How Project Management Tools Drive Growth for Marketing Agencies

Marketing agencies run through a ton of processes to make a single campaign go live successfully. It starts with campaign planning and then progresses to campaign creation and campaign publishing.

The stages of campaign publishing depend largely on the marketing agencies. But it takes at least 10-15 sub-phases to publish a campaign. And more such steps to measure and re-publish an improved campaign.

Let’s consider a typical scenario in a digital marketing agency, which typically includes departments like:

• Plan campaigns
• Schedule content creation
• Connect with third-party sources
• Publish campaigns
• Measure campaign success

Moreover, digital marketing agencies also encompass teams who handle client projects and run marketing campaigns for higher conversions.

When team members are managing tasks from multiple departments, work quickly turns into a mess, especially if the team members are not aware of the task progress and the flow of the work.

For example, the creative team may start creating visual and copy content before the client even shares the brief.

Or, the production team is not sure of when to schedule their next content publishing because the planners haven’t yet figured out the right strategy for the project.

In this typical digital marketing scenario, all the team members are trying to do their part to make the campaign a success but are not going anywhere because of gaps in communication, and unorganized tasks and workflow.

All this project mismanagement can be eliminated if the ad agency employs project management software to be able to streamline their tasks and campaigns.

How Project Management Software Helps Marketing Agencies?

Project management software enables ad agencies and digital marketing companies to manage multiple campaigns and projects simultaneously through team collaboration.

According to Zippia.com, a project collaboration tool increases team productivity by 25%.

Here is a real-world example of how ‘Hailstorm Development’ – a remote digital and web agency increased 2X more customer satisfaction using a project collaboration tool – Orangescrum. Read the full story here.

It enables companies to proper allocation of tasks, meet delivery deadlines on time, plan projects effectively, allocate the right resources to the right project, generate reports and strategize workflows to make project management a success.

So, now the question arises, what are the related actions a project collaboration tool can enable for a marketing agency?

Here you go,

• Share files and folders to the cloud store for easy access from any location.
• Track who is working on which project to better allocate resources.
• Schedule tasks, assign teams, and view from a single page.
• Create project workflows to keep track of task to-dos, upcoming tasks, completed tasks, and pending tasks.
• Facilitate inter-departmental collaboration such as the accounts team, and human resource team.
• Enable your teams to set goals, assign tasks, stay on schedule, monitor task progress, and move a project to success one step at a time.

Why Do Marketing Agencies Need Project Management Software More Than Ever?

Marketing agencies are working harder than ever to make a campaign successful in this competitive market. Many creative agencies get paid only when the campaigns give a desired ROI (return on investment) to their customers.

All these factors make it paramount for advertising agencies to ensure they succeed in their project development tasks and can’t expect to lose resources and time.

Moreover, many companies today outsource parts of a project to freelancers and some team members work dedicatedly on their client’s side.

These scenarios provide insight into how the advertising industry is shifting its techniques such as working with distributed teams, focusing on social marketing, serving global customers, focusing on paid campaigns, etc.

These changing scenarios need project collaboration software to integrate all the above factors to make digital marketing campaigns a success.

• Project Planning: Mapping project budgets, proofing content creative, tracking task timelines, defining project scope, etc.
• Team Communication: Serve as the via media between creative teams and customers to facilitate smooth communication across various project tasks such as establishing project deliverable expectations, providing status updates, receiving and circulating feedback, etc.

• Project Progress Tracking: Monitor and track project development timelines, workloads, and ensure meeting defined goals to keep the project on track.

Benefits of Using Project Collaboration Tools for Marketing Agencies

Manage Workflows and Meet Client Expectations:

Today, Ad agencies are overloaded with multiple projects which makes it important for agencies to prioritize their work for effectiveness and success.

Task prioritization requires tools to create and manage to-do lists, schedule tasks for specific clients, inform clients of the latest updates on tasks, and schedule meetings with specific clients.

