There has been an exponential increase in digital marketing projects and digital transformation initiatives in recent years, especially as many organizations were forced to make the switch to remote work — and cancel in-person events. To successfully manage these projects, the project manager needs to have a deep understanding of different aspects of creative marketing, such as the design process for digital ads or email headers or the approval and quality assurance (QA) process.
To minimize common hurdles and roadblocks (and the headaches that often come with them) and make the project more enjoyable for everyone involved, the project manager needs to make sure the right processes and tools are in place. While you may not necessarily equate processes and tools with fun, believe me: once they’re in place, everyone can focus more on the creative aspects (and less on the administrative) of each project.
As a digital marketing veteran for nearly a decade, I have managed creative projects at various scales across different industries for both enterprise corporations and small businesses. Although each project is unique, there are some common tips that can prevent you from waking up in the middle of the night or experiencing recurrent stress headaches when managing these types of projects — whether you’ve got prior experience in digital marketing or not.
1. Choose the right methodology and project management tool.
One of my colleagues shares some great advice on how to determine the right methodology to use for your project in his recent blog post (see tip #2). Even if you’re a scrum master with rich experience in Agile methodology, however, the nuances and painstaking details that are part and parcel of complex creative projects can still drive you crazy from time to time. Getting the required font, for example, could take longer than expected — pushing your timeline back with it. Or, navigating your company’s complex procurement process could take several weeks, causing you to miss other deadlines that are dependent on that single line item.
Before project management tools became widely available, marketers mainly relied on email and Microsoft® Excel. While Excel can certainly get the job done, a project management platform can boost collaboration and productivity with built-in approval workflows, real-time status, and automated notifications. Built-in reporting and dashboards can also deliver timely insights, so you can easily share important metrics and fine-tune as you go.
Throughout my career, I have used Jira, Smartsheet, Monday.com, and Airtable to manage creative projects. Jira is my personal favorite because you can easily setup workflows, report on progress, and manage backlogs in Agile projects. Each one has its pros and cons; choosing the right project management tool for your organization’s needs is key. Just make sure you choose one that has workflow capabilities (otherwise, you may as well use Excel!).
2. Use the right Digital Asset Management (DAM) platform.
Most companies start out managing their digital assets, such as images, banners, digital ads, brochures, and videos, in Dropbox, SharePoint, shared drives, and individual team members’ Documents folders. Once organizations reach a certain size, level of complexity, and geographic reach, maintaining strict control over digital asset usage and brand compliance becomes untenable. Colleagues in different departments, business units, or even countries don’t realize the assets they need even exist and end up creating their own. Someone uses a three-year-old version of the latest brochure or — gasp! — company logo.
A DAM lets you consolidate, update, and archive all of your digital assets in one central location for a single version of the truth — and make them easily searchable for everyone. I’ve managed several large projects while working with a DAM. A couple years ago, I helped a large consumer brand launch Adobe’s DAM (now branded Experience Manager Assets), which is one of the most popular and powerful platforms for global organizations. It’s designed to make it easy for in-house teams and creative agencies to work together collaboratively on asset creation and distribution, as well as track the utilization of each asset.
Seismic is another great platform that features the ability to setup customized asset review and approval workflows and provides version control for any changes or edits to your assets. This is extremely important in some industries where regulations are tight and legal approval of marketing assets is mandatory. Additionally, reporting makes it easy to track how your sales team is utilizing each asset and which assets outperform others, and you can schedule your reports to automatically be sent via email on a regular basis. The DAM platform that’s right for you will depend on the size of your organization, the number of assets you need to manage, whether you have offices in different countries, and if you have any industry-specific challenges that need to be addressed.
3. Understand key business processes and the approval matrix — both internally and with creative agencies.
It’s very common for companies both big and small to work with creative agencies on their creative projects. As the project manager on the brand side, you’ll likely be working with the project manager on the agency side — and more often than not, their processes will look very different than yours. If you’re involved in the creative agency vetting process at the start of the project, make sure you ask whether they outsource any talent — it can have a great impact on your day-to-day interaction with the agency. Freelancers have their own schedules to manage, and an unexpected resource shortage or delay could hinder the progress of your project.
It has become a trend in recent years for big enterprises to develop their own in-house creative agencies — for example, leading brewer and consumer brand Anheuser-Busch founded draftLine in 2018. Some of the biggest benefits include a much shorter turnaround time, keeping data in-house, easy asset sharing across internal regional teams, and, of course, savings on agency fees.
Regardless of whether you are working with creative agencies or in-house teams, it’s critical to understand the key business processes and confirm the approval matrix for different types of digital assets at the kickoff of your creative project. When developing your project timeline, talk to the key UI/UX designers and developers on your project team. If they can’t actually realize your vision, or do so in the time you’ve given them, your already agreed-upon project timeline will go through more than a few iterations.
Internal stakeholders in different departments or business units have their own business processes to follow, so make sure you fully understand them from the get-go to avoid any future bottlenecks. And, if your project is part of a larger program or campaign, it’s important to align with stakeholders on the acceptance/success criteria for each phase. It’s always a good practice to budget some buffer time for the approval process so it won’t hurt your overall project timeline if there are any delays!
Digital projects require the right digital tools
If you’re not currently using a project management tool or DAM, what are you waiting for? That is, unless, you enjoy a constant barrage of back-and-forth emails, meetings, and phone calls to review, edit, and approve each one of your digital assets.
These projects may not be the most glamorous, but doing the work to bring on one of these tools lets you actually focus on the project and high-priority issues instead of spending a great deal of your time on outreach, chasing status updates, and figuring out the correct project workflow and approval matrix for every project you work on.
We’re digital marketing experts, so we know tech and we know creative. We take our experience working with hundreds of organizations and apply it to every new client we work with. Whether you’re looking to implement, migrate, or replace your MarTech solution, are looking for some help navigating new marketing trends and processes, or would like a hand with the heavy lifting of email campaign execution, we offer a wide array of services that help bridge the gap between creativity, strategy, and execution for maximum results.
Grace Chen is a Project Manager and certified Project Management Professional (PMP) with BDO Digital’s Demand Generation Group. She received her Master of Business Administration with a focus on Services Marketing from Arizona State University. With 10 years of rich experience in digital marketing strategy, MarTech, and project delivery in the consumer goods, manufacturing, software, and professional services sectors, Grace has worked closely with top creative agencies to help some of the most recognizable global brands deliver high-performance integrated marketing projects.
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