Blog for marketers and marketing teams

Professional marketing project management is becoming an ever greater challenge within marketing teams and marketing departments. After all, the ad hoc organization of the average marketer today is no longer aligned with the complex marketing environment and ever-increasing pressure from above in the organization. I see 3 major drivers for marketing project management.

Many marketers use (or abuse) Excel for everything: task lists, budget monitoring, page distribution of publications and also for planning their projects. Excel is without a doubt the global market leader for marketing planning tools. Doesn’t that sound crazy? A spreadsheet used by marketers as the tool for marketing planning?

The communication plan is one of the cornerstones of a professional marketing policy. Marketers who work without a communication plan are condemned to work ad hoc within a multitude of tasks with deadlines. In other words: hopping from task to task is not the most ideal way to conduct a communication or marketing policy. The communication plan draws the lines (vision) for the future, divides the umbrella concept of ‘communication’ into different projects, gives peace of mind and puts all noses in the same direction.

Participation in one or more public fairs or trade fairs is part of many marketing plans and budgets. Anyone who plans an event knows that there are many steps in a planning process that must lead to a successful trade fair participation. From my point of view – as a marketing consultant and founder of a planning tool for marketeers – I see a lot of ad hoc work during this planning process. Marketers run from deadline to deadline and never get a grip on or an overview of the planning process for the trade fair. I plead for a radical turnaround, away from ad hoc work and rushing to the next deadline. The solution? Divide your fair trade participation into 6 clear stages, with detailed workflows attached to each stage. In this article I sketch the 6 key stages for a successful trade fair participation and give you tools for workflows and trade fair planning.

Marketing agencies and marketing teams work together on campaigns and marketing projects. But how far does “together” extend? In practice, after a briefing, the agency starts working internally, reporting and planning via mail, Excel, pdf and meetings. The one party, the agency, executes; the other party, the client, gives feedback. This is repeated until the campaign or project is completed. This works great for creative projects such as rebranding. But what if the agency actively participates in campaigns, for example for content, advertising or PR? Should “together” not really be “together”, in a shared marketing planning? Utopia according to one, because an agency organization does not correspond to a team organization with a client. Hard reality according to us, because marketing technology offers perfect solutions.

How do you put together an efficient marketing team? What do you do internally, what do you outsource? Due to recent developments in marketing the answer to that question is no longer that simple. That’s why we are happy to explain which specialists are indispensable within your dream team.

Completing a project on time and within budget, while achieving the required quality level, is the essential task of a project manager. And, he(*) is consciously or unconsciously hindered from not succeeding in that mission. What does a project manager have to do to ensure that his project suffers as little inconvenience as possible?

The pressure is almost palpable in the weeks just before participating in a trade fair, one deadline following rapidly on another. These are stressful weeks in which plans often go awry for anyone who finds it difficult to get a good grasp on the planning. Nevertheless, there is no reason why marketing planning with regard to trade fairs should be difficult. A carefully compiled and rigorously executed trade fair plan will give you peace of mind and good returns, both during and after the trade fair. In this article, I will not only describe what a professional trade fair plan looks like, but how you can set to work with it in concrete terms.

Do you find it hard to structure your projects according to project groups? Good news! Now it’s possible to apply Tags to projects.

Do you organize events and webinars on a regular basis? Are you dealing with recurring publications? Do you want to standardize your product launches? We’ve got some great news for you!

Up till now, it was only possible to use statuses in the context of projects. But it also comes in handy to add a status to your tasks and campaigns. That’s why we’ve added it.