There are dozens of posts on project management software for marketing teams. But very few of them actually consider what a marketing team needs.
Whether you work in-house or run an agency, marketing projects face challenges with:
- Scheduling, as you work toward hard launch deadlines
- Versioning and file management, as you create hundreds of design assets across different media types
- Capacity planning, as new project requests can arrive at any time
- Delivery, as you share completed assets with multiple clients with contrasting expectations and processes
That’s not to say that marketing teams don’t need features like time tracking, integrated communication tools, and reporting in their project management software — but they also rely on specific task management and team collaboration tools that the more generic posts on this subject tend to gloss over.
Here, I’ll focus on software that gets right to the heart of what marketing teams need. I’ll introduce Wrike, our work management platform, as the most effective way to centralize your project work and communications, and show you how to tailor our software to your marketing team.
Marketing agencies like Ogilvy Australia – and the in-house teams at the Estée Lauder Companies, the Texas Rangers, and the San Francisco Chronicle – manage their projects in Wrike. Find out how Wrike can work for your marketing team.
Wrike: The most powerful project management software for marketing teams
Wrike is a complete, scalable work management platform. With a range of customizable project management features, you can boost collaboration and productivity at every stage of your marketing projects.
You can find out about general project management frameworks, lifecycles, and best practices (and the Wrike features that support them) in our Project Management Guide. But now, let’s zoom in on the features that can change the game for marketing teams.
Present flexible marketing strategies from day one
If your marketing team works with different clients, you’ll have to adapt to different requirements, expectations, and creative goals. At the beginning of a project, this can lead to delays and misunderstandings as you find your groove.
But, when you kick off new projects with your team in Wrike, you can streamline the first phase by using these powerful features to build your marketing plan:
- Custom request forms gather crucial details from your clients, like their requested deadline, their budget, and the images they’d like to use for their content. As you gain experience, you can adjust these forms to collect exactly what your team needs to get started, and you can even automate your request forms to kick off a custom workflow for the types of design assets you’ll ultimately produce.
- Creative brief creation, either with information from your project intake or by using Wrike’s generative AI to build entire project plans from brainstorming and kickoff notes.
- Seamless communication from the start, including features to reduce the number of meetings it takes to kick off a new project. With Wrike, you can create marketing tasks with the files and briefs already attached, delegate tasks automatically, and even share snapshots to update your clients on your project progress.
From the very beginning of a marketing project, this helps you respond to requests quickly, start work efficiently, and document all the decisions you’re making.
This mix of tools creates the perfect balance for a creative marketing project. You have a standard process to make sure you’re completing the repetitive tasks associated with kickoff and planning, but you also have the flexibility to treat each of your projects as unique.
When you want to start your next marketing project in a workspace that’s tailored to your team’s needs, check out Wrike’s marketing campaign management template, which includes request forms, reports, and online proofing tools as standard.
Real-time capacity management for better resource allocation
Marketing teams can have fluctuating workloads. For example, in product marketing, you might face a surge of requests ahead of the holiday season. This can make it difficult to schedule your work, or even to know which new requests to say yes to.
When you add your marketing tasks to Wrike, and your team tracks their progress and time, you have all the information you need to overcome the scheduling issues that can crop up when you manage a busy marketing team.
- Instant delegation: All the marketing tasks you create in Wrike can be assigned to an individual team member or subteam. As soon as a new task lands on their plate — either after intake or because it’s reached a new stage in the workflow — they’ll receive an automated notification so they can plan their work effectively.
- Real-time capacity overviews: When new tasks arrive for your marketing team, you can delegate them based on your team’s current capacity. Every team member’s workload is displayed in Wrike, so you can see who’s available, and when, at a glance. If a team member becomes overbooked, it’s easy to reassign tasks — just click and drag the task to another team member who has the bandwidth.
