8 steps for successful agency project management

A good digital agency generates a lot of leads. An excellent one keeps clients happy.

This results in bottom-line growth, reputation increase, and word-of-mouth marketing. If there’s one thing that can help you achieve that, it’s quality project management. With the right approach, you can manage client expectations, make them feel heard, and complete projects on time without straining the team.

This article will explain how you can achieve that, no matter what type of agency you run.

What is agency project management?

Agency project management is about keeping your employees and clients in the loop and making sure projects are done on time, within budget, and without straining your resources. 

Since resources in most agencies are mostly employees’ time, effective agency project management also ensures your staff doesn’t burn out and is ready to take on more projects.

The project management agency processes include building workflows for effective communication between the client and employees as well as for executing projects and controlling the quality of the work.

The future of agency project management lies in adopting new technologies that make this job easier for all stakeholders and learning to adapt to the challenges and create new approaches.

Unlike project management at other organizations, performing for an agency involves clients’ needs, expectations, and satisfaction. This means a good deal of planning has to go into communication.

Сhallenges in agency project management

Around a third of projects fail, according to the Pulse of Profession report.

This happens due to a variety of reasons. Four are most relevant for agency project management:

• Lack of clear goals:This problem can turn any project into a failure, but it’s especially bad with agencies. Sometimes, clients only have a general idea of what they need, not a concrete plan. Poor client onboarding leads to the agency team following a brief that never reflected client expectations to begin with.

• Scope creep: Precisely due to poor onboarding and lack of clear goals, projects that an agency takes on may expand to include more work. The client realizes they need more things done than agreed upon, and the agency ends up having to balance that new load with other projects.

• Communication gaps: Communication issues plague project management in all areas. Miscommunications with the client lead to misunderstanding of the objects and scope of the project. Miscommunications within the team lead to poor quality of the results and mismanagement of time and resources.

• Resource overload: All three of these issues ultimately lead to two outcomes. Your backlog will grow exponentially, and you’ll have to either refer clients to other agencies or overload your workforce. This can only result in decreased productivity and quality.

8 steps for successful agency project management

Running project management for an active agency is a hard task, but with proper knowledge, it’s possible to balance it. Here are eight relevant elements of project management that make it successful for agencies.

1. Define project goals and objectives

The bulk of project management work goes into planning the project. If you make mistakes at this stage, the project is almost guaranteed to face difficulties down the line.

The project manager’s first task is to talk to the client to identify their needs, problems, and growth opportunities. In some cases, clients will come with only a broad need, and you will have to define project goals and objectives with them.

For instance, a client in need of more website traffic may come to an SEO agency. Since that’s vague, the project needs further investigation. You have to figure out what type of site they have, what the competition looks like, and what’s the most viable strategy for them to increase ROI. Depending on how your workflows are tuned, the team may need to first delve into analytics and define a strategy.

Once you have an understanding of how to proceed with the project, outline the project description and define success criteria. Make sure these criteria align with the SMART framework — specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.

Finally, detail your team’s roles and responsibilities to make sure the project planning is doable.

2. Client onboarding

In agency project management, client success and satisfaction are the primary factors. They don’t just rely on how well you complete a project but on how well you manage their expectations.

Your clients need to understand exactly what they’re getting and when they can expect results. Onboarding can start with the first contact form that is structured to give you information about the client and give them information about the agency processes.

You also need to plan out communication and:

• Gather information before creating a detailed brief
• Discuss the brief with the team and the client
• Report on the progress of project competition
• Report on meeting the KPIs with project results

Scheduling time for a call is only necessary for the first two stages, and even then, a lot of it can be done with specialized software. You can also use diagramming software and give the viewer or commenter rights to the client.

Reporting can also be done with software. With SEO, you’ll need to report on:

• Traffic
• Conversions
• Target keywords
• Rankings
• Backlinks
• Website technical health
• Competitor analytics

An SEO reporting tool by SE Ranking provides a reporting dashboard that can create custom, branded reports for your agency. It can incorporate all the key SEO metrics and create reports automatically on a schedule to save your team’s time.

Find a reporting tool for your industry, and your agency will save a lot of time in creating manual reports while keeping the clients informed.

3. Planning

Now that you’ve figured out the communication with clients, it’s time to plan the project. Most of the information for higher-level planning is already at your disposal from client onboarding. Your job is to organize it and put it in writing to make sure all team members know the project details.

With the client’s data and the project team, define the scope of the project, timeline, and significant milestones. Define the cost of the project based on these estimates.

