Marketing project management is not for the faint of heart. It’s a combination of two big roles in a fast-paced environment, with complex workflows, busy campaigns, and a structured marketing project management process.
It’s no wonder that so many projects fail, with one study showing that out of 50,000 projects, 71% failed to come in on time, on budget, or with a satisfactory result.
If these are the types of challenges you’re dealing with, we’ve got good news: Wrike is the perfect platform for you.
Built from the ground up over 19 years, Wrike is beloved by marketing project managers everywhere for its powerful features, time-saving automations, and fully customizable workspaces. It streamlines workflows, accelerates projects, and offers in-depth analysis that can help take campaigns from conception to completion.
That’s what makes our platform the first choice for marketing project management teams in household-name organizations like Ogilvy, Marketing Architects, and Electrolux.
As a content marketing manager myself, I know just how powerful Wrike can be. For our marketing team, it’s a one-stop shop that helps us plan, execute, and track campaigns efficiently — read on to discover how.
What is marketing project management?
Marketing project management is the process of planning, organizing, and controlling marketing-related projects and campaigns. While every team will have its own unique approach, it usually involves defining project goals, objectives, and scope, as well as allocating resources, assigning tasks, and tracking progress.
Effective marketing project management enables marketing teams to deliver campaigns and projects on time, on budget, and within scope. If it’s done right, it can also ensure that we as a team meet our organization’s quality standards and achieve the planned business outcomes.
Benefits of effective project management
Effective project management is crucial for marketing teams to achieve success. When we put effective marketing project management processes in place, we experience:
- Improved project planning and execution: With a clear project plan, our marketing teams can execute tasks more efficiently and effectively.
- Enhanced collaboration and communication: Effective project management fosters better communication among team members and stakeholders, keeping everyone on the same page.
- Increased productivity and efficiency: We find that streamlined processes and clear task assignments lead to higher productivity and efficiency, especially in a busy environment.
- Better tracking and reporting of project progress: For us, regular monitoring and reporting help keep projects on track and identify any issues early on. That’s the key to course-correcting quickly.
- Improved stakeholder satisfaction: Delivering projects on time and within scope enhances customer satisfaction and helps us meet the goals set by our leadership team.
- Increased consistency in processes and quality of work: Standardized processes ensure consistent quality across all projects, even when working cross-functionally.
- Enhanced team collaboration and accountability: Clear roles and responsibilities promote accountability and teamwork. This is a big benefit for teams with remote workers like ours.
- Refined organization and reduced risk of errors: Organized workflows minimize the risk of errors and ensure smooth project execution. Automation helps here, too.
- More thoughtful planning and decision making: Effective project management encourages strategic planning and informed decision making, preventing too many ad-hoc adjustments.
Challenges in managing marketing projects
It’ll come as zero surprise to the marketers among us that managing marketing projects can be challenging. Most can be attributed to the complexity and variability of marketing campaigns, but others are just part of life in an unpredictable business environment.
Here are some of the pain points we regularly experience in our role as marketers for Wrike:
- Managing multiple stakeholders and their expectations: Balancing the needs and expectations of various stakeholders can be difficult, particularly in times of intense deadline pressure.
- Coordinating with cross-functional teams and external vendors: Ensuring seamless collaboration among different teams and vendors is essential in a global company like ours.
- Meeting tight deadlines and budgets: Just like everyone else, we manage our marketing projects with strict deadlines and careful budget allocations.
- Ensuring consistency in branding and messaging: We operate in 140 countries, so maintaining a consistent brand message across all channels is crucial.
- Measuring and tracking project success: Accurately measuring the success of marketing projects can be complex, but it’s a vital part of our reporting function.
- Managing scope creep and changes in project requirements: Because of fluctuating needs, projects often face changes in scope, which need to be managed effectively.
- Dealing with technical risks and market risks: Every day brings a new surprise in our world, which means that marketing projects are subject to various risks that need to be mitigated.
