Marketing Project Manager: Requirements and Responsibilities for Success

It’s safe to say:

• You’d be awesome
• Your company and team would love you
• You’d have a happier, more fulfilled career

You would finally get everyone on the same page and focused on achieving project goals while nailing every deadline.

Ah, the good life.

However, you will face several challenges along the way.

For starters, marketing project management can feel overwhelming. There are tons of moving parts you need to account for, especially if you’re managing several projects and team members.

Fortunately, you don’t need much experience to pick up the basic skills and knowledge required to plan and manage your team’s projects. Project management is a complex professional field, but marketers can implement basic concepts and use the right marketing project management software.

Besides, a marketing project manager has a cross-competency role requiring them to blend the abilities that make a project manager or marketer successful. Therefore, it’s essential to learn the skills needed to get the marketing project manager job done.

In this post, we will cover the roles and responsibilities of a marketing project manager and the essential skills you need to keep your projects on track.

What is a Marketing Project Manager?

A marketing project manager is the job title for the person who plans, controls, and implements strategies tied to marketing drives. It means you bear the responsibility of transforming your project team’s ambitions into reality.

This all-encompassing role requires a high-level view of many different parts including stakeholders, budgets, and deadlines. It also calls for extreme attention to detail, a mind for prioritization, and the ability to solve problems as they arise.

A marketing project manager also ensures that company projects meet set deadlines and that errors occurring throughout the process are as few as possible.

As a marketing project manager, it is your task to pinpoint all your team’s undertakings. After identifying these tasks, you strategically assign them to relevant marketing team members.

Supervision is another critical role that marketing managers play. You’re responsible for managing the marketing project and the project team.

Additionally, you work with people across different departments with disparate mindsets. This requires a unique skill set to ensure they remain connected and work together to accomplish the set goals.

What Do Marketing Project Managers Do?

With so many variations of a marketing project manager’s roles, you might be wondering what exactly falls under their purview. In a nutshell, these are some responsibilities that form the job description of a marketing project manager:

• Working together with the marketing director to structure an actionable marketing strategy. Once the marketing or media director creates strategic marketing campaigns, it’s your job to implement their vision.
• Creating and managing the content calendar. Today’s digital era sees practically every marketing drive involving a continuous content creation plan, including blog posts or marketing content on social media platforms. You create and manage an integrated marketing calendar to ensure everything remains on track.
• Working with content creators and writers. Established companies often have full-time designers and writers churning out marketing content. It is your job to work with them all through content creation.
• Budgeting and setting timelines. You need sufficient financial knowledge to be responsible for budgeting for a marketing campaign. It’s also your job to create project timelines and ensure every team member sticks to them.
• Establishing and maintaining external relationships with all relevant foreign players. All companies must deal with external players such as vendors, and it’s part of your job to establish and maintain these relationships.
• Quality assurance. You must ensure that the marketing project meets the highest attainable quality standards.
• Content incorporation and dissemination. It’s part of your job to ensure content reaches clients and prospects using various channels like social media.
• Measurement. For every piece of marketing content your team creates, you need a way to measure its feasibility and return on investment.

Essential Skills of a Marketing Project Manager

If you’ve ever managed any aspect of a project before, you know it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. It’s essential to understand what skills you require to identify the gaps in your skillset and start growing your capabilities.

Successful marketing project managers need a range of technical and soft skills to get the job done. In addition, you need to understand project management principles, ethics, and best practices.

The most significant part of your job is getting everyone involved in the project on board and rowing in the same direction. Also, it helps to keep all participants motivated and informed to ensure maximum production.

Below are eight skills marketing project managers use.

1. Leadership

If you’ve never considered yourself a leader, it’s time to change that, and fast.

Marketing project managers need to have excellent leadership skills because their primary task is leading projects. As a skilled leader, you set the vision that others will follow, motivate your team, and make yourself available to overcome any hurdles and roadblocks that occur.

Often you will find yourself balanced between two stakeholder groups — operational and strategic. You must gain the trust and buy-in of every project member and senior management to bring your vision to life.

From an operational perspective, you need to exhibit leadership skills whenever you introduce new tools and enforce project timelines. You also need to ensure every team member is on the same page.

2. Communication

Communication (both verbal and written) is a critical skill you need to do your job. It’s a good thing those come naturally for marketers; otherwise, you’d be in trouble.

Project managers spend a considerable chunk of their time formally or informally communicating. Therefore, the position requires crystal clear communication with the people collaborating on a project, such as marketing designers, copywriters, and developers.

Good communication skills are also essential when working remotely to overcome barriers such as limited availability, lack of non-verbal indicators, or technical issues.

As a rule of thumb, always establish best practices from the start. Select your communication tools carefully, set daily check-ins, and proactively reach out when needed to ensure everything runs smoothly.

3. Time Management

Experienced marketing project managers understand the precarious nature of deadlines, which are like a house of cards. If a stakeholder misses one, the rest come tumbling down.

You are responsible for managing your time and everyone else’s. Working remotely further complicates matters since it is harder to monitor progress and ensure all set deadlines are reasonable.

It helps to have frequent check-ins, smaller tasks, and soft deadlines for deliverables to manage the progress and raise red flags before they become bottlenecks.

4. Budgeting and Resource Allocation

All projects are subject to resource constraints, so budgeting and allocating are crucial to marketing strategies and campaigns. You need to factor in every expense to reach the target ROI and deliver within the cost constraints.

According to “Marketing in Quarantine,” a March 2021 internal survey with Sirkin, 11% of marketers noted incremental investments in their companies’ resource management tools. Therefore, selecting the right budget management tools to avoid underspending on crucial campaigns or overspending on your project is critical.

5. Problem Solving

Every problem that stakeholders face when working on your marketing campaign is your responsibility. Problem-solving skills are critical on the job, and you need to learn and hone them as quickly as possible.

An excellent place to start is learning the fishbone diagram. It’s a cause and effect diagram that lists as many possible root causes of a problem on one side and the final problem statement on the other.

6. Organizational Skills

Project managers on a marketing campaign keep everyone and everything organized and running smoothly. As stakeholders focus on their tasks, your job is to ensure that the entire campaign comes together to achieve the KPIs and set goals.

7. Negotiation and Conflict Management Skills

Not everyone on your team will agree on everything every time, and it’s your job to resolve conflicts when they arise.

Additionally, marketing project managers are constantly negotiating — from hammering out the project’s initial scope with c-suite management to managing the daily operations with team members. Therefore, expect the project to put your negotiation skills to the test from start to finish.

8. Teamwork and Collaboration

On any given project, managers likely oversee multiple people working on various pieces of the greater whole. Hence, it helps to have excellent teamwork and collaboration know-how.

As per a January 2021 internal survey with Sirkin, 80% of marketers believe improving collaboration is essential. Thus, marketing project managers need to ensure everybody shares their data to align the entire team.

Marketing Project Management Software

The work of a marketing project manager is demanding and requires as many of the skills above as possible. However, you also need to incorporate the right technological tools and platforms to help you run your marketing campaigns.

Marketing management software is one such platform that helps marketing teams plan and execute their campaigns. Developers pre-build it with all the tools and integrations required in managing workflows, collaborating, organizing, and executing your creative assets.

Content Marketing Platform’s innovative marketing software is a unified platform that aligns your entire campaign from start to finish.

It centralizes how your marketing teams plan campaigns from shared creative briefs to collaborative, customizable workspaces. It also provides you with all the tools you require to keep everyone working on the same page without leaving the platform.

Ready to give Content Marketing Platform a try? Get started for free