Project management tools can help businesses to determine what’s more important and time-sensitive. Oftentimes, the task itself could be easier to execute but the time it takes to schedule meetings and communicate the data across all team members delays precious man-hours.

Avoid Creative Burnout:

Creative content creation is a time-intensive process and not everyone is at their peak performance at all times. Everyone in the creative team is different and some team members need to step back from their busy schedules and meetings to think in a clearer way and produce creative that’s more likely to succeed.

Generate More Sales:

When the agency can align all of its team members on one unified platform it can immensely benefit the agency in meeting client deadlines effectively as well as reduce expenses on resources to eventually increase sales.

Musts-Have Features of a Project Management Software for Marketing Agencies

Task Planning and Scheduling:

When you are working with multiple team-members in multiple teams you need professional scheduling tools to be able to manage projects effectively.

Some important task-planning features include:

• Task creation
• Task assigning
• Task scheduling
• Calendar feature for post scheduling
• Cloud-storage integration for file storage
• Dashboard features for task-progress views in charts

Team Collaboration:

The project collaboration tool should enable team members as well as clients to collaborate on a single platform for better project transparency.

The collaboration will enable team members to easily give their input at every stage of the project.

This suggests that project managers and team leaders can track tasks from beginning to end.

Moreover, assigning tasks and subtasks to teammates, setting deadlines, scheduling task completion, creative delivery, and more actions can be performed in a streamlined manner.

Resource Management:

Resource management features in a project collaboration tool enable project managers to determine the scope of the project and assign the right number of team members to execute and accomplish a given task.

Using project estimation and time tracking features you can easily identify each activity your team members are performing and how long it will take for it to be fulfilled.

These features, moreover, enable team members to work on tasks based on priority and enables project managers to strategize and modify the utilization of resources for faster project delivery.

Resource management features are particularly useful when teams are working on hourly rates giving agencies more control over how they manage their resources.

Reporting:

With real-time reporting features, team leaders can get real-time updates on the progress of the project as well as create reports about the project’s current status thereby enabling project managers to make informed decisions on improving the quality of the work.

Budgeting:

Enable project managers and product owners to maintain accurate records of billable hours. Project collaboration tools empowered to create an accurate estimation of time taken for each task benefits project managers immensely.

It helps determine accurately how many hours of work the team has put in and how much time is required to accomplish a project.

Things to Consider While Selecting Project Management Software for Marketing Agencies

• Ease of Use – Along with having a professional interface, the project management tools should be easy-to-use. Ease-of-use and ease-of-feature accessibility enable project managers to onboard users with ease. And, team members can access features to easily manage their tasks.
• Shareability – Team members should be able to share their plans and tasks with stakeholders and other team members on a single platform.
• Timesheets – Timesheets make it easier for everyone to measure their efforts and strategies ways to improve project development.
• Dashboards – Dashboard views enable team members and project managers to get crucial task information in a snapshot to determine how many tasks have been completed and how many are scheduled for completion.
• Reports visualization – Visualize task reports in pie charts and bar graphs to determine project progress and create strategies to improve or modify your digital marketing campaigns.
• Data security – A project collaboration tool with data security features goes a long way in saving tons of money for Ad agencies. Data security features such as encryption help in keeping crucial project-related data safe in the cloud or on on-premise servers.
• Customization – Team managers and team members should be able to customize their workflows to best fit their business needs.

Final Thoughts

Running a marketing team is a time-intensive process where project managers have to consider multiple aspects of a project to make it a success. Sometimes they may have to work with remote teams, and sometimes they have to juggle between multiple projects.

The factors of a marketing agency make it paramount for their team to work collaboratively and the need for a collaboration tool to bring everyone on the same page.

There are plenty of project collaboration tools to choose from for your marketing agency. I am sure this blog will definitely help you in choosing the best project management software for your marketing team.

Orangescrum is an all-inclusive project collaboration tool designed for marketing agencies to collaborate, manage tasks and streamline their activities in one platform.

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