How to Become a Creative Project Manager in a Marketing Agency

Creative project managers and their teams in marketing agencies often enjoy a lot of creative freedom and have enough space to think outside the box when working on products and campaigns. You may be using a mix of creative resources to share your client’s message in an effective, impactful way that will resonate with their consumers.

However, having creative freedom is not sufficient to be an excellent creative project manager. In fact, too much freedom can be puzzling:

• Where do you even begin with the project?
• Which tools do you have to implement?
• What talents and media should be involved?
• How do you help your team of creatives show its best?

As a project manager, you play a crucial role in leading your team to accomplish the set client goals. So, let’s have a look at how to become a creative project manager in a marketing agency and bring all your creative endeavors to success.

How to Become a Creative Project Manager

1. Pool and Guide Your Creative Team

As a creative project manager, it’s your responsibility to lead a team of individuals who have the skills you need for your project’s deliverables.

Leading a team of creative individuals can be different from working with other groups like software developers or accountants. Creative marketing employees’ jobs create something that doesn’t exist yet, which is challenging and tough to get perfect right away. A lot of your leadership will involve brainstorming, collaborating and often asking for them to revise their initial ideas, so it suits the project’s overall goal.

2. Be Imaginative

With your imaginative outlook and creative expertise leading the project, you and your team will stand out from your competition with an innovative, effectively-executed campaign.

As a creative, you can determine what is quality and notice fine details to improve your project. You’ll also have an understanding of what’s achievable in your time frame and what is unrealistic.

3. Focus on Empathy

When managing creatives, you’ll need to offer constructive criticism or choose a different approach from the creative’s first idea. When sharing your input, you need to do it in a manner that won’t cause the artist to feel discouraged.

Artists can be sensitive when it comes to their work, so you need to offer helpful feedback to guide their creative process to suit the project’s requirements.

4. Stay Logical and Disciplined

As a creative project manager, you need to have discipline. It’s your responsibility to hone in on the creative process so you and your team remain focused on the client’s needs.

Hence, it’s pivotal to establish some standard procedures for everyone to follow, clearly define performance requirements and have a thought-through, step-by-step action plan. This way, it will be easier to keep the situation under control and prevent chaos.

5. Establish Time Parameters

While your project involves promoting your team’s free thinking and creativity, you also need to add time limits. Your creative members don’t get carried away or delay the project’s efficiency. Remember that your client is on a timeline too. To maintain a positive relationship with them, you must meet the overall deadline date.

As a creative project manager, you need to rein in your time by estimating tasks and aiming to complete certain project stages by certain times or dates. This will keep them accountable and focused on achieving the overall goal. These deadlines also offer multiple opportunities for you to monitor progress and find any details that may need revisions or redos before reaching the client.

6. Initiate Your Plan and Brainstorm Ideas

At the beginning of a project, you will receive your client’s brief. That’s when you will need to learn the project requirements, plan your budget and build your team. Together, you will develop your ideas to reach your client’s marketing goals. Your members will be assigned roles and responsibilities to fulfill to complete the project successfully.

In this stage, you will choose the strategies and collaborative methods to help you work together on your project and reach the deadlines established during this phase.

7. Monitor Project Progress

As your team is working to create their project features for the overall campaign, it’s essential to continue monitoring employee productivity and ensure your team moves in the right direction with their content.

To succeed with this task, make sure to establish a structured schedule to check on your team members and their creations. Conduct weekly meetings or breakdown draft stages (outline, rough draft, 1st draft, etc.) for you to approve, so you are sure that every move they make will fulfill your client’s intentions.

8. Review and Analyze Your Project Results

As your team members complete their assigned creative tasks, it’s time to combine all the parts into one complete campaign or product. You and your team can review the full campaign’s look, fine-tune any flaws and blend all components.

Once you approve the completed result, you’ll send it to your client for their approval and make any revisions requested by them. Once they’re happy, they may test the product on their customers and gain feedback for any necessary changes to bring as much success as possible in their campaign.

9. Organize Project Launch Meetings

Project launch is the climax point in any creative project management process. And your main responsibility here is to ensure your product or campaign is flawless and ready to publish. That’s when project launch meetings come in handy:

• They gather all project stakeholders together for a final review
• They allow you to find any previously undiscovered mistakes and ensure that the team has met all the set clients requirements
• They let you discuss how the product or campaign will be launched and explain who’s responsible for what once more

Doing all that, such meetings help to reduce the risks inherent in every project launch, promote better quality control and guarantee a higher level of customer satisfaction.

10. Use the Right Project Management Tools

As a creative project manager, it’s your job to continuously review your team’s progress and bring out the best quality of work to fulfill the needs outlined by your client. You will be the authoritative figure for people whose job is to rely on their imagination.

Fortunately, there are resources to help you keep your team on track as they work on their designated creative tasks. Using valuable time tracking software like actiTIME will help you monitor their productivity as they work toward your project deadlines. Having this information will help you determine when to intervene and motivate members to stick to the scheduling or learn if they need assistance with their tasks.

With actiTIME, you can see how all your marketing project pieces are coming together and make appropriate judgment calls for a completed campaign that accomplishes your client’s marketing goals.

Ready to Become a Better Creative Project Manager?

As a creative project manager, you could end up working with a range of departments in your marketing agency, from web designers to video editors, to fulfill your clients’ goals of spreading their brand awareness and promoting their services and products. No project will look the same as they will entail various personalized approaches according to their types of business and target audiences.

While working with creatives and promoting imaginative idea-making, you need to set the marketing agency project’s ground rules, so the idea is focused and achievable. As the creative project manager, you must find the perfect balance between being an idealist and a realist.

As a creative project manager, it’s your job to guide your team’s creative workflow. This is done by setting stages for your process to run naturally and efficiently. You need to establish a workflow, so it makes sense as you follow step by step.

When the creative project is being implemented, it’s also essential that you monitor all moving parts and keep them on track. Hence, don’t hesitate to sign up for a free actiTIME trial today to cross off this item from a creative project manager checklist and keep your process under control with ease.