Marketing Workflows To Increase Your Team Productivity

Effective marketing is typically more challenging than it looks. A lot of work goes into crafting an effective message, curating engaging visuals, selecting the best tools and channels, etc. There’s so much to look into–business goals, competitors, budgets, customers, trends, and more. How can your team keep up and ensure consistent quality outputs?

The answer is marketing workflows.

Marketing workflows aim to provide structure, order, and consistency across a majority of tasks. This way, you can focus on the work at hand without compromising the bigger picture. This can help you maximize your strategies while being responsive to trends and continuously improving your efficiency.

Let’s dive into marketing workflows and talk about how you can apply it to your business, or improve the current ones you have.

What Is A Marketing Workflow?

A marketing workflow process is a systematic and organized approach to managing and executing marketing activities. It involves a series of steps and processes that guide marketers in planning, creating, implementing, and measuring their marketing campaigns. 

By following a marketing workflow, businesses can ensure that their marketing efforts are strategic, cohesive, and effective. It helps marketers stay organized, streamline their processes, and improve collaboration within their teams. 

From identifying target audiences and setting objectives to creating content, launching campaigns, and analyzing results, a marketing workflow provides a clear roadmap for success. 

Importance Of Marketing Workflows

Marketing workflows can help your marketing team stay on track, meet deadlines, and achieve your goals. Here are key benefits you can enjoy with a good workflow.

Team Alignment

Having a good marketing workflow ensures that everyone is on the same page and working towards the same goals. By having a well-defined process in place, tasks can be assigned and tracked efficiently, reducing confusion and increasing productivity. 

A clear workflow also allows team members to understand their roles and responsibilities, promoting collaboration and cooperation. With everyone following the same guidelines and procedures, communication becomes smoother, leading to better coordination and alignment.

Better Collaboration

In today's fast-paced and competitive business landscape, effective team collaboration is crucial for the success of any marketing campaign. A good marketing workflow can greatly facilitate this collaboration, allowing team members to seamlessly communicate and work together towards a common goal. 

This clarity not only promotes efficiency but also fosters a sense of trust and accountability among team members. Moreover, a good marketing workflow provides a framework for feedback and iteration, allowing teams to continuously improve their strategies and tactics.

Creative Executions

Having a well-defined marketing workflow introduces consistency and allows you to streamline your processes and focus on more creative executions. By establishing a clear set of steps and guidelines, you can ensure that your marketing efforts are cohesive and aligned with your brand identity. This consistency will not only strengthen your brand image but also help build trust and loyalty among your target audience. 

Moreover, with a solid workflow in place, you can delegate tasks more efficiently, freeing up your time and energy to explore innovative and imaginative marketing strategies.

Strategic Agility

Having a good marketing workflow in place allows for greater agility and flexibility. With a well-defined workflow, your team can create a solid foundation of core tasks and processes to ensure quality work. This can make you adapt more quickly to changes and capitalize on new opportunities without compromising the quality of your work. 

By streamlining processes and clearly defining roles and responsibilities, a good marketing workflow enables your team to work together seamlessly, eliminating bottlenecks and improving productivity. Ultimately, a well-designed marketing workflow will make your team more agile, enabling you to respond quickly and effectively to the ever-changing demands of the market.

Improved Productivity

When everyone on the team knows their roles and responsibilities, tasks can be completed more effectively and efficiently. A good workflow allows for clear communication and collaboration, ensuring that everyone is on the same page and working towards the same goals. 

By streamlining processes and eliminating unnecessary steps, team members can focus on their core tasks, resulting in increased productivity. Additionally, a good marketing workflow allows for better organization and prioritization of tasks, helping team members stay focused and meet deadlines. 

How To Create A Marketing Workflow

When creating your marketing workflow, consider two layers: your overall marketing efforts and the responsibilities of each individual.

Step 1: Identify Key Areas

The first step to building your marketing workflow is establishing key areas that you need to monitor to keep your brand healthy and support business goals. For example, if you’re a B2B SaaS organization, content and email marketing might be at the core of your marketing operations. Meanwhile, if you’re in real estate, this could be events and meetings.

