What Is Marketing Work Management?

What Is Marketing Work Management?

First things first, it’s essential to understand that in a marketing context, work management is not the same as workflow management, as well as other terms like project management, business process management, and so on.

So, what exactly is marketing work management or MWM?

Marketing work management refers to the processes marketing teams use to classify projects, allocate resources, and ensure that work is completed accurately while meeting the budget and deadline.

On the other hand, workflow management is the act of managing and optimizing marketing business processes to improve their efficiency. So, as we can see, there are similarities between the two, but there are also some core differences.

Typically Marketing Work Management Involves Six key Processes:

  1. Define: defining the scope and objective(s) of the project
  2. Plan: how will you execute your project to achieve the objective, and with what resources
  3. Assign: assign roles and responsibilities to the right people that execute do the job
  4. Execute: execute your marketing project to produce the deliverables and 
  5. Deliver: submit the deliverables of the project to the clients/stakeholders, or publish the marketing campaign
  6. Measure: evaluate the campaign and review for what can be improved in the future projects

Below, we will discuss each of these processes in greater detail, starting with the first one

1. Define Your Marketing Project’s Scope and Purpose

We can further divide this process into several steps: 

Step 1: Choosing a project in which you are going to implement MWM

You should generally choose the highest priority project with the most significant potential impact. For example, if your current objective is to achieve growth, it would only make sense to select a project to achieve the most potential growth.

Step 2: Create a Creative Brief for the Project

Develop a comprehensive creative brief for this project by answering these key questions:

  1. Who/which team will benefit the most from this project’s success?
  2. What do you need to create with the project?
  3. Why will this project benefit its target audience?
  4. What kind of resources will you need for this project to be successful?
  5. What are the KPIs for the project?

The clearer your creative brief is, the stronger your foundation for your work management’s remaining steps.

Step 3: Define the Requirements of the Project

The requirement is the standards your project’s deliverables have to meet before you can publish. Every project may need different requirements, and it’s very important to define your project’s requirements before you start properly.

2. Plan The Details of Your Project

Step 4: List the tasks you need to complete

Based on your creative brief, breakdown the project into smaller tasks and list the tasks you need to complete in sequential order.

Step 5: Define the criteria of MVP (Minimal Viable Project)

This won’t apply to every project, but if applicable, define the criteria of an MVP version of your project. This can help in scenarios where you can’t deliver the ideal version of your project.

3. Assign Roles and Responsibilities

Step 6: Assign Responsibilities and Deadlines

Assign realistically achievable deadlines. Understand how much time each task takes to complete (after considering all potential issues), and set practical due dates while also considering who will be accountable for completing each task.

Step 7: Demand Accountability for Deadlines

You should:

  • Set the date when you’ll publish/submit the project no matter what
  • Involve team members and stakeholders when deciding this due date
  • Tell your team members clearly what you plan to do, allow them to review the plan before you start executing.
  • Only start executing once you get your approval from the stakeholders and, if possible, all your team members.

4. Execute Your Marketing Project

Step 8: Execute Your Project

It’s finally time for your team to execute the project, and this is where you keep track of the tasks you’ve assigned to complete.

The best way to begin is to choose a marketing management software that will help in:

  • Managing the entire team while assigning specific tasks and responsibilities
  • Assign and monitor specific deadlines for tasks
  • Automatically notify your team member when you’ve assigned them a task
  • Automatically notify when a deadline is approaching

Step 9: Manage Communication and Collaboration

It’s best to manage your communication around the whole project on a collaboration tool like Aproove, where you can also manage everything else related to the project. You should:

  • Avoid email to manage your communication. Email threads can cause people to accidentally reply only to the sender (instead of reply), so team members might miss important information about the project.  
  • Decide on a single tool to communicate, and have your team members commit to this tool consistently.
  • Keep your feedback, notes, comment, file shares, and reports in a single tool so you can easily track everything. This is especially important when you are managing different projects at once.

5. Deliver Your Deliverables

Step 10: Submit your Deliverables

In this step, we submit the deliverables to the stakeholders/clients, and our objective in this step is to get approvals before we can publish/launch the deliverables.

6. Measure and Evaluate

Step 11: Close Your Project

Conduct a post-implementation review meeting where you ask three key questions to your team members:

  • What went well?
  • What went wrong?
  • What could be improved in the future?

You may also ask other questions depending on your project’s state, like what aspects of the project we can continue (or stop) in future projects and whether there are new ideas we can implement in future projects.

Conclusion

Implementing marketing work management (MWM) is essentially about balancing your team’s workload so you can finish the project successfully while also ensuring you meet your budget and deadline. This is especially true if you have multiple ongoing projects with your team where you need to manage your team’s workload effectively.

In implementing marketing work management, having the right task management software is very important to quantify whether the team’s workload is assigned correctly to ensure maximum performance. Simultaneously, the management software should also act as a hub for your communications and collaborations. This way, you can properly track all feedback, comments, and reports to help monitor and optimize the project.