Marketing Project Management: An Essential Guide

Marketing project management refers to the process of planning, leading, and monitoring the execution of marketing projects to make sure they’re delivered on time and within budget. At least, that’s the gist of it.

The full answer is detailed below in all its lengthy glory and answers some of the key questions of marketing project management:

• What are the responsibilities of a marketing project manager?
• Why is using project management in marketing so important?
• How do you structure and pull off a successful marketing campaign?

Reading ‘till the end will also reward you with some pro tips on how to improve your marketing workflow.

How Important is Project Management for Marketing Projects?

Um… integral.

The American Marketing Association (AMA) says that “Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”

If you think this definition is a bit broad and vague, you’re correct. Marketing is a broad term that encompasses many different marketing types, such as:

• Outbound marketing,
• Inbound marketing,
• Content marketing,
• Social media marketing,
• Affiliate marketing,
• Email marketing,
• Offline marketing, and the list goes on.

All of these marketing types have the goal of spreading the word about an event, product, or service to the wider public and establishing it as a desirable commodity and/or experience. 

However, each marketing endeavour is a unique project in its own right that requires efficiency and precision, which, in turn, requires a solid marketing project management system.

But, marketers are mostly creative people, and creatives are rarely known for their discipline and stellar organizational skills. I should know. I’m one of them.

This is why I’m endlessly grateful to have marketing project management software that helps me keep track of my tasks and deadlines, and a management chain that takes care of the budgeting, scheduling, data gathering, and all that jazz, so that I can stare at an empty page for hours and think of words to write without being bogged down by technicalities. 

It’s brilliant. It’s liberating. It allows me to do my job well.

Marketing Project Manager Job Description

Simply put, marketing project managers are just project managers who work in the marketing industry. This means that, in essence, their jobs don’t differ too much from those of IT or construction project managers.

Marketing project managers are responsible for:

• Defining marketing project goals and objectives,
• Planning the budget, schedule, and tasks needed to complete a marketing project,
• Assigning tasks to project team members,
• Setting milestones and due dates,
• Monitoring and overseeing the progress of marketing projects,
• Managing relationships with stakeholders,
• Creating and leading a marketing campaign,
• Monitoring risks and adjusting the project if it threatens to spin out of control,
• Conducting meetings, and
• Closing the project once it has been completed.

Sort of like conductors in an orchestra, marketing project managers direct and manage cross-functional teams and make sure that their compounded efforts all work toward successfully delivering the final product.

Essential Skills for Marketing Project Managers

Seeing as they have their work cut out for them, marketing project managers need a veritable arsenal of skills in their toolbox.

Here, we’ll discuss some of the crucial skills for marketing project managers.

Planning and Resource Management Skills

As Benjamin Franklin once said, “By failing to prepare, you’re preparing to fail”. 

Project management requires a clear vision of the project goals and the exact path needed to reach them. Achieving this requires: 

• Clearly defined project scope, 
• Responsibly distributed and managed budget, 
• Detailed schedule,
• Correctly allocated tasks, and
• A comprehensive list of assumptions and risks that might affect the project.

Without the skills to put all this together, marketing project managers have slim chances of success.

Leadership Skills

By leadership, I do mean the ability to lead and direct projects and understand who should be doing what, when, and why. But, even more importantly, I mean the ability to lead people. 

In the words of Susanne Madsen, a project management coach and author of the book The Power of Project Leadership, “Team leaders need to have a high level of social sensitivity and emotional intelligence [since they need to] moderate the team’s discussions in such a way that the members feel that it’s ok and safe to come forward and share what’s on their mind - be it concerns or new ideas.” 

Encouraging this kind of open communication and trust within a team is especially rewarding in marketing project management, where fresh ideas and creative thinking are — often quite literally — worth their weight in gold.

Communication Skills

Leadership and communication skills are two sides of the same coin. One rarely goes without the other. But, effective communication skills do far more than boost one’s leadership prowess.

Good communication skills allow project managers to: 

• Effectively instruct their team, without falling victim to misunderstandings,
• Expertly negotiate with clients, stakeholders, and upper management and avoid conflict,
• Present unambiguous and easy-to-digest reports to stakeholders to keep them informed,
• Extract detailed product requirements from stakeholders, and
• Resolve conflicts.

However, there’s one benefit of effective communication skills that’s unique to marketing project management — integrated marketing communication (IMC).

