Marketing skills every project manager needs

Not only have the last 18 months forced us to evolve into new working schedules, it’s also been an opportune time to review our existing working patterns. Across industries, companies are relying more and more on project management to track deliverables and to quantify a lot of their overall processes. There are a lot of parallels to be drawn here to marketing, and marketing teams, either in-house or agency, that are going through a similar phase, in terms of data-driven insights for their campaigns. In this blog, we will discuss which transferable marketing skills for project managers that you can utilise to stand out from the crowd and be the best that you can be!

Problem Solving Skills
Problem solving is a prime element of any project. It is the act of identifying, developing and producing a solution. There are various techniques you can use to deal with a project’s problem. As an example, if your project is constantly missing deadlines, the issue could be a lack of communication from the project manager, but could just as easily also be a lack of resources. Identifying the problem and the solution as early as possible is a surefire way to improve your chances of a successful project. From there, implementing the solution into action is the next step, and often a project within itself.

Time Management Skills
As Parkinson’s Law states: “if someone is given a day to complete a task that ought to have taken an hour, the task will often be stretched out to fill the time restraint you have”. It’s frustratingly easy to waste time if you aren’t properly managing it amongst your team.

With this in mind, there are some easy pitfalls to avoid, such as:

• Not equipping the team with the adequate resources to complete the task
• Hiring the wrong person for the wrong job role
• Not adequately leading or communicating the overarching project objective, which can lead to project individuals not feeling motivated

Detail Orientated
The art of detail orientation lies in focusing on all aspects of your current task, without forgetting the big picture. As either a marketer or a project manager, you will already know that the smallest of details matter. Any project that has a chance of succeeding will have numerous moving parts – the best project managers are the ones that can organise these parts and deliver accordingly for the most seamless execution.

Budgeting
In a marketing role, managing your budget is a cornerstone of a successful campaign, as it is for a project in the PM world. As a project manager, it is your responsibility to deliver the project within the cost restraints.

In order to stay within your pre agreed cost restraints, there are a number of top-level budget management tools that can help.

Negotiation
Both marketers and project managers must be good negotiators. For project managers, you would be forgiven for thinking that this is undertaken almost exclusively with external parties, such as vendors. However, you are regularly negotiating upwards to your internal stakeholders as much as negotiating downwards to your project team. Firstly, you need to call on your negotiation skills to bring a team member on board for a project, but also in-project should there be scope creep, where your time or cost restraints move and become stricter.

Leadership
As mentioned above, defining a ‘good leader’ in project management is not only down to perfecting your communication, it is also how you communicate to your team. Factors such as your personability, the language – and body language – that you use and your character will all play a part in this.

Not only this, it is imperative that you lead by example in terms of work ethic, particularly in the harder times of a project where heads may drop and motivation is lowered.

Combining the leadership and negotiation elements, Albert Mehrabian’s 7-38-55 theory attempts to attribute how much of communication is verbal and non-verbal. This theory suggests that just 7 percent of communication is conveyed using spoken word, 38 percent through tone of voice and 55 percent through body language. Learning just how important tone of voice and body language are will improve your own negotiation skills and will further avoid any potential miscommunication during vital project stages.

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