- Ensuring effective communication and collaboration among team members: Clear and effective communication is vital for project success, especially when juggling creative, design, product, and sales teams.
One of the most common problems encountered in any marketing team or organization is ineffective strategy execution. This can be down to poor visibility, inadequate communication, fundamental workflow faults, a lack of organizational support, or a combination of all of the above and more.
It’s a real problem: According to Harvard Business School Professor Robert Kaplan, 90% of organizations fail to execute their strategies successfully. This often comes down to a gap between vision and reality.
Modern marketing managers will be acutely familiar with this challenge, as strategic OKRs or KPIs initiated in Q1 often become buried under a mountain of more urgent requirements by Q4. So, what can be done? The solution is to connect strategy to execution from start to finish.
This is where Wrike is the perfect platform for marketing project management, delivering all the tools you need to ensure end-to-end delivery of strategic goals:
- Complete visibility: Goals can be set at MLT or ELT level and distributed across company-wide dashboards.
- Customized request forms: Something as simple as adding a “how does this serve our strategy?” question to each creative request can help keep everyone aligned.
- Real-time updates: Lots can change in a marketing environment, but course-correcting fast is key to staying on track.
- Automated reports: Keeping stakeholders informed can help ensure that strategy is being implemented correctly.
- Data analysis: Powerful tools like Datahub that can analyze campaign performances are a great way to measure strategic success.
Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) research revealed that 61% of survey respondents acknowledged that their firms often struggle to bridge this gap between vision and reality, and just over half of strategic initiatives were completed successfully. That proves that there’s a vital need for software that can support strategy. That software is Wrike.
Key skills for a marketing project manager
While there’s no one-size-fits-all list of skills that a successful marketing project manager should have, some of the most important boxes to check include:
- Strong organizational and communication skills: These are essential for managing tasks and keeping the team informed, even in pressured circumstances.
- Ability to prioritize tasks and manage timelines: Good time management is crucial for meeting deadlines and ensuring project progress.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills: Basic skills, sure, but these are very important for identifying issues and finding effective solutions.
- Ability to manage budgets and resources: An ongoing challenge, this skill ensures that projects stay within budget and resources are used efficiently.
- Strong leadership and team management skills: We all know a good leader when we see them. They help in guiding our team toward a shared goal through collaboration and cooperation.
- Ability to adapt to changing project requirements and priorities: Flexibility is key in the dynamic marketing environment, which is forever shifting in line with events and trends.
- Strong knowledge of marketing strategies and tactics: Staying up to date with what’s on offer is essential for planning and executing effective marketing campaigns.
- Ability to measure and track project success: Familiarity with analytical tools is important for evaluating the effectiveness of marketing projects.
- Strong attention to detail and quality control: Got a good eye for a typo? That kind of skill is vital in making sure all aspects of the project meet the company’s high quality standards.
Our talented designers at Wrike put together a handy infographic with the top 25 project management skills (yes, 25!) vital for successful project management. How many skills can you tick off the list?
The standard phases of a marketing project
I know as well as you that no two marketing projects are the same. They’ll vary wildly depending on the goal, team, media, and market. But generally speaking, most marketing projects typically go through several phases, including:
- Planning: This is the part where we define project goals, objectives, and scope. We’ll usually also allocate resources and assign tasks here.
- Organization: Then we’ll move onto coordinating with cross-functional teams and external vendors, and establishing project timelines and budgets.
- Execution: The busiest element is the execution, when we start implementing project plans and tracking progress.
- Control: Keeping a close eye on project progress by monitoring its development helps us make adjustments as needed to stay on track.
- Delivery: This is the fun but nerve-wracking stage, when we deliver the project and start measuring results and evaluating success.
- Closure: Just as important is the post-release analysis, where we spend time documenting lessons learned and evaluating project success.
