Marketing is a complex field. A marketing campaign might include many different types of marketing strategies, including SEO, digital marketing, social media, content creation, email marketing, event planning, public relations, and advertising. As a marketer, you are responsible for effectively managing all of these projects from concept to completion.
But with so much on your plate at once, it’s far too easy to miss an important deadline or let something fall through the cracks. One of the keys to your success as a marketer is using the right marketing project management software . How can marketing project management software help? What steps will you need to take to get started? Here’s what you should know:
What is Marketing Project Management?
Marketing project management is the process of planning, organizing, and managing a team’s efforts to reach certain goals and complete specific projects.
Every project consists of a number of different tasks. For example, creating content for a client’s website is a project that may involve researching keywords, brainstorming topics, creating an editorial calendar, writing and editing content, optimizing the content for SEO, and finally, publishing it.
This content creation project is not complete until each of these tasks is finished. A marketing project manager’s job would be to plan, organize, and manage each of these tasks to ensure they are completed correctly and in a timely manner.
What Are the Benefits of Using Marketing Project Management Software?
Marketing teams can use marketing project management software to assist with the planning and coordination of different marketing efforts. There are a number of benefits to using this software instead of manually managing marketing efforts, including:
- Provides an overview of each project’s status. You won’t need to reach out to team members to ask for a status update on a specific project. Instead, you can simply log into the project management software to quickly check the status of every task.
- Keeps projects organized. It’s much easier to keep track of tasks with project management software, so you won’t have to worry about forgetting a task or missing an important deadline.
- Automates tasks. This software can automate certain tasks to eliminate the manual work that is required to move tasks forward toward completion. Automating these tasks can reduce errors, speed up the time it takes to complete each project, and allow your team to focus on other more important tasks.
- Makes communicating with team members easier. All communication regarding a specific project can take place within the project management tool. This way, everyone who is working on the project will be able to communicate with one another and access the same information.
- Allows for the planning and scheduling of resources. You can use this tool to plan and schedule tasks in advance, which makes it easier to prioritize projects, allocate necessary resources, and ensure no one on your team is overloaded with work.
- Improves productivity. This software makes planning, organizing, and managing marketing efforts much easier, which can lead to an increase in your team’s overall productivity.
How to Start Using Marketing Project Management Software
Every marketing team can benefit from the use of marketing project management software. But before you get started, there are certain steps you should take to make the most out of your marketing project management software. Here’s what to do:
- Establish Your Goals
- Define the Resources Needed to Reach Your Goals
- Break Down the Project into Tasks
- Set Deadlines
- Assign Tasks
- Measure Results
Establish Your Goals
It’s important to set goals before diving into any type of project. Talk to your client to learn more about what they hope to achieve. This way, you can ensure that the goals you establish will meet your client’s needs.
The goals you set should be specific and measurable. Some examples of goals for marketing projects include:
- Attract X number of visitors to your website by X date
- Increase monthly traffic to your website by X percent
- Rank in one of the top three spots within Google search results for a specific keyword
- Convert X percent of users who land on your website per month
- Generate X new leads per month
- Secure X new backlinks to your website per month
- Increase the average time spent on your website per session by X percent
Setting goals is important so you know how to determine if your efforts were successful.
Define the Resources Needed to Reach Your Goals
After establishing your goals, it’s important to determine what resources you will need to achieve them. Here are some of the questions you need to answer to define the resources you need:
- What is your budget for the project? Is it possible to achieve your goals with this budget? How will you keep track of your expenses to ensure you are not exceeding the budget?
- What tools/software can you use to assist with this project?
- Which team members will you need to work on this project? How quickly will they be able to complete their portion of the project? Have you communicated the goals, objectives, and details of the project to them?
- Do you need to hire a freelancer or can your team handle this project without extra help?
Break Down the Project Into Tasks
The next step is breaking down the project into smaller tasks to make it more manageable.
For example, say the project involves performing an SEO audit of your client’s website to identify issues that could be affecting their ranking. The tasks involved in this project might include:
- Researching SEO audit tools to find the right one for this project
- Using the SEO audit tool to conduct the audit
- Reviewing the results of the audit
- Prioritizing issues that need to be addressed
- Assigning tasks to team members so they can make the necessary changes
- Tracking the status of these tasks
- Verifying that the tasks are done correctly
- Measuring the impact of the changes on the client’s ranking
Breaking the project down like this allows you to see exactly what needs to be done to reach your goals.
Set Deadlines
Now, it’s time to set deadlines. Start by setting a deadline for the entire project. When does your client expect the project to be done? Is this a realistic deadline? If not, you may need to discuss pushing the date back with the client to ensure your team has enough time to get everything done.
Then, set due dates for each of the tasks involved in the project. This way, your team will not wait until the last minute to work on this project. Instead, they will have to complete each task by a certain date. This ensures that the team will stay on schedule and complete the entire project by the deadline.
Make sure each due date is realistic, which means you are giving your team enough time to provide high-quality work.
Assign Tasks
Now you are ready to use your marketing project management software to assign tasks to your team members.
Project management software is designed to automate workflows, which means it will keep the project moving forward toward completion as tasks are completed.
For example, if you are creating content, the software will automatically send the task to the assigned editor once the assigned writer has completed their task. This way, the writer will not need to remember to manually send the task to the editor.
Make sure you provide detailed instructions on each task you assign to your team members. Encourage your team members to communicate with you within the project management tool if they need additional information to complete their portion of the project.
Once the tasks are assigned, monitor their progress to ensure they are completed on schedule.
Measure Results
The final step is measuring the results of your completed project. For instance, if you published content on your client’s website, see how well the content is ranking for specific keywords. Is it driving traffic to your client’s website? What position is it ranking within the search results?
If you performed a technical audit, track your client’s SEO results to measure how the changes you made are affecting their site’s ranking. If done correctly, fixing the issues found in an audit should increase the site’s ranking.
Use the marketing project management software to pull reports to share with your client. This way, they can see how your hard work has paid off.
What is the Best Marketing Project Management Software?
Your search for the best marketing project management software is over. Gryffin was built by marketers, so it is designed with all of the features your marketing team needs to effectively manage projects.
Say goodbye to the days of using multiple spreadsheets or programs to manage your projects. You can use Gryffin to plan, organize, and manage every aspect of your marketing efforts, including:
- Creating editorial calendars
- Importing data from Google Analytics and Google Search Console
- Assigning tasks to team members
- Keeping track of the status of projects
- Measuring the results of your SEO efforts
- Time tracking
- Sending, receiving, and paying invoices
- Communicating with team members and clients
Gryffin can provide the structure that your team needs to increase productivity and grow your business. Learn more about how this tool can help by starting your free trial today.