526. Simple ways to project manage your marketing work 🧙

Free Notion template and links to good tools

Hellooo 👋 So happy to have you here. I’m Kevan. I have spent 15+ years as a head of marketing for some cool tech startups. Now I’ve co-founded a brand storytelling business called Bonfire. We do coaching, advisory, and content. If you identify with creativity and marketing, we’d love for you to join us.

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If you have a moment, I’d love your input on personal development and L&D resources — what you love, what you’d use, what you wouldn’t, etc. Should just take a minute or two! (We’re developing some cool stuff in this space at Bonfire.)

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Marketing project management template

Photo by Sumaid pal Singh Bakshi on Unsplash

Two of the bigger, systemic problems you might have to face as a marketing leader or marketing teammate are these:

1. No one knows what anyone else is working on

2. No one knows when something can be expected to get accomplished

Those are obviously two pretty big problems, tactically and existentially!

Of course, this is why a $7 billion software category exists around project management. Everyone knows it’s a problem, and most teams are willing to pay to solve the problem.

It’s also why templates and tutorials are so valuable. One of the things I often share in this newsletter is templates and resources that have bene helpful to me over the years. (I’m always grateful when others share, too; here’re some templates from Notion’s former brand marketing leader Kira Klaas.)

So without further adieu, here are some of the ways that I’ve organized marketing projects in the past and links to the templates I’ve used.

(Okay, one further adieu. If you’re really into templates, you can start a paid subscription to this newsletter and get access to my complete library of marketing resources.)

Helpful project management tools

1. Trello / Atlassian — We used Trello to organize some of our work when I was at Buffer. Our Trello was a pretty straightforward Kanban board of Ideas, Backlog, In Progress, Review, and Done.

2. Asana — We used Asana to organize all work at Oyster, for marketing and for every other team. We also used Asana for goal-tracking. It’s super robust and requires an Asana hygienist (aka a marketing producer or bizops person or, sometimes, me) to organize it all

Others:

• Monday.com — Loved by many, confusing to me

• Airtable — For fans of spreadsheets and databases

Project management template

Nowadays, when we’re advising teams as part of Bonfire, we find ourselves very often working in Notion. And nowadays, you can do some pretty phenomenal project managing right in Notion itself.

(If you’re looking for Notion alternatives, Slite and Coda are great options, too.)

Here’s how to get started with managing your marketing projects in Notion:

1. Notion has a built in template for projects and tasks. It’s actually two databases that speak to one another, keeping everything interconnected. (There’s another template for projects, tasks, and sprints, if you work with a sprint methodology, which is more common for product teams.)

2. Add projects to the project database, then open each project and add tasks at the bottom.

3. Important that you think of projects as the one-off, scoped initiatives you’re hoping to achieve. Something like “Build an SEO program” is a project; but something like a single blog post belongs on a separate content calendar workstream.

Here’s my version of the Notion projects and tasks template.

A couple callouts:

• For each project, there is some boilerplate information that helps to fill out:

  • About

  • Goals

  • RACI matrix (who’s responsible, who’s accountable, who’s consulted, and who’s informed)

  • Additional links to docs and briefs and files

• If you get good at assigning tasks and projects to people, then they can create a little homepage for themselves in Notion where all their tasks and timelines live. This is a pretty robust feature to maintain, so I’ve found that sometimes it’s easiest to leave people off of the tasks at first and to just have a project manager you’ve identified who can keep it all organized themselves.

• The additional database views are great. Try out the timeline view for the projects and the “sort by status” on the tasks.

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About this newsletter …

Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I previously built brands at Oyster, Buffer, and Vox. Now I am cofounder at Bonfire, a brand storytelling company.

Come say hi!

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