How to Scale Your Marketing Agency Using a Project Management System

Post-Its, To-Do lists, and emails just won’t cut it anymore… You can’t expect to run a successful and scalable marketing agency if your best project management tool is email.

More than ever, software makes it easy to systematize and scale your business.

Your new best friend- A project management system called Intervals. (http://www.myintervals.com/)

This is why having a central and dedicated system in place to manage projects, tasks, people, events, communications and progress across the agency and your client base.

There are a ton of different project management tools out on the market today- one of my personal favorites is Intervals due to it’s focus on ease of use and it’s ability to handle time tracking and invoicing.

Below, I’ll outline some of the ways to use Intervals to your yourself and clients on task while building trust and transparency with clients.

Give Clients’ Access

A quick way to build trust and confidence is give them access to view your ongoing projects and milestones. By doing this, you can open up conversation and encourage communication between client and your agency. This also allows you to ditch email and share all tasks, deadlines, and files from one place.

Using a project management tool like intervals- sets you apart from your competition. Early on from the pitching stage definitely encourage clients to take advantage of their access. The results can be excellent when from the beginning you demonstrate your eagerness to communicate and demonstrate progress.

Plan and Execute Campaigns with Tasks, Messages and Milestones

Prove to clients that you’re worth it. Clients can have transparency into what projects you are working on and when by actively tracking campaign tasks and see milestones completed. Don’t let them question progress, allow them to take a glance and even comment.
For instance, when creating content for your client and you need your clients approval for a blog post or to provide feedback on a particular strategy, give them a task for it and a deadline so they know what their responsibilities are as well.

Once you start adding in multiple clients, things can get messy fast! My experience has been it’s easier to fail at a project without proper organization and deadlines. Using this system with your agency, share files, view communications, and keep driving to completion. Keeping all files, tasks, and conversation in the same place can save you countless hours in explaining and wondering if team members got the last email update?

Now important information on a project won’t get stuck on one person’s desk- it’s out in the open for all to interact with.

Track Hours- Stay in Budget and Get Paid Quicker

Can’t stress how much of a pain billing can be…especially if you are not staying on top of it. By using a central system you can easily track your hours as you go. If you have only so many hours to dedicate, make sure you’re not giving them all to your smallest clients.

Once you complete a project or the monthly work is done, generate a quick invoice and send if off to the client.

Organize Content Editorial Calendars

Collaborative calendars are a great way to manage content marketing pieces for clients. This way, the client and the agency can quickly see what is going to be published and when.

Content is a pain without an editorial calendar. Set yourself up for success by organizing an editorial calendar and keep content contributors on track by mapping out deadlines.

A project management system offers a marketing agency’s full visibility for themselves and for all their clients, tasks, and projects they have running. As an agency owner having insight into who’s completed what project and how many hours were billed is huge.

Provide Agency Owner’s Insight

Of course Intervals is a personal favorite of mine- but there are many out there. How does your agency use software to execute client work? Feel free to add your comments below.