What is Marketing Project Management in Business?

It is an open thing that project management is a great operating tool in many industries like IT, logistics, architecture and, undoubtedly, marketing. The last one is going to be our today’s point of issue.

In this article, we will try to develop what project management practices are typically used by marketing experts and how it can be expediently in different business processes. Today we have so many questions, and we will definitely answer them all.

Why does a marketer need to practice project management?

Let’s start with the discussion about how a typical marketing work looks. It usually presents a very busy activity where specialists develop a winning strategy to promote a specific product, prepare advertising materials at a quick pace, work on the image of the company at large, and constantly monitor the users’ reaction to each of the promotion elements.

And now try to imagine how it could be great to implement some useful project management techniques into the work of any marketing team. Indeed, working on an advertising campaign or preparing a product for an exhibition is a kind of project work. Marketing project management disciplines and puts in order all different business processes and make the entire workflow more balanced and harmonious.

Marketing specialists are able to have the following advantages using project management tools:

• simple work planning of even the most complex projects with the help of various project calendar templates, checklists for breaking one complex task into several low-grade ones and marketing roadmaps using
• a more consistent approach to the tasks allocation and a proper expenditure of efforts and resources, both human and financial
• a tuned project development that is easy to be monitored timely by means of time tracking systems or time-sensitive notifications in case of some urgent undone things

Every self-respecting marketing expert should learn at least some basic project management technique. It would be better if he starts using some ready-made project management patterns like Agile methodologies, includes Scrum, Lean, Kanban or other popular systems that help to bring the whole workflow to its comfortable uniformity.

Main stages in marketing project management

Well, we have already mentioned the advantages of using project management in marketing. Now it’s critical to talk about which steps the work on any marketing project implies.

It should be noted that everything is always variable in case of each particular project and its real needs. Anyway, we will try to reflect the most common situations when marketing purposes can be reached with the help of project management practices.

Step 1. Project planning

Using the word ‘project’ we mean any typical big task for the marketing team, but actually it is a project. And the planning of the project is one of the most essential parts of the entire project development. For example, your marketing team has to make up the most profitable development strategy for a certain product. The task is clear, and now it is time to develop a quality working plan, that includes:

• A proper goal-setting: you should determine what your future marketing strategy will cause, whether it is a good brand recognition just for hype or a real financial success in the form of its increased demand.
• A primary market research in order to find some competitor’s offers and compare the advantages of their products to the advantages of your project’s product. You should try to understand how your product is better than others and to feel your further tactic more accurately.
• A primary (sprint-stylish) project scheduling, that means the determining approximate and realistic terms for each of the major tasks.

Step 2. Project development and tracking the execution of the tasks

This work stage is considered to be the most longstanding process when all the specialists are involved in their tasks as actively as it is possible. It would seem that everything is already defined and all you need is to wait for the finished result – but everything is not so easy. Project management implies a continuous monitoring of the execution of all tasks with timely feedback and error analysis by means of the different practices, as follows:

• The marketing roadmap creating: all the global tasks are divided into several simpler activities, and the whole execution process becomes more clear. For example, in Hygger it may look like the list of tasks with vivid horizontal scales of each task’s terms like that:

• Traditional everyday live meetings, where all team members talk about their current tasks, what kind of challenges they have and how they deal with them. Such practice is very useful – it helps the team and the marketing manager (acting as a project manager) understand what is the real stage of the work now and how can it be accelerated if it necessary. Besides, if it is a certain remote team with different location of its every member, there is a great alternative – to hold online meetings with video conferences and whiteboarding functions.

Step 3. Product launch and project completion (or not?)

It does not matter how many business difficulties each project may have, sooner or later the entire project work ends, and then the released product starts to live its own independent life. Or not? Well, it is crucial to remember that after the main project work’s scope it is also necessary taking care of the project, watching how everything works and analyzing the whole strategy as successful. During the project work, each of marketing team specialists begins to feel not only professional but psychological responsibility for the project’s fate. Therefore, it is a good tone to make a recurrent review of your any finished projects.

Conclusion

To sum up, all the above written, it is better to compare the role of project management in marketing with the following poetic picture: a marketing project is like the idea of a new song. You feel just a certain air of this future song but you still don’t have its ripeness. So the practices of project management are like a printed music with necessary notes and signs, and your song will become a real and great composition.

We would be glad to know your opinion about this article and also your personal experience in the implementation of project management into the marketing projects’ work.