The use of project management tools is no more confined to development teams alone. According to the Project Management Institute, almost 59 percent businesses say either their entire organization or most departments have implemented standard project management practices. Therefore, your marketing team too can leverage these tools for better productivity.
From mapping out the marketing plans and schedules to tracking time and collaborating documents, project management software can help marketing teams in numerous ways. But wait. You don’t need just any project management software; you need a reliable one.
This post explores the top 7 reasons for considering a reliable project management software for your marketing team.
1. It Simplifies Your Task Management
Task management is the core of any project management solution. They are the building blocks of your project. When it comes to your marketing team, task management is one of the most crucial functionalities. You need to share important marketing target and goals clearly with your team at once and project management tools can help you here.
Besides, the success of your marketing efforts largely depends on your ability to assign the right task to the right person. A reliable project management tool allows you manage and delegate task seamlessly. Better yet, a robust solution that offers exceptional task management function will even let you manage the plethora of projects at a time and also streamline your workflow capacity.
The goal is to keep your marketing efforts organized and project management tools allow you to do that effectively. Managing workload as well as your overall marketing calendar isn’t an easy thing to do. But these tools allows you to follow and update your calendar as and when you accomplish a task, thanks to their ‘to-do list’ features.
2. It Facilitates Open Communication
As said, a reliable project management tool ensures that your team is on the same page. This can only be achieved by means of improved and open communication. And effective communication is paramount to the success of any marketing effort. By using these tools you can involve all your team members in group discussions and encourage them to share ideas and documents and help each other via real-time chat systems.
Staying in loops is no longer limited to emails. In fact, you need something more dynamic and robust to guarantee effective communication. Project management tools successfully cater to these needs by allowing members to hashtag each other, send direct message, emails, comments, and participate in group chats – all in real time, regardless of the device and location of the users.
3. Easy Resource Management
Today, project managers need to ensure that their team members remain happy and productive. But to do this you need to give your team members a total control to remain agile. They must be able to access files and documents whenever they need. Project management tools let you do this. You can upload files and documents in these cloud-based tools and share the same with your team from anywhere, anytime.
This cloud-based file storage feature also makes it simpler to refer back to old documents and previous ideas, making the project a living document that can be updated and accessed easily by all team members on the fly.
4. Team Collaboration & Brainstorming Like Before
The modern work environment is much different than what we had a few decades back. People from various remote locations are now working on the same project, simultaneously. Marketing teams are also implementing such work culture. But this kind of work environment required effective collaboration between team members. They need to communicate openly, share files and ideas and brainstorm freely. Project management tools help businesses collaborate like never before.
They often change the definition of group collaborations. Apart from communication and file/document sharing, some of these tools also allow annotation and online huddles for team members to collaborate and brainstorm. You can discuss new ideas and marketing strategies with your in-office and remote employees alike, in real time.
Better yet, you can change conversations on specific action items and include just relevant people. In addition, you can save previous history on topics and refer to them later or use them to let new team members catch up on the ideas or project status.
5. Get Organized with Proper File Management
Marketing efforts usually involve copious amounts of data storage and it often become a challenge for your team members to dig through a clutter of folders to find the right file(s) and document(s). Here again, project management software can help streamline your file management process.
These tools allow cloud collaboration, making it easy to share and manage files and documents. Besides, they provide a central portal for every collaborator – including remote employees, clients, vendor and consultants/freelancers, allowing them to access files that are stored on your local server at the mere click of a button. They are safe and reliable too, ensuring the confidentiality of your crucial business data.
6. It Enhances Client Relations
Project management software allows you to give your clients the freedom to be involved in the marketing plans and efforts as they deem fit. From once-a-week reviews to overviewing everyday activity, your clients can check on the project progress and updates on every action right in their account. The best and most reliable project management software even anticipates the needs of your clients and accordingly offer customizable features that will help you keep your clients informed and engaged.
In short, your clients remain updated at every stage of the marketing campaign. This plays an important role in client satisfaction and also helps in building trust and engagement, which in turn, increases the likelihood of repeat purchases of your services.
7. Be Truly Agile
Situations like sudden product launches, major events or website refreshes may need your marketing team to change the project calendars and schedules unexpectedly. Sometimes you even need to revise and change the course of action to focus on a specific thing. Your marketing team should therefore be flexible enough to change plans and schedules without any prior notice, if need be.
The best project management tools allow you to remain extremely flexible and agile. You can better handle any kind of changes in the plan and allocate resources accordingly, without getting overwhelmed.
Conclusion
The dynamics of running a business has undergone a significant change over the past few years. Be it a small business, a developing enterprise or a well-established company, project management software has become critical to organizational success and must be injected to every system. In fact, implementing project management software is a great idea if you are being weighed down by the intricacies of marketing. It will help you to get organized and also alleviate some of the workload, allowing you to create a more harmonious marketing system and help you grow and evolve.
