Did you know that 97% of people judge a business by its online presence? And that 93% of traffic comes from search engines?
Clearly, the need for serious project management in digital marketing has never been more obvious. To hit the ground running, you need a slick system to align your team efficiently, with the biggest impact on your budget.
The best way to do this is with digital marketing project management software. But what are they? And, why?
In this guide, you’ll discover the benefits of using project management software and a framework for applying it to your digital marketing projects.
In This Guide:
- Digital marketing software centralizes campaigns, assets, and performance tracking.
- Teams can cut marketing costs on average by up to 35%.
- Software reduces scope creep, miscommunication, and resource waste.
- Built-in collaboration and reporting tools increase transparency across campaigns and clients.
- Clear timelines, goals, and milestones help projects finish faster and with higher ROI.
What is Project Management in Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing project management is the process of organizing and monitoring marketing projects across digital channels.
While using traditional project management principles (such as scope, timelines, budgets, resources, and deliverables), it's adapted to digital marketing initiatives (like social media, creative assets, data, cross-functional teams, SEO, and content marketing).
What is Digital Marketing Project Management Software?
Digital marketing project management software provides one centralized place for marketing teams to plan, execute, and track their projects.
Unlike generic project management software, you’ll find these platforms are optimized for digital marketing teams (who often work remotely), such as with campaign calendars, asset approvals, content workflows, and performance tracking.
- 82% of companies use work management software for marketing projects.
Key Ways Project Management Can Help Your Digital Marketing:
By increasing campaign efficiency, teamwork, and structured workflows, project managers can reduce marketing costs by up to 35%.
Here’s a look at how using Digital Marketing Project Management Software can help you:
Ensure Project Delivery on Time
From one initiative to the next, digital project timelines tend to vary.
Most projects, such as marketing analyses and ad campaigns, typically run for around 4 to 8 weeks, while larger, ongoing digital marketing campaigns often operate on quarterly cycles.
To complete deliverables on time, you can use digital marketing agency project management software to maintain communication under one centralised hub, with all stakeholders involved. Progress will become easy to track, and stumbling blocks can quickly be identified.
Align Projects with Goals
Strategic goals can often get lost when there are multiple activities, objectives, and teams involved.
To avoid that, you can use project management software to gain a structured way to set objectives, assign responsibilities, and track progress against KPIs.
For example, many platforms can allow you to assign goals to specific tasks (such as generating leads or boosting traffic), ensuring every action has a purpose. You can also prioritize initiatives, so your resources go towards the projects that help you hit the goals most effectively.
Software also promotes collaboration and accountability. That increased transparency helps everyone understand how they fit in the bigger picture of meeting the overall goal.
Efficiently Maximize Resources
In digital marketing, resources are everything. From time to ad budgets, you must assign workloads and budgets to the right skill sets and priorities.
But digital teams include lots of moving parts - from copywriters to designers and web developers. The solution to all these moving cogs is systematic project management. Software gives you the ability to easily assign and track tasks and resources. No more chaotic email trails!
Avoid Scope Creep
‘Scope creep’ happens when a project grows beyond its intended objectives, goals, and deliverables. While it can happen without increasing your budget and resources, it can be counterproductive.
How to Create a Digital Marketing Project Management Plan
Using digital marketing project management software is a game-changing tool. But it still requires a well-crafted and well-defined marketing plan to achieve true success. If you’re a digital marketing manager, follow these steps:
1. Clearly define your digital marketing project goals
Planning sees the creation of two essential documents: the project charter and the marketing strategy.
- The project charter clearly defines the project, including its description, marketing goals, budgeting summary, and list of stakeholders.
- The marketing strategy goes more in-depth, describing the target audience, digital channels that will be used, positioning, and a list of metrics that will be used to determine success.
- 47% of agencies fail to plan a marketing strategy, which can be a real stumbling block later down the line, with no clear way to track success.
2. Set Deadlines and Milestones
Projects with set deadlines see a 2.5x increase in ROI and finish 2.5 times faster than those without clear timelines. But these should be realistic to avoid burnout or immediate demotivation amongst your team.
