Thinking about using Jira for your marketing team? We write the most in-depth reviews of marketing project management software today.

To date the Growth Method team has reviewing marketing and growth marketing project management tools including Panobi, Planview, Effective Experiments, Airtable, Upgrow, TrueNorth, ClickUp & Asana.

What is Jira?

Jira (later called Jira Software) started out as a project management tool for software development teams.

On the 21st April 2021 Jira Management Suite was launched as an extension to the core Jira software product. The release introduced a new, user-friendly interface and functionality tailored specifically for business teams, including HR, finance .... and marketing.

On the 30th April 2024 Jira software and Jira Management Suite were combined into a new product called .... wait for it .... Jira.

Why Use Jira for Marketing Teams?

Jira helps marketing teams manage campaigns efficiently by breaking projects into tasks, assigning responsibilities, and tracking progress. With custom workflows and templates designed for marketing, teams can streamline processes like content approvals and campaign launches. Collaboration is seamless, as Jira centralises updates and communication, keeping everyone aligned.

Using Jira for marketing projects

Using Jira for marketing projects includes many of the features you would expect to simplify marketing project management and enhance cross-team collaboration including:

1 Task planning and prioritisation

Jira for marketing teams includes the ability to organise tasks with Board (Kanban), List, Calendar and Timeline (Gantt chart) views of work:

The typical workflow for a marketing team in Jira would be to:

1. Add tasks - using either the list, board or calendar view

2. Add start and due dates

3. Assign team members

4. Prioritise work (default priorities are Critical, High, Medium, Low)

5. Leverage automation where possible

2 Marketing Reporting

Marketing reports in JIRA are tools that help marketing teams track and analyze their tasks, campaigns, and overall performance. These reports can be customized to fit the specific needs of a marketing team, offering insights into project progress, team productivity, and campaign outcomes.

Jira reports include:

• Sprint reports

• Burndown charts

• Average age reports

• Time tracking reports

• and much more

3 Jira Marketing Templates

Jira software includes a number of marketing templates including:

1. Marketing campaign template

2. Content management template

3. Email campaign template

Typically these preconfigure a number of Jira key features, such as task planning, prioritisation, pipeline management and reporting.

4 Artificial Intelligence

"Work smarter. Turn messy notes into useful documentation, get summaries of pages and comments, and create action items in seconds."

https://www.atlassian.com/platform/artificial-intelligence

Two of the best use-cases for artificial intelligence that we have seen are in search where AI can turn natural language queries into Jira Query Language (or JQL), a user-friendly query language specifically tailored for querying issues within JIRA.

Jira AI can also create insight summaries based on data in the Atlassian Jira platform, such as the potential for process improvements.

The problem with marketing project management

As we have written about previously, we see 3 big problems with most marketing project management tools:

1. A focus on outputs over outcomes

2. Feature bloat

3. Jack of all trades, master of none

The outcomes over outputs trap remains the biggest challenge we see to effective marketing teams delivering real business outcomes and growth. Marketing team "work" quickly becomes focused on creating and assigning tasks, responding to notifications, joining team calls, communicating status updates and discussing what to work on next. Before you know it, high impact work gets replaced with work about work, and goals start shifting towards outputs as opposed to outcomes – because they’re easier to measure.

Growth has nothing to do with tactics, and everything to do with process. Growth is not about the terminology or the tactics, it’s about a change in our mentality, process, and team.

Brian Balfour, VP of Growth @ Hubspot (source)

The most popular comment on the 'Do you use Jira with your marketing team?' post in r/marketing on Reddit is as follows:

"Jira is built for and works (pretty) well for software development teams. Marketers generally hate using it and it isn’t suited to the way most marketing organizations work"

Elijha on Reddit

At Growth Method we believe a good marketing project management platform should be light on features. The goal should be to minimise (not maximise) the amount of time users spend in your app. The best marketing project management platforms get out of the way and enable team members to focus on execution.

FAQ: Jira for Marketing Teams

1. What is Jira for marketing teams?
Jira is a project management tool originally designed for software development but widely used by marketing teams to plan, execute, and track campaigns. It helps organise tasks, streamline workflows, and improve team collaboration, ensuring campaigns are delivered on time and within scope.

2. How can marketing agencies use Jira for project management?
Marketing agencies can use Jira to manage client campaigns, track deliverables, and optimise team workflows. By using templates like marketing campaigns or content calendars, agencies can ensure consistency and efficiency. Features like timelines, task assignments, and reporting tools help agencies stay on top of deadlines and measure campaign success.

3. What are the benefits of using Jira for marketing projects?

• Centralised Collaboration: Keeps all tasks and updates in one place.

• Custom Workflows: Adapts to unique marketing processes.

• Scalable Solution: Suitable for small teams or large organisations.

• Enhanced Reporting: Tracks campaign performance and team productivity.

• Integration Options: Connects with tools like Slack, Trello, and Google Drive.

4. What are some other marketing project management tools?
Other popular tools for managing marketing projects include:

• Trello: A simple, visual Kanban tool for task tracking.

• Asana: Ideal for managing campaigns with multiple collaborators.

• Monday.com: A customisable platform for marketing workflows.

• Wrike: Offers advanced features for resource and time management.
  Each tool has its strengths, so teams should choose based on their specific needs and workflows.

About Growth Method

Unlike Jira for Marketing Teams, Growth Method is a growth platform designed specifically for experiment-led and data-driven marketers.

Learn more at on our homepage, connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter, or book a call here.