The 6 essential skills of the marketing project manager

Marketing project managers are probably the ones running around your office knocking on doors, scheduling meetings and discussing deadlines. You may be familiar with the tasks of the designers and content writers on your marketing team, but it's certainly a little harder to define what the day-to-day life of a marketing project manager really is.

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What does a marketing project manager actually do?

A marketing project manager has wide-ranging responsibilities. Essentially, he/she is a person who makes sure that everything contributes to the success of the projects. Marketing project managers are the ones who execute large-scale plans, coordinate different teams and ensure that everyone involved meets their deadlines.

We've identified 6 skills that facilitate cross-team collaboration and make it possible to become an exceptional marketing project manager.

1. learn to break down the silos between teams

As a marketing project manager, you are in many ways the bridge between the marketing team and almost every other team in the organisation. Therefore, facilitating cross-team communication and making sure that teams work together will save you a lot of work and many misunderstandings.

This seems all well and good, but how can you actually ensure that your employees communicate openly while sharing information, files and project plans in one place?

Many companies use a collaborative platform or work organisation system (Work OS) where each team plans their projects and processes to ensure alignment. Centralising files, communication, project planning and updates allows for better information sharing between all teams. This avoids tensions and ensures that everyone is up to date.

2. plan long-term projects

Defining clear goals and KPIs based on North Start metrics (a metric that evaluates what value your product brings to the user) can help you stay focused and on target when planning long-term projects. Once you know what your project will look like and how you will measure its success, it takes time to acquire and reinforce skills such as project division and delegation of responsibilities.

To make progress, it can be helpful to use models within a Work OS to understand best practices for setting up projects. monday.com, a Work OS that helps hundreds of thousands of teams manage their work, has templates for marketing project managers, as well as e-commerce shops, and real estate, among many others. It's also useful to look through examples of how others organise their projects, and start building your own processes and timelines from there.

3. do the work yourself too, not just manage it

Although planning and coordination are key skills for any marketing project manager, you will still quite often get to deal with the nitty gritty: writing the article for the upcoming event, meeting the product team or choosing the right colour for the exhibition stand. This is all part of the daily tasks of a marketing project manager.

4. build repeatable processes

After you have successfully completed a few projects, you will see trends emerging. You will then be able to develop patterns and derive best practices for gaining buy-in and feedback from key stakeholders, planning projects and working together as a team.

Take these learnings and use them to build repeatable processes. This is invaluable when it comes to building a scalable team, saving time and utilising the insights gained. This becomes especially important when working remotely as a marketing project manager. If you are not able to work onsite, processes need to be very clear, project responsibilities clearly defined and information sharing transparent.

Many teams use monday.com as a way to bring project planning together in one place to transparently share all team-related information - from scheduling to responsibilities.

5. improve processes based on data

After working on multiple projects, you start to refine your processes. At this point, it's essential to use data to understand what's working well, what's slowing your pace and how you can improve. But it can be complicated to collect data on a process that involves many teams. If you and your team are working from the same tool with real-time updates, it's easy to do retrospective analyses and collect data over time to understand which part of the project went smoothly and which parts took way too long.

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6. develop a process for problem solving

With any large-scale project, your plans won't always go exactly as you'd hoped. You will probably have to solve problems or deal with unexpected situations. So it's a good idea to create a clear process for your problem solving, with the aim of making it scalable and something you can continually learn from.

These six different skills can help any marketing project manager to successfully plan and track projects, coordinate between teams and continuously improve. Access easy-to-use marketing templates, valuable market data and useful tips and tricks for all your marketing tasks!

Promotional articles. The experts are independent authors from the appvizer editorial team. Their comments and positions are personal.