- Automatic reporting: As you track your work in Wrike, we gather data on your team’s capacity and project progress and compare it to your past performance. You can use this information to generate reports on your workload and capacity management, which can help you identify the teams that need additional support and inform your future scheduling decisions.
All these features can help you schedule your marketing initiatives effectively, whether it’s to assemble all your deliverables before a final handover or to deliver work consistently over the whole lifespan of a project.
Stringent approvals for creative assets
Your digital marketing assets must adhere to a creative brief. This might be as simple as matching your written content to your tone-of-voice guidelines.
However, in some cases, an extra layer of approval might be necessary. Fields like fintech, for example, require strict compliance requirements for all the content you put out, so it will likely need to be approved by additional stakeholders.
The easiest way to make sure your content checks the boxes is by creating an approval workflow to bring in stakeholders with the right level of authority to sign off on your work.
For example, in Wrike, you can:
- Customize an approval workflow with all the steps your team needs. That could be a simple stamp from the project lead or a multistage approval workflow with an external client.
- Include reviewers and stakeholders outside Wrike by adding external users to your workspace. Simply email your clients from within Wrike and they’ll be able to view tasks for approval, attach files to them, and change their status to match their review decision.
- Record feedback so you can pass your learnings onto your team and ensure you’re continually updating your process to reflect it. Wrike’s approval workflows can also automatically route your completed files and comments to folders where you can access them later — for example, if you need to audit your project work.
- Eliminate issues with visibility on shared digital assets. By cross-tagging the tasks in your Wrike workspace, one task card can exist in multiple workspaces. This avoids duplication and helps reduce silos by connecting your marketing work to other company-wide initiatives or deliverables.
With Wrike’s approval workflows, you can be sure that you’re meeting the high standards required of your project work, whether you’re producing five design assets or 500.
As the number of deliverables scales up, it will still be incredibly easy to find, share, and recall your approved files whenever you need them.
Start with the creative asset proofing and approvals template, which helps you easily create and track approval requests for your design assets.
Access instant insights and analytics
When you use a mix of marketing project management tools instead of a powerful, multipurpose platform like Wrike, reports can be incredibly time consuming to generate. But without reports, your project schedules can slip and you can end up with frustrated clients who see you making the same mistakes time and again.
In contrast, Wrike automatically generates reports by filtering data on the tasks, time, and capacity information you’re tracking. These reports can be shared with your team to motivate them, shared with managers to show returns on the project, or shared with clients as an alternative to scheduling progress meetings.
With Wrike, you can:
- Automatically generate reports at regular intervals. An example could be a weekly project burndown report or key budget metrics, delivered to your inbox at the start of each new week.
- Get risk alerts when something threatens your project milestones. Possible threats include a team member who is over capacity or a too-high number of tasks to complete before your planned deadline.
- Use reports as a starting point to drill down and discover the reasons behind the risks to your project. Because reports are based on real-time data, you can use them as a jumping-off point to find out more about individual tasks or workloads in your project space. You don’t just see the bottleneck, you see why tasks are stuck there, so you can adjust your approach to clear it.
Wrike success stories: Results from real marketing teams
Hundreds of marketing teams have used Wrike to streamline their processes and scale up their businesses. The results speak for themselves:
- Sony Pictures Television delivers marketing projects 40% faster with Wrike. With dashboards and tailored project overviews for the multiple marketing subteams employed, Sony’s teams are sending 90% fewer emails in the course of their projects.
- Electrolux streamlines design requests and approvals with workflows, and brings guest users into the process to keep creative work in one centralized workspace. The time spent on projects has dropped by 30%, with 50% fewer emails landing on the design team’s desks.
- Hootsuite’s marketing and creative departments use Wrike’s proofing tools to streamline their process across 16 international offices. The team keeps marketing projects on track using an integrated calendar and resource management tools.
- Lead Express uses Wrike’s reporting, capacity management, and project views to keep subteams on schedule. Project managers have eliminated 80% of their spreadsheets, 70% of the time spent allocating workloads and managing resources, and they’re 50% more efficient overall.
