How do you manage your marketing projects?
The way you manage your projects will determine its success or failure.
It’s true, projects do fail, according to IBM, about 40% of projects at IBM meet the company’s 3 key goals (schedule, budget, and quality). What does that tell you? What’s happened to the remaining 60%—they failed for one reason or the other.
However, one reason why many marketing projects fail is most likely because most marketing managers don’t use the right project management software. A whopping 44%of project managers don’t use this software, even though PwC concluded that using project management tool increases overall performance.
In the rest of this article, you’ll learn how using project management software will save you 20 hours every month, viable time which you can invest into income generating ventures or activities.
Organize a brainstorming meeting with your team
Having your team members involved in the planning of a project can be a game changer for your new project. Your team members would gladly take on more responsibilities when you bring them onboard to brainstorm with you.
Ensure you do the following during the brainstorming period:
- Be time-conscious: Set the overall time for the brainstorming session. For example, you want to spend 1 hour? Then set the time to 1 hour and keep to it. You can also time each member including yourself if you want everyone to operate within the time limit.
- Take some break: Taking some break will allow your team members to relax their muscles. Even a 5-minute break is ideal.
- Make the brainstorming session short: It shouldn’t go for more than 3 hours.
Next, set your project goal. The goal should be clear enough and in a simple sentence—preferablyin one sentence. This will give every member the picture of what is to be accomplished.
During the session, ensure you make materials available that will encourage idea generation such as whiteboards and sticky notes. This should make each session productive.
Categorize and prioritize your list
Look into all the ideas that have been generated and categorize them based on the project phase.
Remove invaluable ideas and keep the process as simple as possible.
Now you have your ideas and tasks on paper—it’s time to complete our goal.
Implement timeline for the project
Setting a timeline for the project is also a very important part of the planning process.
Once that’s done, use that projection to work backward and figure out how long you’ll require completing the project.
Next, ask yourself, “what do we expect to be accomplished at the end of this project?” this will help you create a perfect timeline with specifics that work with your goal.
Define what “done” means for every task
While you have a general goal for your project, it’s important that you set goals for every task as well.
Most likely, every team member will have their definition of “done” and the definition might not match what you have in mind.
So, save them the stress and clearly define what done means for each task—It’s so vital.
Who does what?
Who is responsible for “that” particular task? It must be well-spelt out.You need to assign each task or tasks to each member. Let everyone know their responsibility and the timeline. Be very clear and specific.
Choose a project management software for your team
This is where everything culminates. The right marketing project management software for your team should allow flexible collaboration—it must be simple to use and very reliable.
1). CoSchedule
CoSchedule helps you do everything from organizing your content to collaboration to publishing on social media and your blogs.
A great tool you should try. Its functions are quite similar to that of Ignitur—a project management tool for web marketers—though, it doesn’t have the editorial calendar feature, but great for managing tasks.
2). Trello
Trello allows you to visualize a project task with its cardboard-like dashboard. Use Trello to quickly manage everyday tasks with your team members.
With Trello, you can create and manage tasks easily, comment on and get comments on cards, and organize lists by dates or priority.
3). Asana
Asana takes you a bit further. This software combines project management features with file storage and collaboration to help you manage your projects more efficiently, without the hassle of emailing your teammates continually.
Create a task template in your chosen PMS
Have you made a choice yet, on the right project management software for your? If yes, then it’s time to use it.
Create a template in any of the project management tool you’ve chosen and key in all the data you’ve organized in your previous steps:
- Create a task
- Assign it to your users.
Test, Revise, Repeat
In order to save 20 hours per month with marketing software, you need to test the process and ensure everything is working as you’ve planned.
Look into your initial plan, look into your sketch, and ensure everything works fine to get you to the goal as quick as possible without problems. You should be able to make changes as you progress.
In most of the software, there’s a progress bar to show how much progress you and your team members have made so far.
This should help in the communication flow, help you save enough time for other worthwhile marketing activities.
Conclusion
In all, there’s really no hiding from complicated projects. Sometimes, despite all your efforts to simplify the tasks into actionable bits, you might still end up wasting your time. Why?
Because the nature of a project differs from one project to the other—however, staying organized is the key.
And for that to happen, you need project management software that will give you total control of your projects. The right software can help you stay organized, collaborate seamlesslywith team members, and get things done quicker with more efficiency.