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 might be familiar with what the graphic designers and content copywriters in your marketing team do, but the day-to-day life of a marketing project manager can be a bit harder to define.

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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 between teams and control stakeholders to get resources in on time.

We have identified 6 types of skills that help facilitate collaboration between teams and create amazing marketing project managers.

1. Combat team silos logic

As a marketing project manager, in many ways, you are the bridge between marketing and almost every other team in the organisation. Therefore, it will save you tons of double work, avoid miscommunication between teams isolated from each other and ensure that they work together.

It sounds nice, but how can you get teams to communicate openly, sharing information, files and project plans in one place? Many organisations adopt a shared platform, or work operating system, where each team plans its projects and processes to ensure alignment. Centralising files, communication, project planning and updates in one place ensures a level of shared knowledge between all teams that reduces friction and keeps everyone informed.

2. Planning long-term projects

Setting clear objectives 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 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 useful to use templates within a Work OS to understand best practices for project creation. monday.com a Work OS that helps hundreds of thousands of teams manage their work, has templates for project managers in marketing, eCommerce shops, real estate, and everything in between. It is also useful to look for examples of how others organise their projects and start building processes and timelines from there.

3. Getting your hands dirty and not just watching

Although planning and coordination are fundamental 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 colour for your event stand is still something you will find yourself doing quite often.

4. Build repeatable processes

After the first few successful projects, you will start to see patterns and deduce 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 utilising the knowledge gained. This becomes particularly 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 information about the team, from timelines to ownership.

5. Improve based on data

As you move from project to project and start to refine your processes, it is important to use data to understand what works well, what slows 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 understand which parts of the project ran smoothly and which parts have been stuck for too long.

6. Develop a problem-solving process

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With any large-scale project, your plans will not always unfold as smoothly as you would have liked. When life fulfils your plans, you will have to get used to solving problems and finding an occasional solution. The best thing you can do is to create a process for your problem solving in an attempt to make it scalable and something you can continuously 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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