According to the American Marketing Association, IMC is “a planning process designed to assure that all brand contacts received by a customer or prospect for a product, service, or organization are relevant to that person and consistent over time.”

In other words, IMC is the visual and written communication presented to consumers in the form of advertisements, promotion, and audience engagement that spreads awareness about a certain brand, product, or service. And, while it’s not the job of the marketing project manager to think of an integrated marketing communication strategy, it’s important that they have a certain level of awareness and understanding of it in order to do their jobs well. 

Technical Skills

Technical skills refer to a project manager’s working knowledge of the industry they work in — in our case, this would be marketing.

The reason why technical skills are so important should be evident if you’ve had a manager who had never worked in your field before.

A marketing manager unaware of the technical jargon used in marketing will be hard-pressed to establish effective communication within their team and have realistic expectations of what they can accomplish in the time and budget they’ve been given.

Implementation Skills

For lack of a better word, I use the term “implementation skills” to refer to the skills a project manager needs to put their plan into practice. This includes knowing how to operate suitable software such as Plaky, Google Docs, Jira, SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, Google Drive, etc., and intimate familiarity with the methodologies used to structure the work. 

The project management methodologies commonly used in marketing are:

Agile — a methodology that puts emphasis on flexibility, iterative work, and continuous improvement. Agile focuses on always providing value to the customer, which means that very little time is spent on planning and writing documentation, and is instead spent creating the deliverable, asking for customer feedback, and improving the deliverable based on that feedback with every consequent iteration. The most popular Agile frameworks used in marketing are Scrum and Kanban.

Waterfall — a rigid methodology that structures work in the form of meticulously planned-out stages. In Waterfall, the stages must be performed in order, and one stage must be completed before the next stage can begin. Backtracking is either extremely difficult or altogether impossible as it requires undoing much of the work that has already been concluded and drastically impacts the project timeline.

Hybrid — a combination of Predictive and Adaptive methodologies. This means that Hybrid can be whatever you want it to be and whatever suits your organization. The downside is that creating a suitable hybrid for your specific needs takes much trial and error, which, in turn, takes time — a luxury for most project managers.

Managing a Marketing Project: A Step-by-step Process

With all your essential marketing project management skills in place, you’re ready to manage marketing projects. 

But, how do you do it and where should you begin? The following section will answer these very questions by going over the 5 necessary phases to help you successfully bring your marketing project to a close:

• Initiation,
• Planning,
• Execution,
• Monitoring and control, and
• Closing and review.

Initiation

The initiation phase is where the marketing project manager makes an effort to understand the project that will follow. This includes:

Determining why there’s a need for a marketing project in the first place — what the marketing campaign is meant to accomplish and why,

Setting project goals and objectives that align with the organization’s strategic marketing plan, and

Creating a project charter and defining the scope of the project.

Some project managers highlight the importance of starting your project with a discovery phase. 

While some view the discovery phase as a separate phase of the project management process, I would argue that it’s simply an important part of the initiation phase.

In the discovery phase, the project manager analyzes the following:

• Competition,
• Target audience,
• Customer journey,
• The product or service they’re marketing,
• External project environment,
• Previous attempts at similar projects,
• Available resources, and
• Potential roadblocks.

The goal of the initiation phase is to get to know the project inside and out. After a thorough analysis, project managers can begin planning the marketing campaign.

Planning

The planning phase is where project managers lay the groundwork for the development process. This is the time to:

• Create buyer personas to understand who your audience is,
• Craft a message you want to communicate,
• Develop a project plan,
• Create a content plan,
• Develop a creative brief,
• Determine project success metrics,
• Develop a project schedule and timeline,
• Break down the project into more manageable tasks,
• Prioritize tasks,
• Set deadlines and key milestones,
• Create project baselines,
• Delegate tasks, and
• Communicate your plan and vision to key stakeholders.

The planning stage can be more or less detailed depending on the methodology you’re using and the type of marketing project you’re working on. However, it should be detailed enough to guide you through the execution phase without the need to backtrack and pause the project to fill in the blanks.

Execution

In the execution phase, the project team works on realizing the marketing plan. In other words, this is where all the planned marketing content is created, reviewed, and turned in or distributed for feedback.

Depending on the project management methodology you’re using and the type of project you’re working on, this may also be where the marketing content is officially launched.

