6 skills of a great Marketing Project Manager
In the office, the Marketing Project Manager is probably the person who is knocking on everyone's door, scheduling meetings and talking in terms of deadlines.
While you may be familiar⋅a with what designers and creatives in the Marketing Department do, the day-to-day life of the Manager can be a little harder to define.
What does the Marketing Project Manager do?
This position has several responsibilities, one of the most important of which is to make sure the magic happens. This is because the Manager is the one who leads large-scale projects, coordinates teams and supports all parties involved to meet deadlines.
Here are 6 skills we have identified that facilitate team collaboration and build amazing Marketing Project Managers .
1. Learn to break down your teams
As a manager, in many ways, you are the bridge between Marketing and almost every other team in the organization. Because of that, breaking down teams will save you tons of work and potential miscommunication by allowing them to work together.
But how do you ensure that teams are communicating openly, sharing information, files and project plans in one place? Many organizations adopt a shared platform, or working operating system, where each team plans their projects and processes to ensure they are aligned.
Centralizing files, communications, project planning and updates in one place ensures a certain degree of knowledge across teams, which reduces friction and keeps everyone informed.
2. Plan long-term projects
Defining clear objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs) based on the North Star Metric helps you stay focused⋅a and proactive⋅a when planning long-term projects.
Once you know your project and have determined how to measure its success, learning how to phase it and delegate responsibility is a skill you need to cultivate and strengthen.
To get the project off the ground, it can be helpful to use templates within a Work Operating System, which helps to frame good project management practices. The collaborative platform monday.com, for example, helps hundreds of thousands of teams manage their work by offering different templates for managing marketing projects, e-commerce stores, real estate and more. It is also useful to look for examples of how others organize their projects and start building processes and timelines.
3. Manage, but also get involved
While planning and coordination are fundamental skills for any Project Manager, getting involved at every stage, writing the report for the event, sitting down one on one with the production team, or selecting the right color for your event booth, are activities you will also see yourself doing quite often.
4. Build replicable processes
After the first few successful projects you have led, you will begin to identify patterns and determine best practices for getting approval and feedback from your strategic allies, planning projects and working as a team.
From this experience, build dynamics and processes worthy of replication. This is invaluable when it comes to building a scalable team, saving time and leveraging acquired knowledge. This is especially evident when working remotely. Without the ability to work face-to-face, processes must be absolutely clear, project ownership must be well defined and information sharing must be transparent.
Many teams use monday.com as a way to centralize project planning in one place and share any information transparently, from deadlines to the division of responsibilities.
5. Data-driven improvement
As you move from project to project and begin to refine processes, it's important to rely on data to help you understand what's working well, what may be holding you back, and how you can improve.
But collecting data on a process that involves many teams can feel like swimming upstream. When you and your team are working with the same system, which has real-time updates, it's easy to conduct retroactive analysis and gather information as you go along to understand what part of the project went smoothly, and what parts were held up for a long time.
6. Develop a problem-solving process
When you manage large-scale projects, they may not progress as planned. In the face of possible eventualities, you need to develop the ability to solve problems and improvise solutions on the fly.
In this case, the best thing you can do is to create a problem-solving process that is scalable and that you can continually learn from.
These six skills can help any Project Marketing Manager plan successful projects, coordinate teams and continuously improve. Access our easy-to-use marketing templates, valuable market information and useful tips and tricks for all things marketing!
Article translated from Spanish