6 skills you need to be the best Marketing Project Manager
Marketing project managers are probably the ones in your office who go around knocking on everyone's doors, scheduling meetings and talking about deadlines. You may be familiar with what the graphic designers and content copywriters on your marketing team do, but the day-to-day of a marketing project manager may be a little harder to define.
What does a marketing project manager do?
A marketing project manager has broad responsibilities but, essentially, he is the one who makes the magic happen. He or she is the one who has to orchestrate large-scale plans, coordinate among teams, and monitor stakeholders to get resources in on time.
We have identified 6 types of skills that help facilitate collaboration among teams and create amazing marketing project managers.
1. Combat the Silos logic of teams
As a marketing project manager, in many ways, you are the bridge between marketing and almost every other team in the organization. Because of this, it will save you tons of double work by avoiding miscommunication between teams isolated from each other and ensure that they work together.
Sounds good, but how can you make sure that teams communicate openly, sharing information, files, and project plans in one place? Many organizations adopt a shared platform, or work operating system, where each team plans its projects and processes to ensure alignment. Centralizing files, communication, project planning, and updates in one place ensures a level of shared knowledge among all teams that reduces friction and keeps everyone informed.
2. Planning long-term projects
Setting clear goals and KPIs based on baseline metrics can help you stay focused and proactive when planning long-term projects. Once you know what your project is and how you will measure success, learning how to break it down into phases and delegate responsibilities is a skill that takes time to cultivate and strengthen. To make it work, it can be helpful to use templates within a Work OS to understand best practices for creating projects. monday.com a Work OS that helps hundreds of thousands of teams manage their work, has templates for project managers in marketing, eCommerce stores, Real Estate, and everything in between. It is also useful to look for examples of how others organize their projects and start building processes and timelines from there.
3. Get your hands dirty and not just watch
Although planning and coordination are core skills for any marketing project manager, feeling comfortable getting your hands dirty and writing copy for the event, sitting side by side with the product team, or selecting the right color for your event booth is still something you will find yourself doing quite often.
4. Build repeatable processes
After your first few successful projects, you will begin to see patterns and infer best practices for gaining approval and feedback from key stakeholders, planning projects, and collaborating as a team. Take these insights and use them to build repeatable processes. This is invaluable when it comes to building a scalable team, saving time and leveraging insights. This becomes especially evident when working as a remote marketing project manager. Without the ability to work in person, processes must be crystal clear, project ownership must be well defined, and information sharing must be transparent. Many teams use monday.com as a way to bring project planning together in one place to transparently share any team-related information, from timelines to ownership.
5. Improve based on data
As you move from project to project and begin to refine your processes, it is important to use data to understand what is working well, what is slowing your pace, and how you can improve. But collecting data on a process that involves many teams can make you want to call the wind. When you and your team are working from the same system with real-time updates, it is easy to conduct retrospective analysis, collecting data as you go to figure out what part of the project ran smoothly and what parts have been stuck for too long.
6. Develop a process for troubleshooting.
With any large-scale project, your plans will not always unfold as neatly as you would have liked. When life meets your plans, you will have to get used to problem solving and occasional solution. The best thing you can do is to create a process for your problem solving in an effort to make it scalable and something you can continually learn from.
These six distinct skills can help any marketing project manager plan successful projects, coordinate across teams, and continuously improve. Get access to easy-to-use marketing templates, valuable market data, and useful tips and tricks for all things marketing!
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Article translated from Italian