Marketing managers would ideally prefer to focus mainly on creating amazing campaigns rather than day to day management aspects. But in the real world, the situation is quite different. Marketing projects can take up different forms, from simple blog posts to global product releases, and marketing managers have to handle it all. They even need to gather sound knowledge of marketing software technologies tools to make their efforts pay-off.
In this article, we have listed down 10 tips that can help you produce great marketing outcomes without getting bogged down with core management activities.
1. Marketing Work and Performance
Marketing is all about numbers now. Hence it becomes really important to link marketing work with marketing performances, whenever possible. Revenue and brand awareness are direct results of multiple brand interactions. Sometimes the result of a marketing campaign is pretty clear whereas most of the time it is not. You should be able to improve your marketing campaigns when you can calculate the leads and revenue that your strategy generates.
2. Store all digital assets in a central location
Many marketing teams operate on multiple shared drives, Dropbox and Google Drive accounts when they really should be looking for a digital asset management system to store all marketing assets. These systems are also known as DAM software and can help teams work faster by quickly finding the files they need. Better systems can even tag images automatically, convert images and videos files into different formats, manage different versions and more.
“Marketing professionals in some of the world’s largest companies are increasingly looking to centralize all digital assets in a single platform to avoid content duplication - an integrated marketing operations software can offer additional features such as brand and creative project management” says Tessa Court, CEO of Digital Asset Management and Marketing Operations software company IntelligenceBank.
3. Marketing Relationship Management
While executing a marketing project, a manager needs to deal with a broad array of outside stakeholders who do not belong to the marketing department. This would include customers, agencies, analyst and even social media influencers. These relationships start to form the most important aspect for any marketing department, and it is important they are managed properly. It is important to keep a continuous rapport with them so that the relationship keeps intact. Marketing projects are all about keeping track of good people and their progress.
4. Keeping Stakeholders Informed
It is important for marketing departments throughout the company to communicate with marketers. This would help them to publish some effective marketing results and in turn, would give you a better outlook about the overall returns in terms of leads and profits to the company.
5. Agile Marketing
This is a new marketing management approach which would help you to break down big projects to small incremental optimization. When applied correctly, this would lead to an increase in marketing output, decrease in project delays and ensure an overall and continuous improvement. Some of the ideal candidates of agile marketing would include ongoing marketing campaigns like content marketing and so on.
6. Global Idea Backlog
Innovation is the key to great marketing skills. You can have some creative ideas come to you anytime, but executing them might not be possible always. However, it is great to keep some global backlogs of marketing ideas. This would help to keep a track and you would never run out of ideas.
7. Cross-Functional hand-offs
Marketing projects consists of contributions of individuals from varied skill sets. If any of the iterations are running late then the whole project can get delayed or even fall flat. Thus as a marketing project manager, it becomes important to look after each hand-off to gain control and process the marketing project properly.
8. Reusable project templates
It would be very important for you to keep a library of reusable project templates. You would see that many marketing projects come with similar themes, so rather than reinventing the same thing over and over again, keeping the old project templates would save your time. A project template basically consists of a standard schedule, task list, hand-offs along with deliverable outlines.
9. High Volume process
To monitor high volume process, it is important to define process stages. From content creation and other creative services, all of them scale to marketing process workflows as the department grows. When you manage by stages, it would allow you to balance workloads, identify bottlenecks and develop some performance benchmarks like productivity.
10. Marketing service project
You should automate marketing service project request. Marketing service functions basically focuses on specialized skills along with the production process in order to increase the efficiency of marketing. To integrate work, it is important that you integrate the system that tracks it. This would give you an enterprise-class marketing project management software. You can go on to create a request form and capture the information of the project at the source.
If you do not have time to learn the wide variety of marketing management skills, then keep in mind these ten effective tips. They all would help you to grow to a successful marketing project manager.