I consider Wrike a large reason why we’ve been able to scale and grow as quickly as we have over the last five years.
James Cashmore, CEO and Head of Strategy
When you’re looking for a complete marketing project management solution, Wrike has it all:
- Customization centralizes your work, adapting to the needs of your marketing team so you can scale up without a hitch.
- Integration across your entire marketing workflow connects the tools you rely on, from your first planning meeting to your project retrospective.
- Cross-functional collaboration unites all your departments, so your marketing team doesn’t get siloed.
- Flexible software allows you to work creatively, optimize your process, respond to challenges during complex projects, and make a great impression on your clients.
More project management tools for marketing teams
While Wrike covers all the bases for a marketing team, I’ll admit there are some teams that can get by with more basic tools.
If you’re only struggling with one aspect of your projects, don’t have the authority to overhaul your entire process, or are looking for a solution you can implement in minutes, check out some of these more basic software options to support your work.
Team calendar tools for informed scheduling
All teams need a user-friendly project calendar, and marketers are no exception. Your team calendar shows the time you’ve blocked off for your projects, the dates you’re booked to work with external teams, and the strict due dates for your deliverables. When you have these milestones in view, you can track progress more effectively and make sure you’re developing a steady stream of content for your marketing campaigns.
Check out these tools for managing your project timeline:
1. Teamup: Team calendar with multiple views
Teamup is an online calendar designed for groups. You can enter all your upcoming dates into the platform, and then switch between sub-calendars and views like Daily, Timeline, and Table to get the precise overview you need for your campaign management.
Similar to Wrike’s cross-tagging feature, one Teamup event can exist in multiple sub-calendars, which keeps your team’s most critical shared deadlines in view. Plus, this tool includes time zone support, which helps distributed teams and international marketing agencies schedule their meetings accurately.
2. Calendly: Automated, integrated appointment booking
Calendly is a scheduling automation platform to help teams book their appointments. Instead of creating a string of emails or Slack messages to book a project meeting, users generate a link, which creates the event and adds it automatically to their calendar.
Calendly integrates with other project tools like video conferencing and invoicing platforms, and you can create booking links to reflect the different types of work you need to schedule. For example, a marketing team could create different scheduling rules for their internal progress reports vs. monthly check-ins with their clients.
3. Social Bee: Scheduling and publishing for social media
Social Bee is a scheduling and publishing tool for the social media specialists on a marketing team. Its content calendar feature helps teams plan, organize, and visualize their upcoming posts in multiple views — like grids, lists, and the classic monthly calendar.
As well as monitoring your shared content calendar, Social Bee includes features to manage engagements and view analytics data, and it integrates with social media essentials like Unsplash, Giphy, and Canva.
Workflow diagram tools for a quick project overview
The classic way to view a marketing project is with Trello — a Kanban-based task management tool that visualizes the assets you’re creating as cards moving through a workflow.
This can work well for small teams or projects with a limited number of deliverables, but it’s not necessarily the best way to visualize every marketing project. That’s why Wrike recently acquired Klaxoon, to bring visual collaboration tools into our work management offering. You can get more info on the acquisition here.
If you’d prefer a simpler platform, try these tools as an alternative:
4. GanttPro: Dynamic workflow diagrams for your project timeline
GanttPro lets managers make a Gantt chart timeline visualization quickly and simply, and it even includes templates to get started. The advantage of Gantt charts for marketing projects lies in highlighting the milestones and task dependencies that affect the way you manage your to-do lists. In GanttPro, teams can easily plan these into a project roadmap and assign tasks to specific team members.
As well as creating the Gantt chart and measuring your progress, GanttPro includes some communication tools to discuss project work without leaving the platform.
5. Lucidchart: Streamlined project visualizations
Lucidchart gives teams multiple options to visualize their project timeline. Beyond creating Gantt charts, this tool can generate process maps, flowcharts, and organigrams, which work well to keep teams on track and illustrate project plans in briefs and proposals shared with clients.
