Marketing! Pfft. How hard can it be? Pretty hard, actually. Marketers today have so much to juggle and so many different hats to wear, from data scientist to copywriter and everything in between. Whether you’re working on content creation, an event marketing plan, or product launches, no two days are the same – and there’s always a deadline on the horizon.
Variety, as they say, is the spice of marketing, but this comes with its own set of frustrations. With such a wide-ranging workload, it’s easy for things to fall between the cracks, especially when you’re using a convoluted system of emails, spreadsheets, Post-Its, and knowing glances to keep track of everything that needs to be done. Add in remote workers, contractors, and freelancers, and you have a recipe for disaster.
Enter project management software. Until now, marketing technology has been focused on tools that help you to engage prospects or customers, but what about tools that actually help you to deliver on that hectic workload? Even if you’re not a “project manager,” it’s likely that – as a marketer – you’re always managing projects. Campaigns, events – these are projects in the classic sense, and marketing excellence depends on coordinating and executing on them in a timely, efficient manner.
Borrowing principles from project management makes sense. According to Bain & Company, by 2027, “most work will be project-based,” and teams will “blend internal and external resources to provide the right skills as needed.”
That’s why today’s marketing teams need project management software in their marketing technology stack. Using the right tool to track your work can save you endless unhappy hours by keeping everyone on your team aligned, aware, and accountable, so you can ensure that the right work gets done in the right way.
But, with so many different things to deliver, it can be hard to find a platform that’s flexible enough to adapt to the diverse needs of most marketing teams.
We recently put together an ebook to address exactly this. Since marketing teams face particular types of challenges, we figured they should have a particular type of guide: one that’s attuned to the problems marketing teams face and the ways in which project management software can address them.
Download the ebook and learn the top 5 Reasons Your Marketing Team Needs Project Management Software!
One of the most revolutionary things project management software can do for your team is help you to streamline and manage that conglomeration of tools. If you find the right software – one that’s flexible enough to cover all of your bases – it can help you at every stage of your marketing process, reducing the need to turn to multiple different tools for every little thing you have to manage, from demand generation to content creation.
There are lots of benefits to this. By implementing one tool across lots of different projects or sub-teams, you can save time on specialized training (not to mention save enough money on individual software subscriptions to fill a swimming pool, Scrooge McDuck-style). In turn, this enables you to accelerate adoption, ease new client onboarding, and truly centralize your marketing project management.
But for this to work, your project management tool of choice needs to be versatile. So how do you know if a particular project management tool is right for your team? There are two big questions you should be asking.
How does your team like to work?
Think about the way you and your team prefer to work. Do you use task lists? Kanban boards? Gantt charts?
If you’re anything like us, you probably use a mixture of everything, depending on what you need to accomplish at any given time. For example, you might like to use a board for your content creation process, and task lists for your event management to-dos. That’s why you need to look for software with a high degree of flexibility. For marketing teams in particular, it’s essential that your project management tool is not only feature-rich, but can adapt to – and with – your processes, at any stage of your progress.
How will it integrate with everything else you use?
While having one central project management tool will enable you to consolidate your work as much as possible, it’s likely that there will still be a handful of other tools that you’ll need here and there for more specific tasks. So how will they fit in with your lean, svelte new marketing stack?
The trick here is to find a project management tool that integrates seamlessly with everything else you use on a daily basis. Whether it’s your email client, your instant messaging platform, your marketing automation software, or your CRM software – good project management software will be the conductor between them all, streamlining and simplifying the passage from “to-do” to “done,” regardless of where that journey started.
The ability to consolidate and connect your marketing stack is just one of the five ways that marketing teams can benefit from using project management software. Want to know the other reasons your marketing team needs a project management tool? Download our ebook below and learn how project management software can make you more organized, effective, and efficient.