I believe that creativity flows best when there is a bit of structure in place. A bit like architecture, without a robust bit of engineering in place, the whole thing - as beautiful as it may be - will likely just come crashing down.
Therefore, within marketing and within marketing teams, having a clear project management system in place to guide the development and delivery of campaigns and wider marketing initiatives is, in my mind, a fundamental requirement.
Now, a retro practice, as functional as it may be, can be to use tools like Excel. But it's 2025, let's move away from the spreadsheets please! There's a plethora of online tools out there to choose from, broadly similar in functionality, features and usability. Over the last 5 years I've used Trello, Asana, Zoho Projects, ClickUp, Microsoft Planner, Monday.com and Airtable, all of them offering a similar experience but with different aesthetics. So take your pick!
But just having an online tool isn't "job done. Going back to the architecture analogy - although here we're more on the topic of structural engineering - just because you have pen and paper doesn't mean you can magic up a sound design. We need to take a step back and think about the design of work and the design of teams, and whether your project management platform setup should mirror the structure of your team, or actually function somewhat differently.
For example, your team may be made up of specialists, each looking after their own area - social media, web, PPC etc - therefore you might structure the platform under these headings, creating workspaces or boards that group these pots of activities. This can certainly work, but in my experience it drives siloed working, siloed thinking and potential territorialism, none of which are conducive to a healthy and collaborative environment.
You may, in that case structure it by campaign. This allows team members to develop unity around a single purpose, all working off the same information, sharing ownership, divvying up deliverables and seeing shared progress. This can work very nicely, and I wouldn't say I've come across any significant downsides to this setup.
However, it also depends on the nature of the work. How an in-house team operates will typically be very different from how an agency operates. Having worked on both sides, I can attest to the added complexity faced by in-house teams, where it's all good and well having a schedule of campaigns to deliver, but there is often also an influx of ad hoc, one-off, I-need-it-by-yesterday type of work. And where does that sit in the project management system? In it own special list titled 'Random'?
Something I have experimented with lately is taking a hybrid approach: creating spaces for macro areas, like campaigns and strategic projects, and otherwise aligning the system with stages of the marketing funnel, following the logic that most ad hoc activity would - and should - fall into one or more of the broad categories of the AIDA framework (or any such framework you're working by). Personally, I've found that this brings a level of thought and rigour into the process of receiving inbound requests, rationalising their contribution towards the overarching marketing objectives and boosting confidence in their value.
So, while I fully advocate for adopting an online project management platform within marketing teams, I believe that careful thought needs to go into how to best set it up in a way that aligns with ways of working and that encourages a positive, collaborative and productive team culture.