Marketing management software: One platform to rule them all

Take a look at your tech stack.
How many different tools are you using to take your marketing campaigns from start to finish?
If you just started counting them off on your fingers, then this article is for you.
Because if you were using all-in-one marketing management software, you could have answered that question in 1.2 seconds.
Imagine all the different apps you and your teams are currently using:

• File management software
• Time tracking tools
• Team communication apps
• Finance and budgeting tools
• Reporting and analytics apps
• Project management software

That’s a lot of subscriptions.
Plus, each one requires specific onboarding, know-how, and training—and then you get to jump between the 20+ open tabs on your browser to manage it all.
Fun.
Sure, these tools all work together to some clunky extent with modern-day integrations, but why integrate continuously when you can consolidate from the get-go?
The best digital marketing management software combines all your SaaS tools under one digital roof.
One platform to rule them all, one platform to find them, one platform to bring them all and in the marketing team bind them.
Let us show you what we mean.
First, let’s start with the basics: what is marketing management software?

What is Marketing Management Software?

Marketing management software is a platform built to help marketing teams plan and execute campaigns. It comes pre-built with all the tools and integrations you need to manage workflows, collaborate, and organize your creative assets.
However, not all marketing management systems are created equal.
Some platforms cater specifically to marketing departments, designing their tools specifically to take creative campaigns from start to finish. This software includes marketing-specific features, like popular CRM integrations, marketing automation, content collaboration capabilities, publishing functionality, and more.
Other platforms cater to a more general audience, adapting their software tools to fit various use cases. These software solutions can be a bit more “robust,” but they tend to overcomplicate marketing teams’ processes and clutter their interfaces with clunky never-touched features.
Yuck.

What Gets Lost without the Right Marketing Management Software?

Think about the steps necessary to create, launch, monitor, and report on a marketing campaign. It’ll look different for every business and project, but here’s a rough assumption:

• A business need is identified.
• Team members rally to brainstorm and ideate on a solution.
• Leaders allocate budget and bandwidth to bring the solution to life.
• Contributors get to work on the nitty-gritty subtasks.
• Deliverables go through countless drafts and revisions before being finalized.
• Different teams in the marketing department finally collect the assets and launch the campaign across various channels.
• Performance is monitored, results are gathered, and reports are made.
• On to the next one…

However, if you’re using a bundle of different apps, a lot can get lost in the process:

• The Vision Dies: Brainstorms land in Google Docs, essential conversations happen in isolated Slack channels, and ultimately the end product doesn’t quite satisfy the identified need.
• Team Members Get Left Out: Managers fall out of the loop, and individual contributors lose control of their assets.
• Budget and Bandwidth Gets Blown: Some contributors work too much—others, not enough. Budgets get forgotten as everyone goes heads down.
• The Launch Is Disjointed: Assets float around in ZIP files and email messages, leading some teams to use outdated images, copy, and more—while some teams never get access in the first place.
• Results Are Reported in Isolation: Each team reports on its successes, but the collective achievement is lost.
• Work Is Repeated Again and Again: Previous campaigns and assets get forgotten as the next initiative rolls around, leading contributors to reproduce the same exact work over and over.

What a headache, right?
Fortunately, the right marketing management software solves every single one of those issues (and more).

What are the Benefits of Marketing Project Management Software?

Let’s not talk hypothetically here—let’s look at some real data.
First, let’s examine the problem:

1. Poor communications cost small businesses (less than 100 employees) $420,000 annually and large companies (with over 100,000 employees) over $62 million.
2. 73% of employees report burnout, and 20% of them cite an unmanageable workload as the number one cause.
3. 41% of businesses with a high project failure rate blame their higher-up stakeholder’s lack of involvement in project management.
4. Project management problems cost businesses $109 million for every $1 billion invested in a project—that’s more than 10%!
5. 46% of team leads state hitting project deadlines is their biggest challenge.

Fortunately, marketing project management software can solve all of these problems. Plus, it can prove results:

1. 66% of companies using project management software completed campaigns without going over budget, compared to just 47% of businesses that operate without a project management tool.
2. 61% of businesses using project management software completed campaigns on time, compared to 41% of businesses operating without a project management tool.
3. Companies that invest in project management practices save 28x more money than those that don’t.
4. Project management software saves team members up to 498 hours per year (equivalent to about $16,667).