Select the areas that would make the most impact on your business and customers, and identify what it means to keep those areas “healthy”. While it’s tempting to want to do everything, most marketing teams would benefit from focus so you can ensure that your efforts are helping you achieve the most impact possible.

Step 2: Establish Accountability

Once you have determined the key areas you need to watch to make your team successful, it is important to establish accountability. This means identifying and assigning individuals who will be responsible for keeping each area in check. By doing so, you create a sense of ownership and ensure that tasks are being completed effectively and efficiently. 

Accountability helps to prevent mistakes or oversights, as there is someone specifically designated to monitor and evaluate the progress in each area. It also fosters a culture of transparency and trust, as everyone knows who is responsible for what.

Step 3: Plan Projects And Routines

Once you have established clear areas of responsibility within your team, the next step is to plan your projects and routines. This is an exciting opportunity to bring everyone together and create a roadmap for success. 

Projects are time-bound initiatives to support your key areas. Meanwhile, routines are tasks repeated to keep the area in check. For example, a project for your creative team can be the building of your brand guidelines. Its corresponding routine would be the quarterly of your company brand materials to ensure that the guidelines are being applied.

Take the time to brainstorm ideas, set goals, and define objectives for each project and the routines that can support their effectiveness. Encourage open communication and collaboration among team members to ensure that everyone's voice is heard. By involving your team in the planning process, you not only empower them but also foster a sense of ownership and accountability for the outcomes.

Step 4: Identify Your Process

Now that you know what you need to do, it’s time to go over the core steps you need to take to do them. Generally, you’ll need to conceptualize, create, refine, publish, promote, and evaluate, and there would often be approver checkpoints. Routine updates to key stakeholders might also be essential.

Here’s an example of how this process might reflect in your marketing activities:

Event Management:

Content Marketing:

It’s important to understand that for some initiatives, the process shouldn’t happen in order. For example, in managing big events, the announcement and promotion can’t occur until after your rehearsals. Instead, they should happen at a particular checkpoint during event production so your prospective attendees have ample time to prepare to attend your event.

By identifying the steps needed to conceptualize, create, refine, edit, publish, and promote your marketing outputs, you can build a streamlined and efficient process that produces high-quality results.

Step 5: Document Your Process

Establishing a process for doing things is a great achievement for any team. It ensures consistency, efficiency, and clarity in the tasks performed. But don't stop there! Documenting the process is equally important. 

By documenting the process, you create a valuable resource for your team. It helps new members understand the workflow quickly and allows everyone to refer back to it whenever needed. And remember to keep that documentation visible to the team. Whether it's a shared drive, a project management tool, or a physical board, make sure everyone can access and refer to it easily. This way, you'll empower your team to work independently and confidently, knowing that they have a reliable guide to follow.

Step 6: Execute And Monitor

By documenting your new marketing workflow, you can set a solid foundation for success. Now it's time to put your plan into action and see the results unfold. 

As you implement your new workflow for marketing, don't forget the importance of monitoring its execution to help your team get used to the process. Keep a close eye on your progress, track the effectiveness of your strategies, and make data-driven decisions. Be proactive, stay focused, and don't hesitate to make adjustments along the way. This will help you identify areas of improvement and capitalize on opportunities for growth.

Step 7: Evaluate And Iterate

It's important to consistently evaluate how your team is adapting to any new processes or changes implemented within the organization. By holding monthly check-ins, you create an opportunity for open and honest communication, allowing team members to voice their thoughts and concerns. These check-ins provide a platform for feedback and allow you to gather valuable insights into how the new process is working. 

Remember, change takes time, and it's crucial to iterate when necessary. By continuously reviewing and adapting the process based on the team's feedback, you can ensure a smoother transition and improve overall efficiency.

Best Practices

Be Intentional

When it comes to creating your marketing workflow, be crystal clear about what you want to accomplish in order to avoid introducing unnecessary steps.

By clearly defining your goals and objectives, you can streamline your process and eliminate any unnecessary tasks or actions. This not only saves time and energy, but it also allows you to focus on what truly matters – driving results and achieving success.

