Successful marketing campaigns often have a lot of moving parts, and keeping track of all those tasks can be difficult — even for the most gifted project managers. Thankfully, project managers don’t have to go it alone anymore. There are numerous online project management software tools that can help organize teams, facilitate communication, and track results to improve workflows.
The trouble with online project management software is that it can be difficult to know what platform will serve you best. After all, marketing campaigns can take many different forms, and tend to vary greatly in size depending on the brand in question and its budget.
We’ve tried to clear things up a little by showing you what marketers need most for project planning, and identifying a few tools that can meet those needs. Use the following information to inform your decision about which project management tool to use for your work.
What Do Marketers Need Most in Online Project Management Software?
Marketing differs from other kinds of project-based work in that it often involves a wide variety of tasks. Furthermore, these tasks are almost always interdependent — you can’t very well place an ad buy before the copy for said ad is written, can you? Well, you could… but almost no sane marketing coordinator would ever do that. Still, that means you need to find a way to break the tasks for each campaign into different categories, and make sure each of your team members know where they fit in the mix.
Furthermore, your needs will differ depending on the nature of your marketing campaign. There are many different kinds of marketing campaign, each of which involves vastly different steps.
Email Marketing Campaigns
Email is a powerful marketing tool when you can convince people to sign up for your mailing list. As such, it is most effective towards an audience that already has a relationship with your brand. An email marketing campaign generally involves a strategy for compelling people to opt in and ultimately guiding them into your buying funnel. Once this has been established, email campaigns make use of content writers to craft the emails themselves so that they can be sent out on schedule. Tools that improve communication between team members allow email-based marketing campaigns to thrive, since they allow editors and content writers to collaborate with greater ease.
Social Media Campaigns
Social media campaigns are often done to raise awareness of a product or service among people who do not yet know it exists. They involve ads targeted at specific demographics, which are usually linked either to additional content on the brand’s website or directly to an online store. Analytics are especially important in social media campaigns, since engagement rates can drop significantly if a brand’s social media posts are not aimed at an optimal audience.
Content Marketing Campaigns
Many brands publish longer-form content on their own blogs as a way of maintaining their SEO practices and attracting more potential customers from search engines. Consistency is key when publishing blog content, so it’s critical for content-based marketing campaigns to use tools that help them publish at consistent intervals. Task tracking can be a major boon in this department.
Project management apps that include the following features can be extremely useful in helping you accomplish the above goals:
- Customizable task lists — since marketing tasks fall into so many different categories, it’s essential to make sure that your online project management tool allows you to make different kinds.
- Automatic tracking for recurring tasks — many marketing tasks (such as writing ad copy or press releases) will be performed over and over again during the course of a campaign. Look for a PM tool that can track these tasks, automatically if possible. After all, why waste time setting manual reminders when you don’t have to?
- Calendar filters — keeping all of your work on a calendar is an excellent idea, until the calendar becomes crowded. At that point, it becomes easy to miss important details in all the confusion, and action items can begin to fall through the cracks. Avoid those challenges with a project management app that comes with an advanced calendar filter system.
Our Favourite Project Management Software for Marketers: Gryffin
Gryffin wasn’t originally intended for use beyond the original digital marketing team that built it— it was just supposed to help them with tasks that other PM tools weren’t addressing. Having done that, the team behind the tool quickly realized that it could also be of use to other marketing companies facing similar challenges.
Gryffin gains an edge over platforms with Google integrations and giving admins a high level of customization when it comes to creating tasks. It also offers an easy-to-navigate interface that includes: automatic task tracking, Gantt charts, and even built-in invoicing tools (to name just a few).
When it comes down to it, you’ll have to choose your own project management tool based on what you think will be the best possible fit for your organization. Keep this info in mind, though — you’ll quickly see that come tools are a better fit for marketers than others.