Your department is full of moving parts, from understanding your capabilities and setting your goals to choosing the right project management tools for your strategy. However, we’re here to give you a hand. Here are 9 tips on how to manage marketing projects.
1. Set expectations
Before starting any project, it’s important to give everyone an idea about what to expect.
First, take your stakeholders: can you deliver exactly what they’re looking for? Will you need to increase the budget to meet their requirements?
Next, turn to your team. How can you fit a new project into their daily schedule without disrupting other areas? Gantt charts can come in really handy here, as they show you exactly how much time tasks should take so you can take advantage of any gaps.
With both lines of consideration, you can start to lay out the project ahead and propose a realistic budget and duration.
2. Keep your eyes on the prize
It’s all too easy to get knee-deep into a marketing project before realizing you’re not working towards your goal. Whether it’s conversions, sales, sign-ups, or event participation, there’s always an overall objective involved in marketing efforts.
One easy way of solving this issue is to adopt Kanban boards, which give you a clear visualization of which tasks are completed, in progress, or still to do. However, most importantly, you can keep a list of your overarching goals here, and refer back to it whenever you create new tasks. Ask yourself “how does this task help us achieve our objective?”, and things will quickly start becoming clearer.
3. Be strategic about your project management
Now you’ve focused on your main goals, the next step is to lay out the tasks that will help you achieve them.
These tasks need to be clear, concise, and make sense to everybody involved — and for that, a smart project management tool is a great addition. Rather than pinging information back and forth across a bunch of channels, create a task with full instructions, a responsible person, collaborators, and observers.
This will give you much greater control as a marketing project coordinator, enabling you to follow the progress of every task and even receive reminders and updates automatically.
4. Smart communication: More productivity, less stress
A key part of any marketing project is how you communicate between your team.
Most of the groundwork can be done through your project management software, with clear instructions, tasks, and deadlines, but you can’t just rely on that.
Set standards for how to communicate within your team and across departments. For example, emails are a great way of reaching out to clients to get things started, then you can switch to video calls for a personal touch as you get into the details. When you’re simultaneously working on the same task, instant messenger can help you with your back-and-forth and get things done in a flash.
5. Automate the menial tasks: Focus on creativity
Automations have been what the past generation of business leaders could only have dreamed of — basically outsourcing repetitive, time-consuming tasks to some clever algorithms and giving your team extra time and headspace to focus on what humans do best.
When you manage marketing projects, it helps to identify the tasks that fall into the automation category. Perhaps it’s automated campaigns, maybe your marketing funnel, and surely reminders. By setting automations, you take a lot of work off your own desk, while keeping your team motivated with more creative tasks.
6. Adopt an agile mentality
When you manage marketing projects, it’s easy to overlook the underlying approach. By now, most professionals are at least aware of agile methodology, and it’s a great way to keep on top of the overall picture while improving the specifics.
Often, you’ll need an interdepartmental team working together to get the best results. For example a sales agent can propose a new idea, with a designer and a copywriter giving their input and a legal mind keeping things above board. Rather than pushing everything through respective line managers, you can create a dynamic, efficient scrum team and boost your productivity.
7. Collaborative documents save so much time!
Why work in silos when you can collaborate on the same file at the same time? Not only is it a more efficient way of working, but you’ll have one master document rather than 50 versions of the same thing — much better for the nerves, right?
Collaborative documents have been around for a while now, and for efficiency, you really need to be using them. Store them all in a cloud-based drive so your whole team can access them from wherever they are and you’ll save yourself a lot of bumps along the road. This way, you can collaborate together and remove everybody’s access once you’ve got your final, approved doc.<h2>Set up workflows for your standard tasks</h2>
Let’s be clear: A lot of marketing revolves around creativity, we get it. But you can’t be creative if your whole department is in chaos.
8. Use workflows for the groundwork of your projects
A great way of creating a stable environment so people can show off their flair is by implementing workflows. This isn’t exactly reinventing the wheel, simply a series of tasks you can connect to your project management so that every step is taken care of.
An example of a well-oiled workflow would include:
- Your copywriter penning some killer lines
- The creative director approving the concept
- A design team bringing it all to life
- Your social media team showing it to the world
9. Test, test, test
If only there were a magic wand that you could wave and get the perfect project from day one. Unfortunately, here on planet earth, iterative marketing campaigns are the best way to improve on what you have.
Similar to the Kaizen philosophy, an iterative approach constantly optimizes every campaign you are running, for example, improving the copy of your ads or rearranging the layout of your landing pages. Be sure to do A/B testing so you can pinpoint exactly what changes bring you more traffic and measure those results. Analyzing your marketing campaign data doesn’t just get you brownie points with your line manager, it can inform the base of your upcoming campaigns.
Change the way you manage marketing projects
You’ve now got an idea of how to manage marketing projects, it’s time to start putting your knowledge to good use.
With Bitrix24, you can make all of the tools and techniques mentioned above part of your working life. Cut out the stress and speed up your processes all from one place.
By signing up for free today, you can level-up your marketing team and start focusing on moving forward.
