It seems like everyone’s a project manager these days – well, not exactly – a more appropriate sentence would be: it seems like everyone is trying to manage a project these days.
Trust me – there’s a huge difference between the two sentences.
According to a recent Wrike survey of more than 1,400 US workers revealed that 94% of current workers manage projects on a regular basis.
However, only around 47% of them have “project manager” in their job tittle.
Marketers as Project Managers
Apparently, you don’t have to be a certified Project Manager in order to start, supervise and deliver a project. You just need to be familiar with the basic fundamentals of project management, and you can be a successful manager.
Except if you’re a marketer that is.
That seems to be the general consensus at least. As Cheryl Conner writes in this Forbes article, marketers aren’t traditionally good project managers – after all – they are people who produce their best ideas either by themselves or in small collaborative teams.
The problem is – modern marketers cannot afford to ignore project management.
The Need for Project Management
So why marketers need to have project management skills? Well, according to a 2014 study published in the Project Management Journal, the use of project management to undertake core business activities – including marketing – has a huge impact on productivity.
As a matter of fact, the study revealed that roughly 15% business leader who used project management report a significant increase in productivity, compared to those who didn’t use it.
And today, with so much information back-and-fort between different departments and teams, any good manager needs a couple of project management tools to keep everything organized and ensure that everything gets done on time and on budget.
That’s not a good enough reason for you? Ok, here we have four simple reasons why you should consider integrating your marketing tools with PM software.
Four Reasons Why Marketers Need PM Tools
More overview and control
For starters, as a marketer, what’s you biggest problem? Well if you’re anything like the rest of marketers in this country, lack of clear insight and overview is the answer to that question. At least according to a 2015 Devroe & Partners survey. So why so many of your colleagues feel like they don’t have insight into their campaigns? The answer is actually surprisingly simple…
It’s mostly because they have data spread over dozens of Word files, emails and servers. But don’t worry, a project management tool will help you bring all of that data together, and organize into a single database. This will give your insight in basically every little aspect of your campaign, a good level of control over the project and allow you to remain on top of everything.
Better communication
At first, a lack of communication is just frustrating for the members of your team. However, after a while these communication issues also start dragging executives down. According to a recent Interact/Harris Poll, more than 91% of employees feel like lack of clear communication between them and the higher-ups is what prevents effective leadership.
If your team members are always wondering who is responsible for what, when the next deadline is or who is going to tackle what – you can easily answer all of that with just a couple of clicks. If the answer for every question your employees have is in the database, you’ll be able to prevent a ton of communication problems before they even become major issues.
More effective meetings
Marketing meetings are important to a huge number of today’s marketers. In fact, according to Content Marketing Institute research, around 32% of marketers meet on a weekly basis and 16% on a daily basis to discuss their marketing plans. However, these meetings are almost always inefficient and at times, they tend to drag on.
And why is that? Simply put, because there is no clear agenda for the meeting. So the employees who aren’t totally prepared quickly loose interest. This certainly won’t happen so often with a project management tool. They create the agenda, post it in the system and send everyone their personal tasks right after the meeting.
Accurately measuring KPIs
Marketers always have specific targets. Logically, they need an effective system that can both set and measure these targets. Just think about it – what exactly is the point of Key Performance Indicators or measuring points if there’s no one that can actually measure them. If you don’t know whether your efforts are effective or not, you won’t be able to tweak them and make them more effective.
But with proper project collaboration software like Active Collab, you’ll be able to create instant marketing reports, which will show you whether your marketing efforts successfully translate into sales or not. You’ll be able to stop ineffective ads or fruitless products in their tracks before they hurt your campaign and force you to rethink your marketing strategy completely.
Final Thoughts
As you can clearly see, every marketing manager and team needs the help of a reliable PM tool in order to successfully plan, manage and execute their campaign. For instance, certain marketing campaign last for months, and integrating PM tools with your marketing platform will allow you to take on these gargantuan projects.
Also, just look at any website related project that requires project-level coordination between the marketing department and the web-development team. With the use of a project management tool, both teams will be able to stay on the same page throughout the length of the project.
Lastly, working across multiple teams with these tools will not only help your marketing efforts, but communications across your entire organization as well. And while it will take some time and commitment to change the way your team works, but in the end, you’ll have a great, streamlined team where people work both hard and methodically.
