Key Software Tools to Succeed in Marketing Projects

Taking into account today’s business efficiencies, marketing PM (project management) is one of the key business management activities to take the highest opportunity in an organization for improving performance and increasing the overall business growth. A kind of computer program (software) that allows performing the marketing function efficiently through using the principles of project management and planning, is important to success in marketing PM.

Such software paves the way for focusing marketing project managers and planners on analyzing customer orientation and investigating ways for satisfying customer needs through developing detailed plans, scheduling marketing projects, analyzing and mitigating risks, monitoring performance, building marketing project reports and measuring success.

In this article we’ll describe several tools that help establish a working environment in which marketers, analysts and planners can efficiently plan, do, monitor and report marketing project initiatives.

Three Goals

When marketing and project management are unified into a single solution, business managers need to get a better understanding of the new unification. Because both marketing and project management have specific goals that are not necessary similar and crossing, the unification “marketing project management” creates a series of unique goals and objectives.

Here are three key goals:

• To guarantee expected results. It’s about the right understanding of desired results through setting clear and comprehensive deliverables.
• To understand processes. It’s about all the process for planning marketing projects to understand and control bottlenecks.
• To ensure higher performance. This goal of marketing project planning refers to managing daily productivity of employees and tracking overall ROI of marketing projects.

Regardless of the methodology applied to staff training and planning, these three goals are always current, and managers should take the goals into account when implementing the chosen marketing project management methodology.

The 6-step Model

There’s a common model for planning marketing projects considering the goals. It’s a 6-step model for getting practical results for marketing project planning and management. Let’s see the following 6 steps of the model.

1. Preparation. This is the first step of marketing project planning that refers to the Planning Phase in project management. The step includes such activities as team selection, determining customer orientation focus, budgeting.
2. Research. At this step managers can use marketing project planning software to organize and conduct market research aimed at determining the target audience, selecting the product for advertizing and promotion, measuring company competencies, identifying competitors.
3. Development. Once research data is obtained and analyzed, the next step is to develop a framework for using marketing project management tools. It’s about website development, product development, team development, etc.
4. Implementation. The step is about implementing solutions for promoting and advertizing the product. Website optimization, affiliate marketing programs, email marketing, social media marketing etc. are tools for implementing marketing project management ideas.
5. Tracking. The step is about customer analysis, ROI analysis, performance analysis, etc.
6. Reporting. The final step is about creating reports on marketing projects, summarize performance and measure efficiency of marketing project planning.

Key Software Tools

The 6-step model can be used in managing and planning marketing projects of any size and type. To use the model marketing project management software is required. Such software features a set of key tools. Let’s briefly describe these tools.

• Planner.The basic tool is for planning marketing projects. It is bets for the first step за the model.
• Collaboration. People participating in collaborative marketing projects need to communicate with each other and share information. This will increase team efficiency during the implementation phase. Users of marketing project software can send feedback to managers and comment project activities.
• Measurer. This tool of marketing project software allows using key performance indicators to measure project efficiency and estimate team productivity. It will be best for the tracking step of the given model.
• Tracker. This tool for marketing project planning allows users to monitor and track projects in real time mode. It will be best for managing the tracking phase.
• Reports Builder. This tool of marketing project management software allows managers to create reports on projects and keep track of project results. It’ll be best for reporting phase.