In essence, marketing project management provides a framework for delivering marketing projects and helps teams complete all types of tasks, such as marketing campaigns, SEO audits, and product launches, in due time and on budget.

Good marketing project management brings easier collaboration, improved coordination among team members, and efficient delivery of projects. Ultimately, it gives teams more reasons to enjoy working together and less frustration. Marketing project management is the systematic approach towards realizing organizational objectives and goals in the realm of marketing and its fine details vary depending on the methodology, specific practices, and project management tools designed to meet a team’s unique needs and preferences.

Since projects are a common thing in the marketing industry, marketers are often involved in new ventures and sooner or later, they’ll be required to dive into the project management process.

In this article, we take a closer look at how to apply project management best practices and achieve positive marketing results.

Critical Elements of Marketing Project Management

Project management in marketing can be used to manage all types of marketing activities such as content marketing, pay-per-click (PPC), email marketing, SEO, and product launch. To make marketing projects successful, two elements are critical – research and data.

• Research. Teams that work on marketing projects should embrace research whether it’s done before the project launches or as part of the project plan. If the project is about launching a new product, conduct customer segmentation research using agile project management tools to see what the intent of your audience is and to understand the best way to reach them.
• Data. If you work in marketing, you probably know that every project lives and breathes data and it’s a crucial part of making informed decisions. Customer data, for instance, is gathered to validate whether the project has reached its goals and to check whether the return on investment has been met. If your project fails to include these elements, it’s probably not a marketing project.

Stages in Marketing Project Management

Once you have a clear idea of what marketing project management is, you should try to understand the process. There are four states in marketing project management: define, plan, implement, and audit.

Define

At the beginning of every project, a general rule of thumb is that you must establish the project’s objectives. They can be project goals and outcomes that you want to achieve at the very end. Once the project is approved, you should figure out how to achieve the project objectives.

To put task identification into action you should start to quantify your goals and ensure they’re clearly defined. At this stage, metrics and data come into play. You must also try to collect feedback and ask your team to organize tasks, times, and required materials. With the feedback, you can proceed to construct a project plan.

Plan

As soon as you have laid down the project goals, your team members should focus on the project budget, timelines, and deliverables. The complicated part of every project is the workforce needed and the tasks. You must give each team member a task and assess its scope.

Determining project scope is key for teams who work on a strict budget. A project timeline is also a crucial requirement during the planning phase and it can be represented visually by using graphs, charts, and tables, all of which shall be updated in real-time.

During this stage, you must focus on organizing and identifying the tasks that have dependencies, set milestones to show clear progress, and inform your team of the project life cycle as a way of keeping your members motivated and ready to take on the project.

Implement

This is the stage where the project manager will be responsible for the team’s task management, starting from tracking and progress reporting, to removing bottlenecks that prevent tasks from being completed.  

During this phase, you should use data to monitor the project progress through quantifiable KPIs and perform regular check-ins as it will provide opportunities to identify challenges and act towards solving them if necessary.

Audit

During this stage, you should analyze and evaluate the marketing project outcome and see if any improvements can be considered for future projects. You can put project audits into action by evaluating your performance by comparing KPIs. In addition, collect feedback and create a follow-up to make improvements for the next project.

Final Words

All things considered, marketing project management boosts the productivity of marketing teams and helps them create better plans, implement activities quicker, and keep track of all moving parts of a marketing project. This guide will help you create a structure and achieve excellent outcomes and keep marketing efforts at optimum performance levels.