool. With Notion, you can even create Wikis which marketing agencies can use to outline the client's brand guidelines, project scope, roles & responsibilities, and other project information. Notion is also the most affordable project management tool on this list!
- Scoro: A minimalist UI with powerful budgeting and billing tracking features to keep everything in one project management tool. You can also quickly generate reports to provide feedback to clients and agency management. Scoro has loads of integrations, including email software, Google Analytics, Hootsuite, Facebook ads, LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms, and more marketing-related tools.
2 - Securing Tools With a Password Manager
Marketing project managers must also ensure that projects operate safely and teams follow safe password management practices. Marketers often have to share credentials for marketing tools, social media platforms, and creative tools.
A password manager makes sharing credentials with internal teams, contractors, and clients easy, so project managers have complete control over digital assets and who has access.
TeamPassword's features to making password sharing secure and efficient:
- Access anywhere and on any device using TeamPassword's browser extensions (Chrome, Firefox, Safari) or mobile app (iOS & Android).
- Create groups to share access with team members. Separate teams, so you only share access to those who need it. Minimizing who has access can reduce security risks and the potential for unauthorized sharing and access.
- Create separate groups with access to the same credentials to external teams like clients and freelancers.
- Monitor TeamPassword actions using our activity tracker or create email notifications for instant alerts to sensitive data and accounts.
- Use TeamPassword's built-in password generator to create robust, unique credentials for every account.
- Set up two-factor authentication to prevent criminals from breaching your TeamPassword account, even if attackers steal your credentials!
3 - Plan Marketing Projects With Team Members
Project managers must include team members during the planning phase of a new project or campaign. If your project involves multiple departments, it's good to get input from each one for realistic budgets and timelines.
If you're part of a big agency, you may also want to meet with other project managers to manage teams and resources effectively to avoid overlaps—which could cause unnecessary delays!
Getting planning input from team members helps give them ownership of the project and their role. Making coworkers feel valued in this way can increase productivity while setting a standard for effective communication early.
4 - Don't Forget Standard Project Lifecycle Phases
Marketing project management is no different from any other project management. Managers should follow the five phases of project management to ensure a well-planned, executed, and successful campaign.
- Initiation: Start by planning the project's goals, list team members and stakeholders, and identify budgets and constraints.
- Planning: The planning phase outlines the project's roadmap. The project manager must define the scope, create a project plan and timeline, set budgets, and define roles and responsibilities.
- Execution: Allocate and manage project resources, tasks, and budgets.
- Monitoring and controlling (runs simultaneously with execution): Project managers must communicate with team members to ensure everything goes to plan and make adjustments when issues arise. Monitoring KPIs is critical to ensure teams meet the plan's milestones and objectives.
- Closing & reviewing: Project managers close the project and terminate any freelancer contracts. They must also create reports for clients and management to review. Teams might meet to discuss ways to improve future projects.
Agencies should use these five phases of project management to create templates and standard operating procedures to ensure the company maintains a high level of consistency.
5 - Define Clear Goals
Defining clear marketing goals during the initiation phase is crucial for planning and executing a project management strategy. You should always have one primary goal with multiple objectives and KPIs on the road to achieving that goal.
Goals should be detailed and explicit so that teams have a clear target. Avoid vague goals and objectives like "increase email subscribers" or "increase traffic"—increase to what? You can increase your subscribers or traffic by one with vague goals like these, and you've technically reached your goal!
A better goal would be to increase monthly revenue to $100,000 within 12 months. Project managers can then identify relevant objectives to reach that goal. For example, to reach $100,000 in 12 months, the agency must:
- Increase email subscribers to X, with an open rate of X, and click rate of X
- Spend X on paid ads
- Grow social media following to X
- Increase website traffic by X%
A project manager will identify monthly benchmarks and KPIs for the marketing project to meet its end goal within each of these targets.
Returning to project management best practices, managers must apply either a SMART or CLEAR goal strategy.
SMART—Allows managers to clearly defined achievable goals that reduce and manage risk effectively.
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Realistic
- Timely
CLEAR—Designed to be dynamic, fast, and flexible. Managers set clear goals with the flexibility to adapt the project plan when problems or opportunities present themselves.
- Collaborative
- Limited
- Emotional
- Appreciable
- Refinable
6 - Build Strong Communication Channels
Communication is vital for ensuring teams follow the plan and objectives to meet the project's goals. Marketing is unique in that a piece of content could go viral, ultimately impacting the project's scope and objectives.
Strong communication channels allow teams to stay connected and make adjustments to complement each other towards a common goal.
Effective communication doesn't only mean that teams talk to one another; project managers must communicate tasks, workflows, guidelines, documentation for tools, standard operating procedures, and more to ensure everyone is on the same page.
The project management tools we mentioned above are designed to foster strong communication for the project and among peers.
7 - Be Open to Change & New Ideas
There's nothing more damaging than an autocratic project manager who's not open to change or new ideas. Marketing often has to react to market changes and trends.
Adapting to these conditions (while maintaining the project and brand's integrity) could help marketing projects reach objectives faster while exceeding expectations.
Marketing project managers should also be open to listening to team members about new ideas or perspectives. After all, these people are experts in their respective fields.
Secure Your Marketing Agency's Assets With TeamPassword
Executing marketing projects often requires teams to share credentials. Secure your marketing agency's (and client's) digital assets with TeamPassword's secure password manager.
Use a single TeamPassword account for all of your company and client assets. Sign up for a 14-day free trial to test TeamPassword for your next marketing project.