It goes without saying that these phases are not mutually exclusive and may overlap or occur simultaneously. Sometimes, we’re juggling all five stages at once, especially during busy periods like our annual Collaborate conference. Effective marketing project management involves managing these phases to ensure that projects are delivered on time, on budget, and within scope, while also achieving our internal goals and impressing our external audience.
Purpose-built features for managing marketing projects
One of the most exciting things about working with Wrike is that we’re always evolving, with more than 134 new product updates released last year. And more than a third of those came directly from customer suggestions.
That means that Wrike is a leading marketing project management software that has been built in direct response to customer needs. For marketing project managers, those requirements have become more complex over the years, requiring a set of features that can help plan, execute, and track campaigns — all from one place. Wrike has powerful features that can simplify and streamline all of the functions of a marketing project manager, including:
1. Comprehensive task and project management
There’s a phrase that we hear a lot from Wrike customers: “If it’s not in Wrike, it doesn’t exist.” What they mean is that by centralizing every creative brief, content document, design asset, marketing task, management project, and overall campaign in Wrike, we can access everything we need in seconds. It’s one easy-to-use single source of truth that offers exceptional transparency among stakeholders.
Next-generation dashboards can generate a 360° view over every part of our operations, so our marketing project managers can then assign tasks, set deadlines, and track progress in real time, ensuring no detail is overlooked. Marketing agencies, departments, and organizations can now monitor every part of the project lifecycle, uniting marketing teams with everyone involved, from product to legal and beyond. Wondering what it looks like? It’s colorful, easy to scan, and yet super detailed, like our dashboard below.
2. Gantt charts, Kanban boards, and timelines
Marketing project managers tend to be both creative and organized. That’s why we love Wrike’s host of visual work management tools like Gantt charts and Kanban boards. They help us to plan and visualize our project schedules, set milestones, create dependencies between tasks, break plans into phases, and track deliverables. Personally, I like to use timelines and tables so I can see my work breakdown structure easily, like in our Gantt Chart view below.
Whether we’re organizing a project schedule, an email marketing campaign, or a corporate event like Collaborate, our visualization tools help us stay on top of every due date.
[Wrike’s] different views are super helpful. We use the Gantt chart to understand all of our overlapping projects and timelines. It’s really valuable to understand the full scope of work happening against a calendar view.
Nicki Batelli, Vice President of Operations & Production
3. Real-time collaboration and communication
One of the main reasons why Wrike is the preferred platform of large multinational enterprises like Siemens, Walmart, and Electrolux is the ease with which teams can communicate.
Wrike facilitates seamless comms among team members, stakeholders, and clients through comments, file sharing, task descriptions, and more.
Approving an asset is a prime example. Once, that might have involved multiple emails, a large WeTransfer file, and an inordinate delay. Now, teams can create a task, upload a design file, ask for feedback in context, discuss it in the comments, compare versions side-by-side, and share instantly with internal colleagues or external stakeholders. In real life, that’s a simple task that looks just like our approval software below.
Overall, the functions of Wrike are helping our team. It’s such an easy and efficient tool for us.
Johan Alm, Design Coordinator
Our Ultimate Guide to Marketing Project Management has more details on the myriad ways you can use the software to keep everyone talking, wherever they are in the world.
4. Enhanced visibility and resource management
Dentsu’s latest Global Ad Spend Forecasts pinned last year’s global advertising spend at $772.4 billion, with 5.9% growth projected for 2025. But how to manage all these resources effectively? In an era of tightening budgets and increased oversight, it’s never been more important to keep track of every dollar spent.
Our Chief Marketing Officer, Christine Royston, recently authored a marketing resource management (MRM) guide, outlining some of the key components you should look for when conducting market research for project management software:
- Budgeting tools that can help you pull detailed data from multiple sources
- Robust planning features with advanced Gantt chart capabilities
- A creative review facility to streamline approvals internally and externally
- Process management or workflow visualization features to manage operations
- A seamless connection to digital assets needed for daily marketing tasks
Wrike has all this and more, featuring live dashboards with a bird’s-eye view of all resources, capabilities, and budgets and advanced analytics for valuable insights that can help with forecasting, planning, and risk management in the future. Every dashboard can be personalized to suit its owner, but a standard executive dashboard might look like ours below.