How does marketing management software help businesses achieve these awesome results? By delivering essential (and high in-demand) management features.
According to Capterra, here are the most-used project management software features:

• Task management (76%)
• Project tracking (71%)
• Collaboration (63%)
• Time tracking (60%)
• Resource management (53%)
• Budget management (47%)

Hey, Content Marketing Platform provides all that and more (check out what other cool marketing management software features we provide). Let’s dig a little deeper to learn how these features lead to results like 28x cost savings and 61% on-time completion rates.

Most-Used Project Management Software Features

1. Task Management

There’s a series of tasks and subtasks that need to be completed to launch a campaign. And they usually need to be completed by specific contributors in sequential order.
Your designer can’t get to work on the illustrations until the copywriter has provided the magic words, and your copywriter can’t do her thing until she has access to the completed brief.
And so on and so on.
Task management helps you assign the right tasks to the right people at the right time to make sure the campaign progresses smoothly.

2. Project Tracking

Project tracking takes a more high-level approach to managing your campaigns. It gives you global insights into campaigns, individual tasks, budgets, and timelines to ensure everything is on track.
Project dashboard and real-time analytics help you avoid bottlenecks and balance the workload between contributors.
And every project manager knows a campaign isn’t finished after launch—no, it’s just getting started. Now it’s time to track performance, identify successes, and learn from mistakes so that the next campaign is bigger and better than the last.

3. Collaboration

There are a lot of contributors and moving pieces necessary to launch a unified campaign. Think of everyone involved:

• Stakeholders
• Managers
• Content marketers
• Product marketers
• Creatives
• Legal teams
• Marketing agencies
• Analysts
• Finance
• And more

Everyone needs to work together to ensure things get done correctly and on time. Collaboration features empower your teams with feedback cycles, templates, repeatable processes, and ongoing communication channels.

4. Time Tracking

You need real-time insights into your employee’s workload to balance their tasks and deadlines. Plus, time tracking gives you attribution data to tie input and campaigns directly to revenue.
Data drives confidence, empowering you to refine your SLAs and improve your workflows and processes.

5. Resource Management

Resource management features help you manage schedules and human talent to meet deadlines.
Without resource management features, you’re just throwing tasks, names, and dates on spreadsheets—and they’re often unrealistic or inefficient.
Content Marketing Platform gives you bandwidth views for each team member, allowing you to drag and drop tasks to balance workloads in minutes. Your team can track time spent on each task, helping you allocate the right contributors, time, and budget moving forward.

6. Budget Management

Marketing management software doesn’t just get things done—it gets things done under budget.
Budget management features give you insights into your marketing spend, empowering you with details on individual marketing initiatives. Data like this lets you make informed decisions on the fly, like when to cut aspects of a campaign or reallocate budget when necessary.

Your Marketing Management Software Should Do It All

The right marketing management platform will align your entire campaigns—from start to finish and beyond. Let’s take a look at how a unified platform can make it come together.
And we’ll prove it all with Content Marketing Platform’s innovative marketing software.

Kick Things Off on the Right Foot

Campaigns come together collectively—not in siloed Zoom rooms, email threads, and Slack channels. Get things right from the get-go with proper planning and collaboration:

• Create Unified Campaign Briefs: Invite the right people to come together to work on shared campaign briefs. Not campaigns briefs that’ll get thrown in a cloud storage archive somewhere—but campaign briefs that’ll sit front and center throughout the project.
• Invite the Right Collaborators: Get your creators (whether that’s staff writers or external marketing agencies), decision-makers, and promoters on the same page.
• Build Realistic Workflows: Optimize your workflows to keep the right team members involved and informed to ensure every communication is on-brand, on-message, and on-time.

Content Marketing Platform’s integrated marketing solution helps centralize the way your teams plan campaigns. From shared creative campaign briefs to collaborative, customizable workspaces, you’ll have all the tools you need to get (and keep) everyone on the same page without ever leaving the platform.

