Did you know that 77% of the teams that perform well on projects employ project planning software? Marketing campaigns are the backbone of sales. An effective marketing campaign creates more avenues for a business to gain from the leads it creates. Marketing campaigns and initiatives are a crucial part of business strategy as they help you portray your brand how you visualize it.
What will you get thanks to this article:
- The role of the marketing project planner
- A few words about marketing project management
- How to improve marketing project planning
That said, each business has multiple marketing campaigns live at any moment. It is important to ensure full visibility into each one and its transparency for all the stakeholders. An effective plan is needed to manage all your marketing campaigns with defined guidelines and standard operating procedures that keep your campaigns on track.
Your business benefits from a marketing project when all the associated campaigns and tasks run efficiently by the prescribed deadlines. Marketing project planner software is the perfect implement to help your organization drive projects towards their goals with efficient resource allocation and preferred timelines.
Let’s understand what a marketing project planning software can do for your business, what challenges you may face with such projects, and how you can formulate a good marketing project plan.
Looking for more expert tips on project management? Check out our FREE sprint planning checklist now!
What is a Marketing Project?
Marketing involves multiple parallel tasks directly impacting how customers interact with your brand. For example, the major marketing tasks are promotional emails or newsletters to leads, designing brochures and pamphlets for a campaign, or discovering upselling and cross-selling opportunities through customer data analysis.
A marketing project encompasses all the activities that must occur during the active tenure of your company’s marketing campaign. It lists the following aspects of your marketing campaigns:
- The objectives and goals of the campaign
- KPIs involved
- Timeline of the project
- Teams and professionals involved
- Resources involved
- Detailed phasing and execution plan
The data above changes based on the complexity and scope of a marketing project. As the number of marketing projects increases, you need better systems to manage all of them in parallel. A report by RGPM highlights that project managers lead between two to five projects at any given time, which gets overwhelming.
What is Marketing Project Planning?
The significant benefit of marketing project management software is precisely predicting the project timeline.
Marketing project management is the process of scheduling and managing all the ongoing marketing projects to keep them running on the right timeline while keeping the stakeholders in the loop.
Project management is a necessary activity that streamlines your execution practices and timelines, making the inherent processes more efficient while increasing the throughput.
Your teams get better visibility into each campaign and its projects by deploying an effective marketing project planner. Using the task tracking activity in project management planners, you can effectively monitor each campaign’s progress against the KPIs you weighed it for.
You achieve the capability to bring all your projects under the designated scope and execute them with optimized resource allocation using project management tools.
6 Best Ways to Improve Your Marketing Project Planning
Marketing experts need an assistive tool to augment their creativity with organizational capabilities to take their marketing skills to the next level. Here are six simple ways to improve your marketing project management if you are a marketing professional.
1. Simplicity is the Best
Understandably, detailing every little aspect of a project is necessary. However, it may derail your focus and lessen your productivity, as such details may be distracting. Break your campaign down into simple portions classified as below:
- Initial phase
- Planning phase
- Execution phase
- Task tracking and timeline tracking phase
- Time Management
- Project closure
As mentioned above, breaking down the entire marketing project into simpler parts enables you to keep better track of activities and dependents. Each task can be viewed vis-à-vis others and put on a timeline to track the relative progress between dependents.
2. Align Every Task with a Goal
You can achieve efficiency in a marketing project when all your tasks lead to specific outcomes. Before you begin, list all the objectives you must fulfill from a marketing project. These could be KPIs (like increasing the number of subscribers by 1,000) or specific results, like brand awareness. Ensure that your marketing project leads to fulfilling your goals at the end of the timeline.
3. Set Your Priorities
Diverse marketing projects are set out with equally diverse goals and objectives. However, you need to work within specific marketing budgets and ensure you achieve all your goals at the end of a sprint or term. With that in mind, assign a priority number to each marketing project and allocate its resources accordingly. Prioritization will help you keep your projects justified within the allocated budget.
4. Schedule All Your Marketing Projects
You may have one or more marketing projects active at any given time. Some may be Agile; others may be your regular marketing projects. To put everything into perspective, schedule your projects on the same time graph to see which ones you can execute in parallel, which ones are dependent, and how to plan the resources for parallel, complementary, and exclusive projects.
You can start by breaking your projects into milestones that line up together for results that expedite the downstream tasks.
5. Execute Your Marketing Projects
You can now begin executing your marketing project according to the timeline assigned to each task. Remember always to keep the marketing project calendar visible and accessible to the team – this helps in cases where tasks do not line up due to unavoidable circumstances. It helps the team to improvise by looking at the downstream requirements.
6. Monitor the Progress
Monitoring your projects’ progress helps you see how effective your strategy has been in helping you achieve the set goals. You can use marketing planners to understand where each project stands on its designated KPIs.
Additionally, workforce analytics help you supervise the efficiency of the human resources deployed for each marketing task. You can track your employees’ quantitative progress and performance using ROI, throughput, and time-based KPIs with the software and methodologies of workforce analytics.
It becomes easy to readjust the strategies and eliminate roadblocks if a project lacks momentum. For example, if you are a security company to increase sales on particular commercial security systems, your team should continuously track the conversion rate as the project occurs.
This makes it easy to readjust the strategies and eliminate roadblocks if a project lacks momentum.
Challenges in Marketing Project Management
70% of the organizations saw at least one of their projects fail in the past year.
That adds a lot of weight to managing projects well. Here are a few challenges you may face while managing your marketing projects.
- Poor briefing in marketing projects results in disparate sources of truth and scattered tasking. It can significantly hinder progress if you do not have a unified, democratized platform to plan your marketing projects.
- Poor clarity on resource allocation and availability leads to wasted time. You spend time manually selecting the correct versions of software to use or the right people for the job instead of rapidly mobilizing your assets.
- Siloed execution of projects results in poor team coordination, which may compromise the project timeline irreversibly. The absence of a unified source for teams to coordinate on the same project creates gaps in communicating progress.
- Inefficient, undefined workflows result in directionless tasking that does not produce the right results for dependent or complementary processes. The lack of standard operating procedures handicaps smooth operation
Marketing Project Planners
Content marketing project planning tools help you establish best practices for optimizing all your marketing campaigns. Here is a list of the best tools to get all your marketing projects on track.
Teamdeck – IT and Marketing Project Planner
Teamdeck is a comprehensive 360°-view tool known mostly because of its marketing and resource management software features. The following functions make it extremely useful:
- Timesheets and time tracking
- Team scheduling
- Workload management and availability management
- Project planning
- Resource utilization
- Project resource management
Hive – Collaboration and Marketing Project Planning Software
Hive is a high-performance project planning tool that comes with extended functionalities. This all-in-one tool includes high-utility features such as:
- Visual views of projects, including Kanban and Gantt charts
- Team time tracking
- Collaboration on unified project resources
- Resource scheduling software features
- Countless integrations with another app
- Native chat
- Real-time analytics
Trello
If you would instead work with a visual aid for project management, Trello should be your choice. This tool uses the Kanban concept of project management and delivers the following functionalities:
- Project workflow management and automation
- Kanban-style project view
- Custom fields
- Online calendar planner
Based on your project requirements, you can select the most suitable tool.
Wrapping Up
Managing a marketing project can get complicated if you are not using the right tools. It is necessary to understand the overall scope of your project and deploy a marketing project planner software to help you put everything into perspective and aid efficient execution.
