Product Roadmapping and PM Tools for Marketing Activities

When people who work in marketing hear the words “project management,” their eyes glaze over, and they assume that the conversation will drift into a discussion about software development.

After all, marketing isn’t about management. It’s about creating demand, writing killer headlines, and growth!

But as the growth arrives, so too do additional demands on the marketing team. Instead of just creating YouTube videos or writing blog content, the marketing team now needs to create Instagram posts and TikTok videos.

Plus, three new hires are joining the team next week and must be brought up to speed on how to do everything.

Oh, and there’s a big conference next month that the company will be presenting at!

The point of this extreme example is that project management is a friend of marketing. There are benefits to introducing solid project management processes, even for smaller teams or solopreneurs who handle their own marketing activities.

The biggest of these benefits is getting more done. Marketing is often a game of numbers, and volume equates to growth. I.e.

• The channel with the larger number of useful videos will win YouTube’s algorithm race
• The blog with the most helpful articles will receive the most traffic from Google.
• A company that can produce constant content across an omnichannel range will grow.

Now that we’ve made our case let’s move on to ways of introducing proper project management methodology into marketing activities.

The best project management methodology for marketing

There are a bunch of different formal project management methodologies:

• Waterfall
• Agile
• Kanban
• Scrum
• Lean
• Hybrid

They all have their place. Some approaches, like Kanban, were originally used in manufacturing (specifically building Toyota cars), but most have been forged in the realm of software development.

For this reason, they’re not a perfect fit for many marketing activities because there’s not a product being built but rather a web of loosely related activities.

The methodologies to note from the list above are Agile, Kanban and Scrum. You can combine parts of these approaches for a super-effective marketing management methodology.

Here’s a short rundown of the best parts of each methodology.

The underlying principle behind Agile is to stay fluid and respond to change instead of following a detailed plan. It also preached the idea of building a big vision in small bits that can stand on their own feet, so there’s always progress to show.

Kanban offers a nice visual layout of tasks, rules around how many different tasks a team can be working on concurrently, and a defined workflow for declaring a job completed. Typically, there’s a backlog of tasks to be completed. Someone on the team takes responsibility for working on the task until it’s time for a different person to review it before the job is considered complete.

Scrum preaches the idea of completing “sprints” of work. A sprint is a period, usually 1 to 4 weeks. The project team meets to review the backlogged tasks and agree on which jobs will be completed during the sprint. At the end of the sprint, they meet again to talk about what worked well and what needs improvement so the next sprint can be better than the one before.

Combining the three methodologies provides a cyclical framework for marketing teams to figure out the highest priority marketing activities, avoid working on too much, visually communicate where everything is at, and stay fluid about the changing nature of their business.

The retrospective meetings held at the end of the sprint are almost the most important part of this approach. They give the team a rare opportunity to provide feedback to their colleagues on what could be improved.

A strong methodology is a good start to tuning up your marketing project management. Another great technique for big launches or events is creating a Product Roadmap.

Product Roadmapping for marketing activities

Product Roadmapping in software is a plan that details everything required to get the first version of a product off the ground. It follows a four-part process;

1. Goals
2. Flows
3. Features & release plan

Here’s a quick outline of the process so you can see how you can apply it to a marketing context.

Goals

First up is defining the goals. It sounds like an obvious place to start, but different stakeholders are usually involved in big marketing events, and they all want to achieve particular things. For instance, the executive may be looking to launch a new campaign to drive partnerships.

Having a solid understanding of the goals and objectives of an extensive marketing event is like agreeing on where the finish line is before a race commences.

Defining goals usually takes one long, organized meeting with the right stakeholders and someone who knows how to ask the right questions. Sometimes the people pushing for the event or launch understand what results they want but have difficulty expressing it when asked directly.

Flows 

With the goals figured out, it’s time to draw up the execution path. In software development, this involves creating workflows to show how the steps a user takes when performing particular activities.

In marketing, however, it’s better to map out how the promotional activities and content will drive users toward the goal.

This usually looks like a funnel or a series of connected steps that push a user down the acquisition path toward conversion.

By mapping the activities out and indicating how they’re catering to purchase intent, you can spot weak areas or places where additional activities may help a user move towards converting.

Features & release plan

The features and release plan step should be dedicated to capturing the detail of all the marketing activities that will happen and their order of operation.

There are a bunch of questions to answer in this step:

• What social posts will go up? When will they launch? Who is responsible for managing them?
• Will we run a paid campaign? What’s the budget? Does it need a warm-up period?
• Are we planning on writing a new email sequence?
• Do we need a new landing page? Will it be A/B tested? Who will write the copy?

All the activities required to get the launch off the ground should be captured, assigned to someone on the team, and written up with enough detail that there’s no confusion about what’s happening.

Writing up a solid Product Roadmap will keep everyone on track and help your launch go smoothly. But this kind of plan really only has value for one-off events. Day-to-day activities can benefit from different project management tools and approaches.

Tricks for day-to-day marketing management

Here’s a handful of other tricks and tips we recommend applying for your marketing activities.

Build a content calendar

Assuming your marketing activities involve posting to social media, YouTube, or writing blog articles, then creating a content calendar is a super effective way to get ahead.

The least effective approach to producing regular, high-quality content is to do it whenever you remember that it’s time. Besides the fact that it’s easy to forget, there’s no way to get ahead under this approach.

Once you’ve laid out a plan for the content that needs to be created over a period of time, your team can start preparing future posts.

We’re a big fan of creating content calendars on Google Calendar, but there are a million different tools you can use here. A good tool for this job will be able to do these things:

• Send you reminders
• Easy to share and update
• Allow you to mark content jobs as complete

Adopt a project management tool

Along the same lines as introducing content, the calendar is using a project management tool. Most marketing teams have probably already taken this step because it helps so much.

Project management tools take a bit of time to get used to, and it can be hard to encourage the entire team to commit to the process. However, you get out of these tools what you put in. If your whole team is committed to adding tasks for each other, you’ll see a drastic improvement in efficiency.

There is no shortage of excellent project management tools to choose from, but the one we recommend is Paymo. It provides a handy Kanban board, a regular task-list view, and a tidy interface to keep your efforts focused.

Meta Kanban view in Paymo: view team’s tasks on a visual board

Paymo also allows you and your team to track which activities your time is being spent on.

Record your team’s time

Recording time is one of the most annoying things to do as an employee, but it has an incredible value from a managerial perspective. Time is money, and if your organization’s money is being spent on activities that aren’t generating a return, then it’s time to change tact.

The trick with tracking time is making it into a game. Setting weekly goals for your team to record a particular number of hours on each activity and competing to see who can hit their numbers most frequently helps make it feel like less of a chore.

Use a structured file management system

The days of saving Blog_Article_Final_FINAL_V.1.5 to your desktop are over. There’s no excuse for not using Google Drive, Dropbox, or some other shared cloud hosting service to keep your team’s documents organized.

For best results, your file management system should follow a rigid structure. The top level should have up to 10 folders. Within each folder, there should be a standard set of directories.

Something like this:

01 – Management
02 – Content
03 – Support
04 – Launches
05 – HR
06 – Knowledge base

The trick is to keep your subfolders structured and repeatable. Avoid adding documents where they don’t belong. Ultimately, this means that when your team has grown to 50 people and you’re creating hundreds of blog articles a week, you can quickly find a post written three years ago without wasting time searching through randomly named and sorted documents.

Wrapping up

Adopting project management approaches to your team’s marketing efforts adds real bottom-line value. We recommend choosing a methodology and getting good at it, onboarding a project management tool, and writing product roadmaps ahead of your next big launch for maximum success!