Top Marketing Workflows
Marketing workflows – those protocols that help you stay organised and get great work out the door faster – have come a long way. In simpler times, workflows consisted of standalone spreadsheets, decks, email chains, a shared drive and an agency WIP. Now, thanks to a combination of advanced tech and necessity, we’ve got a choice of some seriously impressive online marketing workflows to take us from planning through to post analysis.
The thing is, while online marketing workflows make life easy, sorting through an expanding choice of martech software options isn’t. While the fundamentals of project management don’t change, the tools we use to manage tasks are becoming increasingly specialized and sophisticated.
We’ve identified the most popular marketing workflows used by medium to large teams to stay on top of the game.
First, How Online Marketing Workflows Help
Online marketing workflows are centralized software platforms used by companies to scale quickly, increase efficiencies and mitigate risks. They are interoperable, meaning they are a one stop shop that allows you to plan, collaborate, create, integrate, template, organize, and store work on both a company or individual level
The power of online marketing workflows lay in their status as the single source of truth run on standardized processes and systems. The biggest benefits to implementing them are:
Basic time and project management
Scheduling and task management tools offer a range of views to suit personal preferences. Knowing what needs to be done by who and when is the bread and butter of efficiency.
Transparency and collaboration
As the saying goes, “united we stand, divided we fall”. Marketing workflows keep all team members informed of the project’s progress and what is needed to move forward.
Eliminating redundant work
Revisiting lengthy email threads, multiple platforms or share drives in endless searches for information or assets is just plain inefficient. Workflows keep intel in one organized and searchable system.
Producing high-quality compliant work
Consistent protocols make sure the right people have approved the work prior to launch. In fact, it can be baked in. Auditable sign offs from Creative Directors, legals and brand managers mean there is never any second guessing.
Boosting campaign success
When results can be consistently monitored and analyzed, opportunities for improvement virtually present themselves.
Online Marketing Workflow Options
Whatever the marketing discipline, there’s bound to be a vertical marketing workflow. Generally though, the best path for a marketing operations manager is to select a composable solution. That is, start with the platform that ticks the most boxes and has the capacity to integrate specialist solutions. Here are the most common types of online workflows:
Comprehensive Marketing Workflow
The most common online marketing workflow is one that brings together multiple marcom functions such as planning, content creation, asset management, brand compliance, campaign execution, and performance measurement.
This all-encompassing approach streamlines multiple functions and incorporates powerful search, templating and automation tools. Centralized systems provide clear visibility into progress and bottlenecks, and facilitates traceable version control, communication and feedback. Typical workflows in this solution include:
1. Campaign management:
Marketing workflows make campaign management a breeze. Marketing teams use them to plan, brief, execute, and track campaigns, including creating assets, scheduling social media posts, and analyzing performance.
3. Content creation and approval:
If your team is pumping out a lot of content, workflow automation makes it easy to keep track of all the data points involved…without losing anything in the shuffle! From blog posts, e-books and whitepapers, marketing teams use workflows to manage the entire content creation process, from drafting to final approval.
5. Data management:
Collecting, cleaning, and analyzing data is a critical part of any marketing strategy. Marketing workflows can help manage these tasks and make it easier to make data-driven decisions. Importantly, performance and risk data needs to be presented in an easy to access digestible format.
2. Collaboration and communication:
The big one. Marketing teams rely on collaboration and communication to get things done. Marketing workflows help with task assignment, proofing and feedback, and sharing files. The beauty of these marketing workflows, is that they not only help you work faster, they have inbuilt tools to help you stay compliant and on brand.
4. Brand and Digital Asset management:
A workflow with the horsepower to integrate stored, tagged creative assets in one location is a key to working efficiently and staying compliant. It is essential your workflow provide full visibility and control over asset usage as well as brand guidelines. Access to assets should be permission based via an automated system.
6. Legal and compliance:
Workflows manage tasks such as including legal disclaimers in advertising materials in accordance with laws and regulations. IntelligenceBank has templating and disclaimer engine tools that revolutionize efficiency and increase compliance. Take a look at our client Tabcorp who in the space of 10 weeks, produced 9,500 regulation heavy creative assets with zero errors.
IntelligenceBank marketing operations software is a great example of this type of solution. More detail on what to expect from this type of delivery, can be found in our Marketing Workflow ‘Must Have’ resource.
Image: IntelligenceBank Marketing Workflow screen sample
But no system is an island. For marketing departments who rely on multiple technology solutions, connecting their Digital Asset Management (DAM) or Marketing Operations Platform to other systems such as Microsoft Teams, Jira, Slack and other project management systems is a must.
Other workflows tailored to more specialized verticals to consider annexing to a comprehensive workflow are:
Lead Management Workflow
Capturing and nurturing leads is a crucial part of any marketing strategy. Marketing workflows make it easy to manage this process, from creating landing pages to sending follow-up emails and assigning leads to sales teams. But let’s face it, lead scoring can be tedious and time consuming. Marketing workflows can make the process easier by automating lead scoring based on predetermined criteria such as demographics, location, past interactions with your brand, etc.
Event Management Workflow
Whether it’s a virtual conference or an in-person event, marketing workflows can help manage the entire process, from creating event pages to tracking attendance.
Social Media Management Workflow
Highly specialized platforms catering to social media planning creation and management can take away an enormous amount of heavy lifting in this labor intensive channel. Multiple accounts can be managed across multiple platforms without having to leave the workflow itself.
Email Marketing Management Workflow
Inbound and outbound email marketing campaigns can be time-consuming. Specialized workflows provide relief by streamlining the process from creating templates to segmenting lists and sending automated drip campaigns.
Online Workflows Keep Everyone Down with the Plan
Marketing workflow software helps keep all those spinning plates in the air by ensuring everyone is ‘down with the plan’. With workflows, we can set a clear process for each task, assign responsibility, track progress and ensure everything is completed on time and to the highest standards.
IntelligenceBank has a full suite of marketing workflow processes that help you stay organized and make better use of your time – instead of wasting precious hours trying to figure out what needs to be done next! Hit us up for a live demo to see how we can help your team.
