Managing marketing projects to a deadline is absolutely crucial in today's fast-paced digital world. It could make or break your company. Marketing campaigns these days are becoming nothing short of holistic experiences because they're increasingly omni-channel and run in a more and more sophisticated way. This means that marketing and brand managers are under constant pressure, but it also means they need more efficient project management tools to keep everything on the right track. Work management or marketing project management software goes beyond what you typically think of as ‘project management'. It's an end-to-end solution that gives you more strategic advantages, which are outlined below:
The Evolution of Marketing Project Management
Managing a marketing project used to be a manual, sometimes chaotic process: you'd use spreadsheets to track progress, email threads to assign tasks, and face-to-face meetings to communicate, track assignments, and review task status. It worked, but challenges were common. Tasks could slip through the cracks. Communication was often scattered and incomplete. You also lacked real-time visibility into a project's status.
Enter, work management software – a type of software that tracks project workflows, improves collaboration, and serves as a ‘single source of truth' for all things in a marketing project. The modern marketing team requires more functionality from these tools, and providers have responded by offering marketing project management software that targets the needs of teams.
Key Benefits of Work Management Software for Marketing Teams
- Improved Collaboration
Typically, marketing projects have many stakeholders – designers, content creators, analysts, external vendors, and more – and it can be tough to get them all working together when they're in different offices or time zones. Marketing project management software makes this frictionless collaboration possible, where team members can communicate with each other, share files, and view progress in real time.
Common features such as shared workspaces, comment threads and task allocation force everyone to be on the same page and easily contribute to project milestones. This helps keep everyone on board and avoids the possibility of miscommunication.
- Improved Project Visibility
One of the main benefits of work management is increased visibility. Marketing teams can generate dashboards and reports that clearly state the status of projects, view KPIs and watch progress against deadlines. Real-time insight can help project managers flag issues, reallocate resources and make decisions.
Gantt charts and Kanban boards are great additions to project work, helping teams visualize deadlines as well as dependencies between separate tasks. All this transparency is great for getting things done and keeping everyone on the same page. Each team member has a clear idea of what they need to do and how it fits in the broader picture.
- Streamlined Workflow and Task Management
Marketing projects can have many sub-tasks to take care of, with some having more demanding requirements while some have tight deadlines. Work management software provides a feature to set up a task list for all the sub-tasks in a project, assign responsible team members, set the requirements, and for each sub-task, specify the deadline, as well as reminders and notifications to keep the task owner on track.
Many marketing project management software tools also come with the option to create bespoke workflows that could be customized to suit the unique requirements of any marketing project. Whether attempting to launch a campaign, create content or source market research, the tool can be adapted to the particular project type and ensure the correct steps have been undertaken to complete it successfully.
- Resource Allocation and Management
Resource allocation is essential for the successful completion of any marketing project. Marketing project management software offers features such as tracking resource availability, assigning tasks, managing workloads, and balancing team capacity. Analyzing resource utilization helps the project managers identify resource overutilization and overworked team members, and appropriately distribute work to maximize resources while minimizing wastage.
Some solutions also allow for time-tracking functionality so you can track how long you spend on a given task and assess your ability to stick to a budget or complete a project under specific time constraints, a circumstance which can prove invaluable for budgeting, forecasting and next-time project planning.
- Enhanced Communication
Contemporary marketing projects place great importance on seamless communication. It is vital for projects to properly represent the ongoing work progress and provide a platform for project parties to give feedback and review work status. This is where the integrated messaging systems (such as @mentions), discussion forums and file-sharing features of work management software play a significant role.
The messaging systems allow members of the team to communicate without stepping out of the system. In other words, instead of using emails or meetings outside the system, workplace communication can take place within the system.
Some tools prompt status reports and general updates through push notifications and other real-time delivery modes, making sure that team members are kept in the loop at all times about changing project circumstances or new developments.
- Data-Driven Decision Making
Data is a valuable way to make decisions about marketing project management. The marketing project management software provides us with analytics and reporting functions where we can analyze every project performance to measure our success, track our progress, and evaluate if our strategies are effective or not. By leveraging data, project managers can clearly notice what trends are emerging and how to make appropriate adjustments to our project.
Likewise, these insights also help teams conduct post-project analyses to identify what went right and what went wrong during the project so that they can better execute on campaigns in the future. Marketing work becomes less prone to mistakes and more effective over time.
Challenges and Considerations
While work management software can be beneficial, it's important to think about the drawbacks and considerations when using it. In conjunction with the implementation of new software comes a time and monetary cost upfront, like team training and integration with other systems.
Furthermore, you should choose the best marketing project management software for your team and for your responsibility at work, looking at features, easiness of use, and compatibility with the desired workflow of your team.
Finally, after all this, the software itself needs to be managed to make sure it's being used effectively: teams have to check in on their use of the tool on a regular basis, seek help when problems come up, and continuously look for ways to improve their workflows.
