What are the key features and benefits of using a marketing project management tool?

In my experience, executive level reporting is the most difficult yet important reporting feature. This reporting is for the same people who will support the investment cost and champion implementation so it has to add value to them specifically.

Before you jump into a centralized dashboard, you should define your optimized workflows (the process of how work gets done in the team), so you're tracking the right milestones. Workflows can include development, review and approval steps/stages.

The best project management tools allows customization of the dashboard information for each person or role. A creative may be overloaded by the nitty gritty details, but that information will be important to a PM.

I know you can integrate a marketing dashboard into other marketing comm tools like Slack. My preference is a marketing management dashboard that also has some level of built in collaboration / communication features. It's a personal preference to use 1 or 2 tools over 3 or 4.

It's helpful to have a tool that allows a team to turn notifications on or off as determined by team preference. No one wants a million pings on a single topic. While automation is great, be sure you have the ability to make manual modifications to workflow, timing, assignments, tasks and dependencies as needed. In my experience, seldom are "standard" timelines or tasks truly standard.

Communicating in context is essential to quickly understanding the situation and what is needed. Platforms that allow communication to happen at the document, task, project, program level help teams spend less time “switching” throughout the day.

Ideally, views and formats can be personalized for each user. Some tools provide time tracking capability, which can be helpful when determining base standard timing or to determine resource allocation.

In my experience no two projects are alike yet they are all connected in some way. Therefore, a platform must allow flexibility to manage work using different techniques (e.g. Kanban, Scrum, Waterfall) while still connecting the data for reporting, resource management, budgeting, etc.

Analytics can be as basic as the number of projects created in a given year to detailed reporting such as the amount of time spent on specific tasks by specific people. Sometimes out-of-the-box tools require custom development so that certain metrics can be captured. The most versatile tools provide the ability for super users to easily add data fields and/or calculations without having to go to a developer.

I don't think there was one marketing tracker/tool I've used that also tracked marketing performance and ROI. Usually that was a system like Tableau or multiple spreadsheets. Definitely a game changer to have marketing investment (budget) and ROI integrated in a marketing tracker.

I remember the struggle of getting our marketing efforts audited when I worked in financial services. Compliance and being audit ready is critical in marketing management tool.

In my experience there are two ways of looking at security. There is Cybersecurity to ensure your data is protected, then there is access for users. Your platform needs to allow for easy customization of access so you can truly integrate internal and external team members to the platform.

I’m my experience scalability is important but I see too many teams spend too much time discussing features they will likely never use. Start simple and prioritize adoption of basic features (e.g. project plans, resource management, communication) then scale. It also helps to launch a platform with a subset of an organization to get quick wins and build a coalition of support before attempting a full scale launch.

There are dozens of tools available. To help you determine which one is right for you and your team, gather requirements from cross-functional stakeholders and conduct a comparative analysis based on those criteria. Criteria could include out-of-the-box features, ease of use, look and feel of the interface and dashboard, ease of customization by the resident administrator, reporting capability, price and more.