The workflow diagrams created with Lucidchart aren’t set in stone, either. It’s possible to adjust and update them as projects progress or to make tweaks for future project diagrams if a manager identifies a better approach.
6. KanbanFlow: Kanban task management for creative workflows
KanbanFlow is a back-to-basics Kanban board project overview that makes sense for smaller marketing teams that want an overview of their deliverables.
It includes some useful features like work-in-progress limits, which ensure a team is completing tasks rather than juggling lots of different design assets in the production stage. For marketing teams, this helps combat the common problem of ensuring consistent content delivery throughout a longer project.
Cards can be filtered for a cleaner project overview. To boost productivity, KanbanFlow also includes a Pomodoro timer.
Time trackers for accurate budgeting and resource allocation
Tracking your time helps manage your clients’ expectations and keeps your team motivated. It shows you how your project execution matches up with your project planning and gives you the data you need to hone your approach as your work progresses.
Wrike includes an intuitive time tracker, and we use this information in the reports we generate for your projects. Find out more here or consider these tools to slide into your existing stack.
7. Clockify: Timekeeping software for better resource management
Clockify is a time tracker and timesheet tool that reports on the time spent on different marketing projects and the subtasks within them.
The free plan covers unlimited users and includes basic activity reports on a team’s project progress and billable hours.
8. Timely: Time tracking and project management insights
Timely is a time tracker and reporting platform that records how a team is spending their work hours and aims to help team leaders uncover insights to streamline their process.
From a dashboard, managers have an overview of active projects, the time spent on them, the time budgeted, and their overall progress. This helps inform resource allocation and keep work on track.
Collaborative approval workflow tools
When you include collaborative editing tools in your content creation and approval workflow, you make it easier to raise the standards of the assets you’re working on.
Imagine how difficult it is to action feedback on a visual asset that’s been listed in an email. In contrast, when different members of your team can view the asset in real time and make suggestions as comments, editing and approval becomes a shared process.
Wrike includes a collaborative document editor and integrations with Adobe Creative Cloud that let you comment directly on visual assets and video. For more options, check out these tools:
9. Ziflow: Approval workflows for complex marketing assets
Ziflow is a proofing and approval workflow platform for creative and marketing teams. This software includes features to manage the creative workflow from ideation to approval, including integrations with Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premier Pro. As with Wrike, this ensures discussions about the asset happen on the asset itself, so feedback is fast, accurate, visible, and collaborative.
Ziflow is also designed for marketing teams whose assets have to pass compliance checks. When you need to create audit reports on completed projects, for example, this platform makes it easy to access the older documents and comments you need.
10. Bynder: Digital asset and workflow management for marketers
Bynder is a DAM platform with customizable workflows for creative teams. When the goal is to ensure that all the marketing content a team creates and schedules passes through the same rigorous approval process, this platform helps define the steps that make it happen.
In addition to approval workflows, Bynder includes a studio feature to manage content creation and workspace features to centralize all the assets you create for your clients.
Find out about how Wrike partners with Bynder to help your team create and distribute marketing content more efficiently.
Wrike: The best marketing project management software for creative teams
When you want a complete project management solution that adjusts to the specific needs of your marketing team, Wrike offers all the functionality you need.
- Stay responsive with the perfect mix of a solid project management framework and the flexibility to try creative ideas and respond to feedback along the way.
- Stay on track with real-time capacity management and task tracking throughout your marketing project.
- Stay on message with custom approval workflows and compliance checks to maintain your high standards across all the content you produce.
- Stay on top with reports tailored to the metrics your marketing team, clients, and managers need to know.
As mentioned above, our acquisition of Klaxoon combines visual collaboration with intelligent work management on one platform — no more switching between multiple tools.
Find out more about how to build your ideal marketing project space in Wrike. Contact our customer service team to book a demo.
