In today’s highly competitive world, effective marketing is what makes you stand apart from your competition. The marketing profession is filled with projects of all kinds. From planning a new product launch to executing a customer survey, marketers are always busy with challenging projects and seeking innovative ways to market their products.
This is why marketers need to invest in effective project management to succeed in their projects and deliver solutions within deadlines. However, due to the immense research obligations and the sheer volume of projects, marketers tend to struggle at the start, especially those who don’t have enough experience.
For this reason, we have created a brief guide on marketing project management and outlined several best practices to help you succeed in project management for marketing.
What Is Marketing Project Management?
Essentially, marketing project management is quite similar to project management in other industries. Image result for what is a marketing project management
Similarly, marketing project management is the complete overarching administration and development of a marketing campaign. Marketing project management increases productivity by providing guidelines to team members that help them complete campaign tasks correctly and efficiently.
4 Tips That Help in Marketing Project Management
Although traditional project management and marketing project management are similar in many ways, some things can still make it uniquely challenging. Here are X tips that can help you manage marketing projects in a more effective way.
1. Develop Your Strategy for Success
Before you start anything, you must first make sure that you have a good understanding of what you want to achieve. Then, you must align your marketing goals with the business objectives of your organization.
Usually, the main purpose of a marketing campaign is to deliver reputable solutions, create something for the target market, expedite marketing initiatives and ensure operational excellence.
As a marketing project manager, you must remember what your priorities are and clearly articulate the value of your campaign to everyone else. For this, you can leverage presentations that illustrate your vision for project management and show how a campaign achieve the company's objectives.
2. Project Scheduling
Once you have started a project, you must define the scope of the project clearly to prevent any misunderstandings. In the marketing world, a project is very similar to product development where the team has to launch the service for a very specific section of the audience.
The problem with many new marketing project managers is that they don’t have enough experience to plan and schedule tasks effectively. In marketing project management, planning is not merely a simple “To Do” list.,
Managers must consider all tasks, internal dependencies and their durations. Here remembering important dependencies is extremely important, particularly at the time of the product launch. Cross-functional teams are interdependent and the resources available to all teams are limited. You must be an effective project planner to manage all things effectively.
Also, while you schedule and plan everything, it’s important to document all your assumptions and the attached risks in your project schedule. You should validate your assumptions during the course of the project and adjust any panning in the schedule that doesn’t seem realistic. Scheduling risks need to be monitored and managed continually after taking feedback from the entire team.
3. Leverage Research and Data Extensively
Marketing projects have an immense investment in research. Research must be done before the project and market research takes a lot of space in the marketing project plan. For instance, if your team is rolling out a new product, you must first use the results of a customer segmentation research to approve products for the target market.
At the same time, all marketing projects contain a significant amount of data. Marketers must collect considerable data to validate whether the projects have met their goals and if they can ensure the expected investment (ROI) from the marketing project.
All this plays a key role in evaluating the feasibility of business decisions and tells managers whether they should invest in certain projects or not. People unfamiliar with marketing always think that marketing is only about creativity. However, just as in other industries in today’s world, successful marketing campaigns are principally powered by data-driven decision-making.
Lacking in either of those things in a marketing project can weaken your marketing campaign severely. Research and data lay the foundation of marketing initiatives.
Everything from running advertising campaigns and naming new products to build buyer personas requires considerable research and data-backed decision-making. Acing both these things can ensure that your project is on the right project.
4. Adopt a Product Development and Launch Methodology
The challenge here is that typically Marketers view the process as stifling their creativity (this is an acknowledged generalization). The positioning with Marketers, therefore, needs to be in convincing them to use their creativity on the product (or service) itself instead of reinventing the methodology each time.
Using a standard development and launch methodology (or process) will also allow them to focus more on the customers’ requirements.
Creativity applied to the methodology during the execution of every project will only serve to elongate the overall cycle time. The use of a standardized methodology will therefore address the business objectives of repeatability and speed to market.
The biggest challenge comes while communicating the interdependencies of the work. It can be a very complex effort to get a product out the door! I believe that if all team members truly understand how much other team members are dependent upon them, then they will be more likely to turn in quality deliverables on time.
Conclusion
Marketing project management can be extremely challenging, especially for new managers. However, with time and training, you can overcome these barriers and succeed in marketing project management.
One of the best ways to familiarize yourself with the best project management techniques and practices is training under an experienced project manager.
Project Vanguard provides high-quality project management online courses to help understand the building blocks of project management. It’s difficult to fill a marketing project manager’s role, but with the right guidance and training, you can boost your management skills and apply project management techniques to expand your business.