How Poor Project Management Can Impact Paid Media

I’ve been a part of plenty of agency/vendor evaluations when an in-house marketing team is looking for a new paid media partner. All of the RFPs, or written email requests I’ve seen normally always focus on technical skills and ad platform expertise.

While these aspects of a partnership are definitely important, I rarely see marketing teams ask questions about communication and project management systems. Despite how infrequently this is discussed in vendor evaluations, I’ve seen poor comms and organization kill an engagement resulting in client churn.

These “soft” skills can have a huge impact, so below are some tips that I’ve learned and implemented in my own work over the years to improve this part of a client relationship.

• Slack Isn’t Enough - I know some agencies won’t go near clients in Slack, but for those that do, I can appreciate the convenience. It’s easy to quickly get in touch with a client for a simple question, instead of waiting for an email or PM tool message to reach the top of their inbox. With that said, I don’t recommend using Slack to record important updates (like budgets) or sharing deliverables. It’s too easy for critical messages to get lost or buried in a thread, which makes it difficult to go back to conversations from a few days or weeks ago.

• Use A Project Tracker - This may seem obvious, but having a list of tasks, owners, and due dates outlined somewhere is a simple but overlooked game-changer. Whether it’s Asana, monday.com, or a Google sheet, this system helps to prevent deliverables and requests from getting lost. Clients never need to chase me down asking where something is because the simple tables I’ve set up allow me to keep track of projects and get everything out on time.

• Notes & Action Items - Take notes during meetings, and follow up with clear action items and due dates. Sometimes the most productive meetings can be the ones where my clients and I veer off of our agenda and find inspiration in a brainstorm. The key piece there is making sure those brilliant ideas survive once the meeting ends. I always send out a meeting recap which outlines specific next steps to get new projects moving. AI notetakers can make this really easy too.

• TLDR - Depending on who my audience is, I abuse the TLDR section in my updates. Sharing detailed methodologies behind my analyses or planning can be helpful context, but I know my clients don’t always want to read a short essay. I’ll include brief TLDR sections at the top of messages to convey my most important points, and let my clients know they can read on if they’re curious about how I arrived at my conclusions.

Have questions, considerations, or critiques? I’d love to hear them! If you’re reading this via email, just hit respond. Otherwise, you can find me on LinkedIn.