5. Hundreds of integrations with third-party apps
As a fellow marketer, your morning probably looks a little like mine. Log into Wrike, send a message via Slack, take a call via Zoom, consult results on Tableau, write an article in Google Docs, and comment on a design in Adobe. Other members of our in-house team members will be using Microsoft Teams, Facebook Ads, Twitter, Mailchimp, Dropbox, and much more.
How? Through Wrike.
With more than 400 integrations with other key marketing tools, platforms, and apps, Wrike is the platform we need that lets us keep the tools we love. We can weave in and out of each piece of software seamlessly, using all their combined capabilities to produce great work fast. Our integrations below are just a small sample of what’s available directly from Wrike.
Advanced automation and game-changing AI
Here at Wrike, AI is nothing new. We’ve been pioneering the technology for more than a decade, harnessing the power of machine learning to build our renowned Work Intelligence® suite. Our objective, then and now, is to make work flow faster, easier, and more efficiently.
Over that time, we’ve been perfecting our automation rules, which now offer incredible time-saving benefits to all users. Our marketing project managers love using workflow automation to take care of mundane tasks, speed up processes, and keep momentum moving by:
- Automating workflows, projects, or custom item types
- Accelerating sign-off by automating proofing stages and approval statuses
- Applying bespoke rules to individual tasks or across all your projects
- Creating guardrails to ensure tasks flow in a certain order or within defined limits
- Issuing regular automated notifications to stakeholders and clients
- Ensuring up-to-date reporting based on automated data entry
- AI content creation: Type a couple of words and watch as AI crafts expertly written messages, detailed descriptions, and even entire creative briefs from scratch. Take back the hours you used to spend laboring over the keyboard!
- AI editing: Perfect and polish all your content by tasking Wrike AI with checking for mistakes, adjusting the tone, and even translating into multiple languages — the ideal solution for international enterprises.
- AI summaries: We all have that colleague who likes to write 1000 words instead of 100. Wrike AI can summarize descriptions, documents, comments, and more, to generate a TL;DR so you get the gist, fast.
The recent Wrike 2024 Impactful Work Report showed that the power of AI isn’t being fully harnessed yet in our industry: most of the marketers surveyed felt that AI or automation is assisting them, but at different levels, with the technology supporting leaders with almost 47% of their workload and employees with only 16%.
If you want to help your marketing team to start saving time and money quickly, check out the “10 Must-Use Wrike AI Features” infographic. This instant download on our AI capabilities includes Wrike’s copilot for work management, next-gen analytics, and built-in Datahub — all ideal solutions for helping modern marketing project management teams juggle ever-changing resources and responsibilities and channel vast amounts of information into one centralized space.
Tailored solutions for multidisciplinary marketing teams
While our creative output can be wildly varied, a lot of the nuts and bolts of a marketer’s role are actually quite predictable and repeatable. That’s why our marketing experts built a wide range of industry-specific templates for marketing, designed to speed up simple processes, ensure uniform methodology across teams, and get projects started fast.
Wrike offers a comprehensive project management tool that helps streamline all marketing operations from start to finish.
Five of the most popular include:
- Content operations template to help streamline all marketing operations from beginning to end
- Marketing campaign template to help plan, launch, and track campaign performances
- Media management template to help juggle multiple social media campaigns and monitor progress
- Content calendar template to help track assets from their first draft to final publication
- Event planning template to help plan, organize, and deliver every type of event, from launches to conferences
At Wrike, the creative brief template is a life-saver: we adapt it to ask for specific details, limited due dates, particular assignees, and other details to keep the whole project timeline and project scope well in check.