92% of marketers also cite approval delays, and 82% report stakeholder communication issues as top reasons for missing deadlines.
By using digital marketing project management software, you can help avoid these delays. A centralized platform can help you track data, deploy open and transparent communication, and keep your team flexible to sudden changes and risks.
3. Monitoring Team Performance
Without monitoring key metrics, you’ll struggle to know how the project is progressing or has performed. We recommend identifying key metrics such as:
- Utilization rate: A metric that shows how efficient your team is, via billable work vs total hours worked.
- Lead generation: Data for organic traffic, pipeline engagement, and leads.
- Lead conversion: The number of leads that are becoming prospects and then clients.
- Profit margins: This is determined by profit divided by revenue. If you recognize that you have a high profit margin, you may be able to grow in the future through further resource allocation and investments.
4. Resource Planning
Assigning too few or too many resources will see your project grind to a halt or overshoot the mark. You must identify the required resources first, which can help you avoid gaps in the future.
Once you’ve determined your resources, you can start to assign tasks based on employee expertise and availability (such as social media managers, copywriters, editors, and graphic designers).
By using software, you’ll be able to stay proactive by allocating tasks continuously, allowing you to overcome common problems such as sick leave.
5. Risk Management
75% of businesses using digital marketing have an incident response plan. It’s a critical step to keep the wheels turning and to mitigate damage when problems arise.
Risk avoidance and reduction can be achieved through project risk management, which we’ve made a guide on here.
The Features You’ll Need in Digital Marketing Project Management Software and Tools:
When deciding which tool to support your digital marketing workflows, you must choose a tool that aligns with the unique needs of your team and its goals.
Here are the key features that we believe are essential to success:
Project Intake Forms
Ideally, your software should have a tool to standardize how work enters your system. Custom intake forms can automate kickoff setup with reusable templates to manage tasks, timelines, budgets, and assignments.
Task Management and Scheduling
Resource-aware scheduling tools allow you to quickly designate tasks to employees, teams, or roles based on clearly identifiable workloads, dependencies, milestones, and subtasks.
Time Tracking
To fully understand the impact of performance on your budget, you’ll need built-in time tracking with manual entry and integration with calendar events. This can dramatically improve your awareness of what tasks are time wasters.
Centralized File Sharing
Creative workflows in digital marketing require smooth collaboration. A centralized software allows you to perform simple file sharing, email tracking, annotations, version control, and side-by-side comparisons.
Dashboards and Reporting
Visibility across projects, both operational and financial, is a must-have.
We recommend using software with customizable dashboards that can adapt to roles, showing task status, utilization, deadlines, and more. For example, Workamajig uses traffic-light alerts to quickly flag projects that are on track or at risk.
Collaboration, Proofing & Feedback
Your digital marketing project management software of choice must have a centralized file sharing system, with the ability to leave comments, make side-by-side comparisons, and have version control to study rounds of revisions.
Should You Use Digital Marketing Agency Project Management Software?
Only 23% of organizations use a project management tool, with the rest relying on less efficient tools like Excel or paper.
Making the switch can help your team make leaps ahead of the competition by solving these common problems:
FAQs on Digital Marketing Agency Project Management Software:
What is the best software for digital marketing project management?
Workamajig is widely recognized for its comprehensive project management, perfect for digital marketing agencies. With project request forms, CRM, budget tracking, resource scheduling, and centralized project details, it’s ideal for making complex digital marketing projects.
Is project management software suitable for small marketing agencies or only large ones?
All sizes of agencies and teams can benefit from project management software; smaller teams will gain structure and efficiency to maximize their small headcount, while large agencies can use it to manage scale.
How do marketing agencies measure the ROI of using project management software?
ROI can be measured through time savings, reduced errors, collaboration, and profitability. We recommend comparing data before and after adoption to see how the use of workflows and reporting translates into financial and performance gains.
Can project management tools handle multiple campaigns and clients simultaneously?
Yes! Platforms such as Workamajig are built for multi-client, multi-campaign use, all within a centralized system.
We welcome you to request a free personal demo with Workamajig to learn how a powerful agency management system can transform your projects into profits.
Originally published December 1, 2025.