Marketing teams are constantly facing numerous challenges. How do they stay organised and manage a variety of different tasks and work processes simultaneously within the same framework? With cross platform marketing content for ad campaigns, email, social media, and other public and community related activities, creating a marketing workflow that can handle these activities effectively and most importantly in an efficient manner can seem difficult or nearly impossible. Especially when you include the constant interruptions, missed or overly-ambitious deadlines, long meetings, and even unrealistic client demands. It can be a headache trying to handle and remember so many tasks and what needs to happen, especially when it comes to the small details and overarching goals for each process. Marketing workflow management can address some of these issues by streamlining all your marketing efforts and keeping the team in sync throughout all projects.
In this guide, we will introduce to you:
- What is marketing workflow management and why you need it.
- What are the areas and roles of a marketing team.
- How to define and create the right marketing workflow for your team.
- What are the right tools for marketing workflow management.
- Best practices for marketing workflow management.
What is marketing workflow management and why do you need it?
A marketing workflow is a system you create that outlines a sequence of steps or stages that your team can follow to build a marketing campaign or manage a project successfully that covers both the overall objectives of your marketing efforts and organises all the separate activities that formulate the project.
Basically, marketing workflow allows you to set an order to tasks and activities, understand what needs to be prioritised, and lets you measure the performance and results of your work, while marketing workflow management centers on the structure of these processes and how team members collaborate to get the tasks done.
If your team struggles with task overlapping, knowing what are the next steps, and is constantly losing digital documents and assets, a marketing workflow will tackle all of these pain points. Marketing work will always face hefty client demands, communication misunderstandings, and confusion over the packed and ever changing schedules. Marketing workflows help you minimise or even eliminate most of these challenges in a way that you can improve the satisfaction, efficiency, and overall quality of your work and entire team. Simply put, it help you:
- Keep the team up to date in real time
- Get more work done and save time in inefficiencies
- Avoid unnecessary duplicate work
- Increase performance and get better results
How can you structure a marketing team?
To structure a successful marketing team, you first need to know what are the essential areas and how roles tend to be divided. These are the areas marketing teams of any industry usually are conformed of, depending on the organisation’s size, the following areas could be broken down further:
- Marketing and branding
- Social media strategy
- Email marketing strategy
- OOH (Out Of Home) marketing strategy
- Physical and other digital marketing strategies
- Brand activations
- Communication angle strategy
- SEO / SEM
- Keyword and content positioning
- Blog content creation
- Web page content writing
- Community Management and PR
- DMs and replies
- Community opportunity hunting
- Outbound and back link building
- Brand collaborations
- Communication angle strategy
- Content and design team
- Static graphic content production
- Audiovisual content production
- Branded graphic design
- Image sourcing
- Social media copywriting
How to define and create the right marketing workflow for your team?
Marketing workflows don’t have to be overly complicated, they come in all shapes and sizes. The magnitude of it will depend on your industry, the active areas in your team, and the usual tasks you regularly handle, among other factors. However, there are three factors that make any workflow of any size and type successful:
1. It’s Logical
It helps establish a consensus about processes between the team to be able to work predictably having the next step in mind, which is why it’s crucial to make sure to establish a logical and easy to understand workflow.
2. It’s Visible
A workflow is more effective and easily followed when every team member can understand how to do things and where to find them. Having a visual way to see your entire work can help with:
- The onboarding process of a new member
- Keep the team on the loop with familiar templates
- Not miss any work step and detail
3. It’s iterative
The best workflows are based on repetitive actions that form habits and routines that are replicated for different processes so that team members can intuitively keep adopting new added processes seamlessly.
What are the right tools for marketing workflow management?
Setting up a marketing workflow is already a very difficult and laborious task, let alone if you try implementing manual processes. That’s why project management collaborative tools not only help digitizing your workflow but also to help you keep record and track of your workflow and maintain all processes standardised.
However, not all workflow management tools are made equal. Here are some examples on how MORNINGMATE tools easily help set up and manage your marketing workflow without you having to stress on keeping in mind everything you’ve read when implementing it:
1. Marketing and branding
Suggested tool: Gantt Chart workflow view
Tool use: Creating marketing strategies and brand activations isn’t just about the research, but also planning well tasks and tracking everyone’s work simultaneously to ensure that all the needed elements are ready in time and all parts are coherent and cohesive together. With MORNINGMATE’s Gantt Chart view, you can view your entire campaign in one glance, tracking what are all the ongoing tasks, checking on each team member’s responsibilities, and easily modify your campaign activity schedule as needed, all in one single tool.
2. SEO / SEM
Suggested tool: To-do lists
Tool use: Search engine optimisation and marketing can be a laborious and messy job with all the keywords and links to have in consideration. Not only is the research hefty, but there are a lot of things to check when optimizing content and keywords for search engines, that’s why a to-do list can help you set check points for every step of your work and assign part of the process to other team members that require their approval to get the work done.
3. Community Management and PR
Suggested tool: Event planner
Tool use: Scheduling posts and content can become overwhelming, especially when it has to be manually done, such as stories and other content that can’t be programmed. With MORNINGMATE’s event planner, you can schedule not only the content, but also meetings with third party external collaborators such as influencers and other press to ensure that the information being delivered and received doesn’t get lost and clear for both parties.
4. Content and design team
Suggested tool: Task management
Tool use: As you may have experienced, one of the biggest headaches for marketing teams are content and design assets because they can be requested at any time and usually requires a lot of feedback and modifications before delivering the final piece. FLOW’s task management tool makes this process painless with task status updates to know when a new asset is being requested, in progress, completed, or in need of feedback. You will also be able to see your teams’ comments and all the multiple versions of your working file all in one place.
Best practices for marketing workflow management
Starting and managing a marketing workflow can be challenging, but with the help of MORNINGMATE tools, you’ll easily and seamlessly reach success. Lastly, here are some tips and recommendations you should consider to make your workflow the best it can be:
1. Get the team involved
The best workflows are the ones that listen to the team members’ insights, make sure to consult with your team about their processes and understand their needs well.
2. Keep it as simple as possible
As mentioned before, workflow doesn’t have to be complicated, it’s not about having many steps, quite the opposite, it’s about only having the needed steps and not making work any more tedious.
3. Let your workflow FLOW
Don’t force actions and habits that aren’t part of your team’s routine. MORNINGMATE’s platform is not only simple and easy to use, but also engaging, making your workflow not seem like an extra step for everyone in the team.
