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What is Marketing Project Management?
Marketing project management is the application of project management principles in delivering marketing-related projects. This involves initiating, planning, executing, monitoring, and closing projects aimed at achieving specific marketing goals.
This is often spearheaded by project managers, or the head of marketing in an organization, who focus on aligning different teams and perspectives in order to keep the project on track, and stakeholders informed of overall progress.
Because project management takes into account everything that can go right or wrong in a marketing campaign, we’ve broken it down into a collection of articles, so you can take in each one without overwhelming yourself. Feel free to jump to any of the articles below in the order that works best for you:
How Does Project Management Help in Marketing?
Marketing teams with dedicated project management resources hold a key advantage over teams that don’t in terms of alignment—effective project managers are particularly skilled in stakeholder management, helping to keep different members, with varying perspectives and areas of expertise, working in the same direction.
This helps keep things organized and efficient, which cascades into better potential returns from any marketing effort. This also gives the team the highest level of control over the many factors to the success of a marketing campaign. Communication and coordination between team members is also vastly improved, which translates into faster, more informed decision-making and more effective deliveries.
As a whole, project management helps your marketing effort by providing direction and structure, which is especially important in a field where trends and demands change quickly and constantly.
Product Management, Project Management, and Product Marketing: What’s the Difference?
It can be easy to mistake each of the three disciplines for one another. Here’s a quick guide to telling them apart:
Product management
Product management places a focus on strategic goals—a product manager is often in charge of setting the overall vision of the marketing team and identifying the products or services that marketing campaigns look to encourage customers to engage with.
Product managers interface most with the project manager and the rest of the marketing team.
Project management
Project management, on the other hand, is about tactical goals—a project manager is mainly responsible for coordinating activities that help achieve strategic goals, by delivering marketing campaigns to help drive customer engagement, whether that’s increasing social media impressions, sales, or establishing a new brand identity in the market’s consciousness.
Project managers also typically face internal collaboration with the marketing team and aligning the project’s status between them and other stakeholders, such as the product manager, investors, and in some cases, the customer base itself.
Product Marketing
Product marketing centers around consumer needs—they are then involved with activities meant to measure and influence customer demand and market trends. This includes marketing directly to consumers (i.e. outbound marketing) as well as conducting marketing research and using this information to help the product manager come up with an effective strategy.
Of the three, product marketers are the most customer-facing, as they need to pay close attention to consumer demands and market trends and relay this back to the internal team to come up with a relevant marketing strategy.
Depending on how an organization is structured, some of these responsibilities may be shared between any of the three roles, while some might have a single resource juggling any combination of these tasks. Understanding the difference between the three roles, however, remains important, as all of them work hand in hand to ensure a cohesive and successful marketing campaign.
Get Started with Marketing Project Management with Workamajig
Marketing project management means taking your campaign from start to finish and having a structured process and dedicated resources for managing a marketing project helps teams stay organized and on track to meet strategic goals. This means ensuring clear communication, efficient coordination, and alignment between the many perspectives and disciplines that contribute to a successful marketing effort.
With Workamajig, the premier marketing management software, you have an all-in-one solution for planning, organizing, and delegating tasks, and easily transitioning between any of the three. Easily adjust your schedule or modify task requirements and assignees to ensure efficiency, and use native reporting tools to measure your progress, as well as identify and address roadblocks along the way.