How to Manage Marketing Projects

Jane collapses into her black leather office chair. Piles of papers outlining various marketing projects smother her desk. She can’t decide where to start.

Marketing Director: This is supposed to be Jane’s dream job but it feels more like a night terror – And she can’t wake up. The marketing she can handle, but the project management saps her energy.

Have you ever felt like Jane? How do you complete your marketing projects without getting lost in the management? How do you keep yourself from being overloaded?

Improve your project management skills and do your best work. Here’s a five-step process to manage your marketing projects.

Marketing Project Management

A common project management process involves five phases:

1. Initiate
2. Plan
3. Execute
4. Monitor
5. Close

Like Jane, you may have a desk covered in marketing ideas. But how do you know which one to start first? And how do you follow through to completion?

Initiate the Marketing Project

Consider each of your marketing goals as its own project. Prioritize your goals based on the impact of your business. Then rank it on the difficulty to complete. Start with projects that will have a high impact with the least difficulty.

Some suggest starting with the hardest project, but that’s probably not going to help you when you’re feeling overwhelmed. Build some momentum with an easier project.

Plan the Marketing Project

Now is the time to create a schedule. Identify what parts of the project can be completed simultaneously and map out clear project milestones. Assign time estimates and set deadlines on a single calendar. At Open Lock Marketing, we use Atlassian Confluence to create Project Briefs. Since we do it so often, we built a customized template with pre-populated fields.

Think about the resources available to you. This includes your staff, tools, and budgeted funds. Assign the resources you’ll need for the project.

Execute the Marketing Project

Communication is essential. Use a project management tool that allows you to share and review communication. These platforms can also store comments, notes, and project updates. We integrated our Confluence instance to Trello – making it easy for the team to collaborate seamlessly. Project Briefs are created in Confluence and mapped to Trello cards containing tasks, due dates, and responsible owners.

Assign milestones to your team. If you need to break it down further, assign specific tasks. Don’t forget the deadlines and send notifications when due dates are approaching.

Monitor the Marketing Project

Decide how often you need updates on the project. Short-term or highly critical projects may require daily meetings. Long-term or less critical projects may not need your team to meet that often.

Keep track of how much work is left. Each milestone may contain a different percentage of actual work involved. Tracking the hours remaining can deliver more insight than the number of milestones.

Close the Marketing Project

Once your project tasks and milestones are all complete, don’t sit on it. Ship it. Post it. Publish it. Implement it however it’s intended. Let the project do what it’s supposed to do.

After you finish a project, review it with your team. Ask yourselves: What went right? What went wrong? What needs improvement?

Manage Your Marketing Projects

It’s not hard to feel like Jane. It can be a struggle to know where to start and how to finish but you don’t have to be baffled any longer. If you take charge of your projects with these steps, you can achieve success in your dream marketing job.

Contact Open Lock Marketing for help with your marketing projects. Let us help you build your brand. You’ll never have to wonder where to start again. Talk to us today.