Take Projects to the Finish Line

Tons of campaigns launch with grand intentions and a unified mission—however, many fall apart before reaching the finish line.
Once things are headed in the right direction, you’ll need to stay on top of the campaign with the right project management tools and task management control.

• See the Big Picture: Access a complete view of your project to ensure deadlines are on point and resources are allocated appropriately.
• Manage Workloads: Track time, monitor engagement, avoid bottlenecks, and hit every due date by understanding your team commitments and balancing their workloads.
• Maintain the Budget: Monitor the health of your campaign budgets to know what’s being spent and what’s outstanding so that you can make financial decisions before it’s too late.
• Collaborate: Empower managers, creators, editors, and even your legal team to work together with marketing templates, built-in editors, and customized workflows.

Content Marketing Platform’s easy-to-use workspace makes it easy to monitor everything from your tasks to your budgets to your workloads—all from a single, holistic view. Use Content Marketing Platform’s powerful-yet-flexible timeline, Gantt charts, and calendars to keep a pulse on what’s going on across every channel.

Launch with Precision

Congratulations! You’re ready to launch your campaign out into the digital world.
This is a milestone, for sure, but the project is far from finished—now on to the most important step.
Now (more than ever) is when all teams and channels need to stay aligned. You need to keep messaging consistent, dial-in your timing, and protect the brand.
It’s go time.

• Keep Messaging Consistent: Every message on every channel should be consistent with the right copy, assets, links, and more.
• Maintain Your Brand: Ensure the right assets go out the door, so no team uses an old logo or outdated font.
• Analyze Real-Time Results: Monitor which assets get used, how often, and by whom to provide agile on-the-fly changes and improve your future campaigns.
• Govern Your Assets: Centralize your content to avoid producing duplicate assets and grant easy access to all appropriate team members.

Content Marketing Platform makes it simple to ship your content. Shared libraries, asset tracking, version control, and streamlined reporting make it quick and easy to launch your campaign with cool, controlled precision.

Is Marketing Project Management Software Worth the Cost?

Some people choke when they pull up the pricing page for a marketing management solution. Unfortunately for them (and their now spit-splattered screen), they’re looking at the numbers in isolation.
Consider how much you’re currently spending on your marketing stack.
Think of the time-tracking tools, project management subscriptions, and analytics platforms you use. When you total up the costs of all of them, it’s bound to be way more than an all-in-one marketing management platform.
Plus, what’s the value of your time?
Some businesses spend hours pinching pennies, ultimately wasting the company’s resources. Think about the value of your project managers’, writers’, and designers’ time.
If you could save them valuable minutes, hours, and even days (yes, days) every month, wouldn’t it be worth a higher price tag?
Think about it.

How Do You Choose the Right Marketing Management Software Platform?

Do a quick Google search, and you’re bound to find an overwhelming number of marketing management software solutions.
But which one is right for your business?
Great question!
Don’t settle for any old tool—find one that fits your business’s unique need. Sure, you can adapt your business to use just about any tool, but that’s not ideal.
The platform you choose should be adaptable to your business—not the other way around.
If you’re managing teams of developers, then you’re better off using a developer-specific tool, like JIRA, Wrike, or Zoho.
And tools like workamajig and Hive work for siloed creative teams, but a creative team without a stronger marketing arm to promote the work is lacking.
However, if you’re managing marketing teams comprised of content marketers, product marketers, creatives, public relations, and the like, then your best option will be a marketing-specific management tool—like Content Marketing Platform.

Start Managing Your Marketing Projects With Content Marketing Platform

Content Marketing Platform isn’t just another project management tool—it’s a marketing-specific platform that’s mission is to “unleash the potential of marketing.”
We believe marketers spend way too much time doing work about work. We built Content Marketing Platform to get them out of the administration and back into the creative.
Content Marketing Platform has marketing in its DNA:

• Content Marketing: Streamline your content creation process from ideation to distribution.
• Creative Services: Automate intake and assignments so your creative team can get back to what they do best—being creative.
• Product Marketing: Build detailed launch plans that get the right content delivered to the right place at the right time.
• Marketing Communications: Collaborate and control your brand’s story and marketing activities across every communication channel.