Why Marketing Teams Absolutely Need a Project Manager

Do you need more time in your day? If you had that, what could you do? Enjoy some more food, take a deep breath or maybe just get more done.

Whether you’re a one man team or a large corporation, a project manager with the right tools can help take a lot off your plate and make it seem like you have more hours in a day.

Almost every team can benefit from a project manager. In this article, I’m going to focus on how I absolutely need one when it comes to marketing.

Scheduling

Everyone works more effectively with a task list and a schedule, but not everyone is disciplined enough or has the time to plan it out. This can lead to missing little things you meant to do or rushing to finish it at the last second.

When it comes to a large campaign such as a new email series or ad setup, it’s easy to skip proofreading. You know what you’re doing, and you know you don’t make mistakes. But you can, and you will if you rush to complete a project.

Someone in the project manager role will be able manage your schedule for you and keep you on task. It will leave you much more organized, and you will have less to worry about. Not to mention how much stress will melt away from knowing that you didn’t skip over any tasks to save time.

A schedule is just a plan for your day or week, and as Benjamin Franklin said, “Failing to plan is planning to fail.” If I didn’t have a detailed calendar, I’d miss many appointments and project deadlines.

Team Collaboration

Whether you have a team or are planning on eventually building one, a project manager needs to be at the center of it. You need someone that can ensure collaboration on a projects, and a dedicated project manager will help you effectively do this. This allows things to run much more smoothly and helps ensure that pieces aren’t missing.

For example, a simple email build can easily take several people. You have the designer, the writer and the person that puts it together in the email system. Each person is focused on their task, and they assume that everyone else did their jobs correctly. Your project manager will be able to catch any issues since they should know what the end result needs to be.

One thing I’ve noticed from having a project manager lead marketing projects is that things are usually created properly the first time, maybe with some small tweaks. Since they’re in the middle of it all, they can see what everyone is working on and make sure it is all seamless.

A project manager makes it easier to assign projects and tasks to specific team members. You just need to explain everything to them once and then they can handle the rest. This saves you a lot more time versus having to talk to each person individually and following up with them.

Communication

Communication is the most important part of successfully completing projects, and with a project manager you’ll have someone handling all of the communication with your team.

Project managers should be seen as an extension of yourself and everyone on your team. Sometimes they’re the bad guy hounding everyone to get things done, but this is necessary to keep the projects moving forward. When your project manager tells someone that something is needed, it should be as if you were telling them.

If you don’t have one centralized person handling the communication, you open yourself up to a game of telephone tag where things can get lost in translation from person to person. Or, confusion arises when one person thinks another person is supposed to do something.

Miscommunication is something you simply cannot afford when multiple people are working on a project. By having one manager that everyone communicates with, nothing slips through the cracks.

Not only is your team’s communication critical but so is the external communication with stakeholders. I have had several clients where I needed to repeatedly send emails to get something important from them. Or, I was just trying to get their approval on something, and I couldn’t move forward until they responded.

This is hard to keep track of and very time consuming. I prefer actually doing the work and getting things done. Now that I have a project manager that will chase the client for me. I only have to send one email to them, and they handle the rest.

Organization

A project manager’s goals are focused on the success of the project. For the project to succeed, they not only need to be organized themselves, but they also need to make sure that everyone else on the team is organized. Especially when there are several items on the to-do list.

When you need to build an email campaign, a new campaign in Adwords, and complete development projects, there are a lot of moving parts. A lot can go wrong.

Even the best teams will miss small tasks. Having a project manager will put another set of eyes on your team and stop these tasks from being forgotten.

Founders and managers often worry too much about day-to-day details. Sometimes it’s helpful to be in the trenches with your team and doing things: I know I still like to write email copy. However, to help move your business forward, you need to be focused on what you can do to move it forward. Let someone else manage the operations for you.

Relationship building

An underrated skill when executing a project is managing relationships with people. When I worked for a large tech company, I would always consider how to approach someone for a task. Usually I tried to not push too much or demand a lot; it kept the relationship healthy. Every interaction sets precedence for future interactions. If I was regularly the bad guy, my tasks would fall in priority. But if I managed the relationship properly, it would really come in handy when I had a hard deadline and I needed their best work quickly.

Your project manager needs to be on top of your team but they also need to cultivate a good relationship with everyone since they will be talking to everyone regularly. This is much easier than trying to force a team, that may be miles apart, to be friendly.

It’s About Saving Time

Nothing is more valuable than your time. A project manager will free up your days and leave you with more free time to grow your business or maybe even spend more time with your family. Once you’ve hired one, you will wonder why you didn’t do so sooner.