Become great at marketing project management

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Do you ever get the sneaking suspicion that there could be a better way to organize your marketing team? There are plenty of reasons you might feel this way, from endless email threads and unmanageable stakeholders, to difficulties communicating and delivering campaigns on-time. 

The answer to all these gripes, as it turns out for many teams, is marketing project management. 

In this guide, we’ll talk you through the ins and outs of the marketing project management process, including:

• What is marketing project management?  
• The phases of the marketing project management process 
• How project management helps teams to communicate
• How to instill project management skills and responsibilities into a marketing team
• The benefits of a project-managed approach to marketing 
• Project management tools and platforms 

Our aim is to give you all the information you need to make project management part of your everyday marketing processes.

What is marketing project management? 

Marketing project management is a way of working that provides a framework for delivering marketing projects. It can help teams complete all sorts of work on-time and on-budget, from marketing campaigns and products launches to SEO audits and competitor analysis. 

Key benefits of marketing project management include easier collaboration, better coordination among team members, and more efficient delivery of project work. To put it simply, it’ll give the team more reasons to love working together, and fewer reasons to curse at their computer.  The fine detail of marketing project management varies depending on the project management tools, methodology and specific practices each team chooses to use. (This can be a very good thing, if you have team members who are particular about their particulars.) 

With that said, the following points are true of most marketing project management processes: 

• The project is focused on producing specific outputs, called deliverables. A deliverable could be anything from a series of blog articles to a new marketing strategy for a brand. 
• Project work is divided into manageable chunks. This includes task lists, tasks, sub-tasks, and milestones representing major achievements on the way to project completion. 
• The work is managed within a project management tool. A project management tool is a digital workspace used to plan and track project tasks and facilitate collaboration among the team.
• Each project progresses through well defined phases, including planning and execution. There is usually a pre-defined timeframe and budget for the project. 

Project management can be used to manage all sorts of marketing activities and campaigns, including: 

• Pay-per-click (PPC) 
• Email marketing
• Search marketing (SEO)
• Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
• Content marketing 
• Product launches 

A project management framework brings together all the people and tasks that are needed to deliver a campaign or piece of work. For example, in a brand campaign, project management might be used to organize a team effort between graphic designers, copywriters, market researchers and strategists. 

The four phases of marketing project management 

Most marketing projects can be managed in a four-phase project lifecycle: 

1. Start
2. Plan
3. Execute 
4. End/Evaluate

Phase #1: Start

At the start of a project, the commissioning stakeholder (i.e. client) and key project stakeholders from the marketing team will define and agree on the objectives of the project. 

The objectives can then be translated into project goals, forming the basis of a project charter. The project starts when this document has been signed by all the leading stakeholders. 

Phase #2: Plan

With the project goals established, the team can agree a project budget and identify the deliverables. 

A deliverable is anything the project works towards and produces intentionally. The most common (and obvious) deliverables used in marketing projects are marketing activities and campaigns. Some projects include secondary deliverables, such as generating project data that will help with future projects. 

After defining the project’s deliverables, the team formulates a marketing project plan made up of several tasks. The more complex the project is, the more tasks it will need. Each task is allocated to a team member. Sometimes, leading stakeholders assign tasks to team members; in other cases, team members self-assign their own tasks.

It’s important, at this point, to estimate the project scope, meaning the extent of work involved in the project. This will help the team avoid planning more work than it is able to do. Careful project scope estimation is especially important for teams working on a retainer or with a strict budget. 

Another requirement during planning is to create a project timeline, which describes the chronology of activities that make up the project. This can be represented visually through graphics such as Gantt Charts, which can be updated in real time to give the team a clear indication of project progress. 

Phase #3: Execute

This is the phase where the team gets on with implementing the project plan. 

During execution, the team members who are leading on project management will be responsible for task management. This involves tracking and reporting on task progress, creating new tasks as needed, and removing ‘blockers’, which are issues preventing tasks from getting done.

An easy way to track progress on certain marketing projects is using kanban boards, which give an at-a-glance visual reputation of how a task is progressing through a project. The kanban board has multiple columns, each of which you can label as a certain stage in a process (e.g. Ideas, Researching, Writing, Editing, Published). When a task progresses to the next stage in the process, its card can be moved to the appropriate column. For more guidance on this approach, read our guide on How to use Board View to create a killer content marketing process. 

The team member(s) responsible for project management will also need to monitor project status during execution. If the project is running behind time or over budget, this person needs to find out why and seek a solution. They should also provide status updates, in reports to senior stakeholders, and in discussions with the whole team at regular progress meetings.

Phase #4: End/Evaluate

Finally, we reach project completion. What happens in this phase will depend on the nature of the marketing team’s relationship to the project. If the project is a one-off piece of work, then it could be considered finished once it has been delivered to the commissioning stakeholder. 

 On the other hand, if your team is a marketing department, or a marketing agency working for clients on a retainer basis, the final phase of the project lifecycle will likely involve an evaluation process. This is especially important to the continuous improvement of campaign tactics, as insights from evaluation can be fed into future projects…

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