Today’s digital, multi-channel environment means that marketing activity has become more complex than ever. Today’s marketing teams are responsible for planning and executing a huge range of campaigns that can involve multiple stakeholders and resources. The need to plan, coordinate and track all these activity means marketing departments are increasingly using project management systems.
Today on the Aproove blog we look at the key ways in which project management systems are being used by marketing teams, to help deliver marketing activity more effectively, efficiently and collaboratively.
The main responsibility of project management systems in marketing is to plan projects effectively. Maybe you are releasing a new product, a social media campaign, or a trade show? All these are marketing projects that take a lot of planning to be undertaken and accomplished successfully.
With project management software, marketing teams can document their projects in a granular manner with task lists, timelines and relationships, so everyone involved in a project has a clear understanding of what needs to be done by whom and when. Depending on the system used, marketers can also have easy access to Gantt charts, Kanban boards and other visualization tools that help them have an immediate, big-picture view of the status of a project and potential risks lurking at early stages of the project.
Marketing projects often require the use of resources – ranging from human resources such as people-hours, to budgets and free goods. Marketing project management tools allow you to allocate resources: a calendar of resources and a cost-tracking feature can be used to ensure you can access resources when you need them, and that a project doesn’t go over budget. (It’s a must in any business!)
It is imperative to marketing departments to keep a check on the resource usage and cost to address any areas that might incur extra cost for the organization, or failure to take advantage of any opportunity due to a strategic oversight. Project management systems provide marketing departments with a way of optimizing the usage of their resources and ensure the delivery of their campaigns.
This matters because marketing is inherently collaborative. Projects are often cross-functional, with teams drawn from different areas of the organization. The software facilitates collaboration by providing a single location where team members can post information, files and updates. Chats, @mentions (Aproove has this feature), discussion boards and even document uploads make communication easier and reduce the number of long email chains.
Also, having a project management software helps create a sense of transparency within a marketing team. Stakeholders can see what is being done, what has been achieved and left to do, and everyone has access to the feedback from others and the required documents. This relieves a lot of potential misunderstandings and keeps everyone responsible for their actions.
Often, marketing campaigns involve doing the same things over and over again, and therefore wasting your marketing team’s time, either on rote work or processes that must happen but that you would rather forget. Project management systems can help you. You can set up workflow templates that automate some of the work or processes. You can then reduce time spent on rote work, and you can reduce the chance of error.
Marketing success requires data-driven decision-making. Project-management systems can be used by integrating with analytics tools to help marketers make good judgement. The real-time performance reporting on KPIs (such as click-through rate, conversion rate and ROI) can help marketing teams make adjustments in strategies and tactics.
Marketing campaigns and projects rarely function in environments that are static, but rather a changing landscape. Project management systems help marketing teams to plan, resource, collaborate with internal and external stakeholders, automate workflows, and make better and data-driven decisions as outlined above.
Marketing practitioners can better ride the powerful waves of project management software to overcome the formidable complexities of their domain, and produce better outcomes for their marketing goals.