Use agency project management tools to show the plan to the client and the team to make sure there are no issues, and everyone is on the same page.

4. Resource allocation and team management

The next stage is allocating agency resources to the project. Since your main resource is employee time, coordinate with the specialists and their management to understand the availability of staff and how many hours they can give to the project per week. You’ll also want to manage their time around vacations and sick leaves. Depending on team availability, you might have to decide to either lengthen the project timeline or hire external specialists to help.

Resource availability is often tied to both time and finances. Agencies frequently employ multiple tools to support their teams, aiming to maintain a lean and efficient structure while maximizing the return on their investment. In digital marketing, it’s common for agencies to use a PPC optimization tool to manage numerous client advertising accounts with a smaller team of specialists.

In any case, in this stage, create a rough plan of what specialist does what and how each part of the project is reviewed within the team to avoid bottlenecks.

5. Task management

Once you have the project planned with clear objectives and milestones, the team will divide them into smaller tasks for each specialist. Your job as a planner is to observe project execution and make changes in the overall plan and agency workflow as needed.

There’s no point in trying to micromanage project execution, as specialists know more about the operations than the project planner. What you can do to help is plan and communicate.

Gather feedback from the team and the client, then decide on whether you need to make changes to the overall project strategy to have better results or manage interdependencies in the team to avoid bottlenecks.

In the case of SEO, you will find that a particular group of keywords produces a lot of traffic but not a lot of conversions. Communicate with the client and the team that you should focus on other keyword groups that can produce more immediate results.

6. Risk management planning

During the execution stage, you should have an understanding of possible risks that may affect the projects and plan on how to avoid them.

The exact risks depend on the type of agency you run and the project you work on. On SEO projects, the typical risks are:

• Website traffic drops after an algorithm update
• A new and active competitor appears
• A keyword group brings traffic but not conversions
• The client is dissatisfied with the speed of SEO results

Some issues are out of your control. Develop strategies to prevent them from impacting client satisfaction. For the most part, the solution to the risks you can’t control revolves around communication and expectation management.

7. Track project performance

As you progress through the project, track and evaluate the performance and productivity of team members and their efforts in your agency management solution. In smaller teams, the team leader can do this. Project managers can take on this task in larger ones to give team leaders more time to tend to their primary tasks.

Observe how the project progresses, take client feedback on the quality of the job, and make the necessary changes as you go.

8. Collect feedback

Collecting feedback from your team and from the client is a crucial part of project management. It lets you manage client expectations, keep them in the loop, and do a better job with the project.

The final stages of the project are a great place to gather feedback from both parties and analyze successes and failures. This feedback analysis can help you improve your project management skills and do a better job with future projects.

Agency project management differences by agency type

There is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to project management. Most successful project managers choose a hybrid approach to succeed.

Agency project management has differences from, say, project management in product teams. Different agencies also might find they’re facing different problems. Let’s take a look at the most common types of agencies and their biggest differences in project management.

Paid ad agencies

Marketing agencies typically have to wait for results. In paid ad agencies, this is the first couple of weeks of additional spending needed to draw conclusions on the campaign’s effectiveness.

SEO agencies

In SEO agencies, they must wait for several weeks to see results. This waiting period can be frustrating for the clients.

Content marketing agencies

A content marketing agency’s biggest problem is doing their job right and still facing client dissatisfaction because the sales aren’t there. This is because content marketing is a top-of-the-funnel technique that requires additional work by other teams to turn traffic into leads.

Web design and development agencies

Web design and development agencies might experience unrealistic budget and timeline expectations for high-end services. This might lead to the mistake of trying to cut corners to meet the budget or deadlines.

Creative agencies

Creative agencies, due to the nature of creative work, can greatly suffer from a constant stream of edits from the client.

Most of these problems can be fixed with proper client onboarding. Make sure to communicate clearly what they should expect and get their sign-off on the project brief.

Final thoughts

A project manager’s job is to create workflows that turn a brief into quality results and to create a communicative environment that can result in a quality brief.

To do your job right, document meeting results to make sure no information escapes the stakeholders and analyze the performance of the team. This will help you solve problems on the go or prevent them from arising in other projects.

In the end, you’ll come up with a unique project management framework that works with your company and your clients. When you do that, review it from time to time to see if it’s still viable.

Author bio

Alina Tytarenko is the Outreach Team Lead at SE Ranking, a reliable SEO platform for solving any SEO task. She leads strategic outreach initiatives and builds strong industry connections to boost brand visibility. Alina believes that effective reputation management is crucial in today’s digital age and sees SEO as an essential tool for achieving it.