“I always encourage my clients to create templated creative briefs for each of their project types, like ad campaigns, eBooks, videos, etc.,” says Roberto Wantland, operations expert and Strategic Customer Success Manager at Wrike.
“Some work management tools like Wrike even make it possible to build out conditional request templates, where the questions dynamically change based on the information the requester provides as they fill out the brief. This allows you to ask the right questions that are most relevant to that specific client or project type.”
It’s this type of wide-ranging customization that sets Wrike apart from the rest. Our customers appreciate the platform’s ability to adapt to the specific needs of a marketing project plan, no matter the scale, helping marketing teams stay organized and on target.
We also know that every marketing team is unique, so your software should be, too. Wrike is incredibly flexible, offering advanced customization that means you can work your way, every day. You can personalize your workspace, build a bespoke dashboard, create custom item types, and design individual and team workflows to automate and accelerate your work.
If that all sounds complicated, don’t worry — it’s not. Our fresh-looking interface is easy to use, fast to learn, and supported by 24/7 assistance if needed.
Wrike is an incredibly intuitive tool that allows easy recording, reporting, and project management — while not being too scary for creatives to use.
Cheryl Venable, Senior Manager of Operations
Unrivaled scalability and flexibility for growing teams
Effective project management for marketing is crucial for growing teams to stay organized and efficient, particularly as they grow. A powerful software solution with analytics, blueprints, and templates can help organizations scale seamlessly, expanding their capabilities to meet increasing demands.
By applying successful processes and lessons learned from current projects, Wrike helps marketing teams everywhere improve the effectiveness and consistency of future projects. That’s the key to unlocking unparalleled growth.
If you’re planning on growing your team, department, or organization, pay particular attention to the ease of onboarding. Even with a platform as straightforward as Wrike, learning new software is still a challenge, especially across multiple teams, departments, and locations. There’s an investment in terms of time and training, even if it’s only short.
That’s why it’s so important to choose your own marketing project management tools and software wisely — make sure it’s one that will scale with you as you grow, facilitating rather than hampering your rise to the top.
Wrike is exactly the type of project management software that a growing marketing team needs, offering all the powerful features you need today, along with the advanced functionality you’ll crave in the future.
Plus, in one of the industry’s most exciting announcements of 2025, Wrike acquired Klaxoon, a leading visual collaboration platform that supports global customers like Microsoft and Coca-Cola. That means we now offer live whiteboard features as well as nine visual collaboration services and tools, including Board, Memo, Session, Adventure, Network, Quiz, Survey, Question, and Mission.
Featuring hundreds of ready-made templates, Wrike powered by Klaxoon is now even better suited for marketing project managers, helping to enhance brainstorming and ideation, improve marketing strategy and planning, and facilitate seamless remote collaboration in a wide range of industries.
With Klaxoon, we power better communication, and we’ve reduced the amount of emails sent and received by 54%.
Stéphanie Seznec, Innovation & Transformation Officer
The key to making marketing project management flow
NVIDIA is the perfect example of an incredibly successful and fast-paced company that uses our AI-powered software to streamline its workflows, even at its most complex. “We use Wrike, not just for resource and project management, but we also use it for project telemetry and customer visibility of what we do and our actions, and everything is bubbling up to the most senior level,” says Lior Ofer, Vice President.
Watch our video “How NVIDIA innovates with Wrike” to see how these two power players work together in perfect synchronization.If you want to join customers like NVIDIA and become 40% more efficient, reduce emails by 85%, and cut meetings in half, it’s time to take a free two-week trial with Wrike.
Not only will Wrike make your life as a marketer easier and your projects more successful, it will also tick every box when it comes to maximizing ROI. Start using Wrike for your marketing projects now and watch how your team — and bottom line — benefits from easy efficiency, collaboration, flexibility, and scalability.
