Introduction to Digital Marketing Project Management

Digital marketers work to tight deadlines on multiple campaigns. They must keep daily operations going while creating timely campaigns to keep their audience engaged. Sometimes they collaborate with creative agencies and professional service providers to deliver successful marketing campaigns. This can make digital marketing project management complex as multiple teams carry out their responsibilities.

Digital marketing project managers focus on delivering a successful marketing campaign project, while digital marketers work to complete the marketing tasks and activities. When effective project management methods are applied in marketing, you can reduce costs, schedule conflicts, and missed deadlines. Digital marketing project management optimizes marketing resources and limits the risk of failed marketing projects.

What is digital marketing project management?

Digital marketing project management provides structure to marketing teams and projects by defining workflows and processes. This creates precision and control over the various marketing processes, from planning to implementation and review.

Some essential tasks involved in digital marketing project management are:

Documenting team meetings and project status
Organizing and assigning project responsibilities
Guiding the team through projects
Setting and monitoring budgets for campaigns
Setting up processes to stay on the project timeline
Making sure the project meets necessary quality criteria
Creating analysis and metric reports
Providing project report feedback to stakeholders

The digital marketing project manager and marketing team may face obstacles during a campaign. Breaking team workflow into tasks and achieving marketing goals become easier with a good digital marketing project plan.

Digital marketing project examples

A digital marketing project is an instance of an online journey created by a business for its customers. Some digital marketing project examples include optimizing a company website, rebranding a product, or launching regional marketing campaigns to increase brand visibility.

Let’s take a closer look at the example of rebranding a business mentioned above. A digital marketing project manager may start by breaking the entire project into the following stages to achieve its objectives:

Analyze business rationale for rebranding
Research market and customer preferences
Create a new brand identity
Launch a brand-launch marketing campaign

Digital marketing project plan

Digital marketing project managers must begin with a well-documented marketing project plan to execute digital marketing projects without chaos. Below are the main steps to developing a digital marketing project plan.

Step 1: Define your digital marketing project goals

Digital marketing project management starts with identifying and aligning the business and marketing goals of the organization. Some common marketing goals set by businesses are:

Boost the company’s following on social media and increase brand awareness
Increase website traffic and convert more leads to customers
Become a thought leader in an industry

Digital marketing campaigns created by the marketing team must contribute to achieving these goals. Once business and marketing goals are defined, it becomes easier to create successful marketing projects with aligned metrics and deliverables.

Step 2: Prioritize your digital marketing projects

Your digital marketing goals determine which marketing projects are most important, urgent, and impactful. Prioritize projects in order of impact and value to your customers. Consider the timing for the organization's goals and also the macro-marketing environment. Certain projects will demand immediate attention and thus have higher priority than others.

For example, product awareness campaigns will take precedence over brand awareness campaigns in the weeks before launching a new product. Digital marketing project managers may also choose to push campaigns with higher chances of conversion.

Step 3: Understand digital marketing project requirements

Once you're clear on the projects you will be executing, your next focus is to gather the requirements needed to complete them and meet stakeholders' expectations.

List the prioritized projects and their requirements. Identify, analyze, and order them to determine how each marketing project or campaign fits into the other. This helps solidify the marketing project needs into a program level, allowing you to take advantage of economies of scale and achieve more with your available resources.

As you conduct the requirements analysis process, ensure your accepted requirements are documented, actionable, measurable, testable, traceable, defined with sufficient details, and related to overall business needs. Your digital marketing project requirements may include:

Digital marketing project management tools
and templates
Graphic designing software
Content writers for blog creation
Project management software for streamlining the workflow
Information databases of potential clients
A network of subject matter experts for broader customer outreach

Step 4: Plan digital marketing projects with a timeline

Once the marketing project requirements are listed, proceed to workflow management, where you break down marketing goals into actionable tasks with due dates and team members assigned.

Executing a digital marketing campaign without putting it on a calendar is nearly impossible. The digital marketing project plan and calendar keep the marketing team and collaborators aligned and working on a schedule.

Digital marketing project management tools

Digital marketing project management tools help teams manage multiple marketing projects efficiently. There are many types of digital marketing project management tools. Some are simple task management software, enabling you to make and track project-related to-do lists.

Others are more robust, offering an organized way to manage multiple projects and collaborate with in-house and external teams. Digital marketing project management tools like Wrike allow you to manage it all from one centralized dashboard, accessible to team members regardless of where they are working.

The right digital marketing project management tool ensures that the marketing team stays focused on its goals and can successfully monitor project tasks in real-time.

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Digital Marketing Project Management