How Work Management Software Can Help You Meet Marketing Deadlines

Meeting deadlines is key to staying competitive in the highly competitive world of marketing. When working on a digital marketing campaign, launching a product or juggling multiple client projects, it’s imperative to stick to deadlines. Missing a deadline can mean losing clients, an open opportunity and wasted resources. But in addition to creating and scheduling content and campaigns, managing a social media strategy and developing creative assets, you also have to juggle client projects, emails, files and approvals – a lot of information to stay on top of. That’s where work management software can help. 

There are many marketing management software tools available to help with this, such as Aproove. These tools provide the what, the when, and the how, enabling marketing teams to structure workflows, hold them accountable, and avoid missing deadlines.   

On the Aproove blog today, we’ll discuss how such work and project management software can help your marketing team stay organized and meet critical deadlines.  

1. Centralized Task Management

The main benefit of work management software is that it unifies all your tasks in a single place. Most marketing efforts entail an eclectic mix of tasks: writing social content, creating content, building email campaigns, coordinating external vendors, sorting and proofing assets and so on. When we spread our task across numerous subsystems in the marketing ecosystem – be it platforms, spreadsheets or any other manual tracking mechanisms – it is next to impossible to find stuff when we need it. 

Work management software centralizes all this information, so deadlines, who owns what, and where within the overall project it fits in are all readily visible. It then facilitates team members interacting, managers tracking progress and the team staying on the same page with regard to goals. 

For example, Aproove lets marketing teams assign tasks to individuals within the team, assign deadlines to those tasks, and then track progress in real time. This can better keep the whole team accountable and can reduce the risk that a task will slip through the cracks.  

2. Enhanced Team Collaboration

Marketing campaigns are often executed by cross-functional teams consisting of content creators, designers, strategists and external agencies generating complex communications and feedback loops, which can derail a project if not addressed promptly. Marketing management software improves team work and collaboration by providing a flexible communication platform and file-sharing resources. 

Tasks, project boards, instant messaging, comments on tasks – features like these mean that teammates can communicate efficiently, even when they’re not physically together, eliminating the need to ping everyone in one long email chain or sit through hours of meetings waiting for feedback to a single point.  

Additionally, project management software has the capacity to send out automated notifications, so stakeholders receive notice when their input is needed. When a designer is ready with a draft of a social media post, for instance, the content writer and marketing manager automatically receive a notification, keeping the project moving without unnecessary lag time.  

3. Automated Workflows

This is the most powerful aspect of this type of work management software. In a marketing team, for instance, approvals can be routed automatically, posts scheduled automatically, reports generated. Automated workflows allow a project to move from one stage to another without anyone having to transfer work from a tray at one stage to another. Bottlenecks are minimized and cycles are sped up. 

For example, a marketing team can create an automated approval workflow for creating content: when the content is ready, it is routed to the manager for review. If approved, it is routed to the scheduling step; otherwise it loops back to the content creator with notes on edits that are required. Automating processes such as these saves time, reduces human error, and helps meet deadlines more consistently. 

4. Clear Visibility into Project Progress

One of the key causes of project deadlines not being hit is that no-one knows where a team is up to with a project. This is where project management software helps, by creating real-time dashboards on where tasks and projects are at. 

Managers can know at a glance whether the team is ahead of schedule, on track, or behind schedule If we know where we’re going and know the milestones along the way, it’s easier to correct course for errors: we know the route we’re supposed to be on. 

For instance, if you are running a marketing campaign in a short timeframe, you can monitor progress as it happens and shift people and resources or re-prioritize if one aspect of the campaign falls behind schedule. You avoid a last-minute scramble and missing the deadline entirely.  

5. Prioritization and Time Management

These are the essential project management software tools that help a marketing team order and prioritize its workload (urgency vs importance) in an often frantic environment, where harried teams can get stuck in Covey’s ‘urgent but not important’ quadrant of activity and overlook the essentials needed to maintain the business.  

With work management software, you can group tasks in columns that represent deadlines or importance, and use features such as sorting mechanisms, due date fields and dependency tracking, to make sure that the right team members know what to do next. 

For instance, if you’re running a campaign, there are some tasks (such as content creation) that need to be completed before others (such as publishing posts, or analyzing the data). Work management software makes sure that a task is done in the correct order, and that the team is focused on the right thing at the right time.  

6. Resource Management

Limited resources, whether people, time or budget, are a common obstacle faced by marketing teams. Allocating resources can cause delays and deadlines to be missed. Marketing management software helps teams to allocate resources better by showing team capacity, workload and project timelines.  

For example, when one team member has too much to do, the software will flag that member, so that a manager can reassess the project’s workload and make sure that it can be finished on time, or add new staff.   

7. Deadline Tracking and Reminders

Not only does work management software let everyone know exactly what the deadline is for any given task, but there are also reminders for time-sensitive tasks so you can stay on top of the entire process. And most tools also let you create milestones, so you can break down projects into smaller chunks over which you have individual deadlines. 

For instance, if you have a project involving a product launch, you can determine specific deadlines for each step – market study, content preparation, publication on the socials and paid advertising – and the status of these steps will be sent to each team member by the project management software as the deadlines approach, so that they can avoid last-minute rushes.  

8. Data-Driven Decision Making

Having the data available allows the marketing teams to make informed decisions: have the campaigns worked as they should? Is it possible to deliver all the elements on time? Is the budget reaching its goals in terms of engagement with the audience? The work management software tracks every essential performance metric in real time, enabling the teams to take data-driven actions to hit the deadlines. 

For instance, if one campaign is underperforming, a team might be able to tweak a strategy by making a few smart tweaks, or if other segments driving activity is picking up, the team can shift more resources behind the successful initiatives to make sure they reach their velocity goals for a specific time period, and that campaigns align to deadlines properly and still perform. 

Hitting marketing deadlines is a complicated but vital aspect of any campaign, and work management software can help marketing teams stay on track by improving workflows, increasing collaboration, and automating repetitive tasks, helping to ensure timely delivery. Whether your marketing juggernaut is producing content, running a campaign on social media, or creating a multi-channel marketing strategy, software can help you acquire the structure and visibility needed to meet your deadlines with ease every time.