Monitoring and control

In the monitoring and control phase, the marketing project manager tracks the results of the campaign by tracking the project KPIs over time and regularly reporting them in project status reports. 

In case of major marketing blunders, this is also where amendments are made (where such a thing is possible), or apologies for offensive marketing are made when necessary to attempt to control the damage.

Closing and Review

The closing and review stage marks the end of a marketing campaign. This is where the final details of the project are sorted out and all loose ends tied up.

This is also a good time to reflect on the performance of the campaign and the performance of the project team, analyze what went well and what went badly, and mark the successes and blunders for future reference.  

Marketing Project Management Example: Social Media

Having gone over the main phases of the management process, it’s time to see how that would look in practice. So, here’s a simple example of a social media marketing campaign.

Initiation — This is the part where you set your SMART goals. Next, you need to research where exactly your customers hang out on social media, what influencers they follow, what your competitors are doing and how the customers are responding to it, whether a similar campaign was done in the past, and lessons you can draw from it. Pay close attention to the time of year, upcoming holidays, economic situation, and other external factors that may influence or thwart your campaign.

Planning — This is where you should create a strategy for the specific type of social media you wish to use for your campaign, create your customer profile, determine your KPIs, your schedule and timeline, and assign all the tasks to your team.

Execution — This is the part where you actually create a social media content calendar — create the images, videos, and captions you’ll be using during the campaign, schedule when you will post them, and how you’ll divide the content across different social media platforms, and finally, launch the campaign.

Monitoring and control — The monitoring phase is where you track your KPIs, engage with your audience by making sure you reply to comments, and acknowledge any reposts from your customers. 

Closing and review — Finally, when the campaign comes to an end, you can gather your team and go over the results with a critical eye. Reflect on your successes and failures, determine whether you’ve managed to hit your goals or not, and make sure you reward yourself and your team for a job well done.

4 Marketing Project Management Tips

By now, you should have an idea of what your marketing project should look like and how you can successfully lead it to completion. But, here are 4 additional tips that might make it easier to get there. 

Tip #1: Consider Using a Standardized Methodology

The most optimal project management approach may differ depending on the type of marketing project you’re leading. But, considering how difficult it is to switch from one methodology to another from project to project, it’s best to find one method that works reasonably well and stick to it.

You might consider choosing a hybrid approach, or any of the popular Agile frameworks, as they are usually more conducive to creativity and require less upfront planning.

Hybrid and Agile approaches allow you to gather customer feedback throughout the project and adjust your strategy accordingly — something which is much less feasible in Waterfall.

Tip #2: Use templates whenever possible

The goal in marketing project management should always be to improve technical efficiency, thus saving time and leaving more room for creativity. 

This is best done by standardizing processes — transforming them into something mechanical that doesn’t require too much thinking, just “manual labor”. Like how you can, for example, ride a bike now and get lost in thought, while, when you were learning to ride, it took so much effort to just keep your balance.

Using a standardized methodology is one way to do this. Using project management templates is another. Templates drastically cut down on time needed to prepare the project and write documentation, but they also help you and everyone else easily find the information they need, since they always have a uniform layout. 

Here’s one example of a template in the Plaky project management software.

What I love about this and other Plaky templates is that they help you kickstart your project, sparing you the trouble of staring at an empty page and not knowing where to begin. But, their extreme customizability also gives you the flexibility to change the template in any way you like to fit your workflow. Afterward, you can save your version and use it in future projects.

Tip #3: Include Your Team in Project Planning

As a project manager, it is important that you set realistic goals and deadlines, and responsibly allocate the budget. 

However, you’re not the one who will have to perform the work within those constraints — it’s your team — therefore, it’s important to consult with your project team when planning a project. They are the ones who will have a better idea about the feasibility of a task and the time and effort needed to complete it.

Tip #4: Embrace New Technologies

Project management is difficult as is — there’s no need to make it more complicated with Excel spreadsheets and convoluted email strings. Nowadays, there are a plethora of project management tools to choose from that make managing marketing projects easier — take advantage of them.

Wrapping Up

Project management in marketing is a unique sort of project management that requires teams and project leaders to understand the psychology behind every customer purchase and the visual and textual detail that accompanies every marketing campaign.

Unlike other project management branches, marketing project management puts emphasis on effective communication and creativity that will spread the word about the product or service being advertised, attract new customers, and retain old ones by employing the skills and processes listed above.