Keep It Simple

It's easy to get overwhelmed with all the different strategies and tactics out there, but keeping your marketing workflow simple can actually be more effective. 

By focusing on a few key channels or tactics that align with your goals and target audience, you can create a streamlined workflow that is easier to manage and measure. 

Plus, simplicity allows for more flexibility and adaptability, as you can quickly make adjustments and pivot if needed.

Involve Your Team

Another great practice to ensure effective workflows is to involve your team. While it’s important to make calls based on your insight regarding your team’s focus and competencies,  you’ll need to ensure that you’re giving the team room to give feedback and voice out concerns. 

Without your team’s buy-in, you won’t be able to implement your marketing workflow properly. Plus, new processes can be challenging to embrace at first, so you all need to be patient about integrating them into your day-to-day activities.

Use The Right Tool

It can be tedious to monitor and navigate your workflows without the right tools in place. These can be as simple as checklists, or as sophisticated as marketing workflow software such as Workamajig.

Workamajig is the only project management tool built for marketing teams. Tools such as Workamajig allow you to store many types of information – targets, budgets, schedules, deadlines, tasks, files, etc. –in one place. Workamajig is also equipped with features such as time tracking and notifications to make collaboration and project management easier.

Automate

Workflow marketing automation can be very powerful when it comes to optimizing your workflow marketing management. While set processes can already make work faster, automation can streamline it further.

Automating is composed of triggers and actions that happen when those triggers are activated. These triggers can be as simple as changing the status of a task, and the actions can be automatically assigning it to a person in charge, or notifying approvers. This can make collaboration smoother, removing the need for several back-and-forth emails.

Be Open To Change

Especially when it’s new, your workflow for marketing should not be set in stone. The marketing landscape, especially in a digital world, changes so often. 

New tools, policies, trends, and people can suddenly be involved. You might also need to adjust them based on your team’s results, or specific strengths and weaknesses you want to maximize and mitigate, respectively.

Changing your marketing workflow is okay, as long as you don’t do it too often and you’re mindful of everyone’s learning curve. Done right, change can be used for improvement.

Make Accountability Clear

A pitfall in assigning tasks, especially when platforms allow you to assign multiple assignees, is that accountability becomes lost. When you establish accountability, ensure that expectations from that person are clear. When assigning teams, it also has to be clear who has the final say.

Establishing accountability can help in motivation because everyone is clear about their role in the project. The one in charge would know to initiate and problem-solve, while the rest of the team would know to consult and collaborate.

Workflow Examples

Content Marketing Workflow

Content marketing is an essential tool for businesses to connect with their target audience and drive engagement. To effectively execute a content marketing strategy, having a well-defined workflow is crucial. A content marketing workflow example can help streamline the process and ensure that every piece of content is created, reviewed, and published efficiently.

A content marketing workflow example  typically includes the following steps:

•  Brainstorm content ideas
•  Create an outline
• Write the content
• Edit and proofread
• Create visuals
• Publish (or schedule for publishing)
• Promote content

By following a content marketing workflow, businesses can ensure that their content is consistently high-quality, engaging, and delivered to the right audience at the right time.

Digital Marketing Workflow

A digital marketing workflow provides a clear roadmap for marketers to follow, to ensure that their digital marketing efforts are aligned with their goals and objectives. 

Here is a digital marketing workflow example:

• Craft theme or campaign
• Research trends and relevant keywords
• Conceptualize posts
• Write captions
• Create images
• Schedule posts
• Evaluate performance
• Gather insights

A digital marketing workflow can greatly enhance the effectiveness of your online marketing strategies.

Event Management Workflow

An event management workflow is a step-by-step process that helps to ensure everything runs smoothly from start to finish. Your event management workflow could include tasks such as the following:

• Conceptualizing events based on experiential marketing goals
• Creating a budget and having it approved
• Researching and booking a venue
• Coordinating with speakers and sponsors
• Announcing and promoting the event
• Managing registrations
• Training volunteers or personnel
• Documenting the event
• Contacting press contacts
• Evaluating event
• Documenting results

By following a defined workflow, you'll be able to stay organized and on track, making the entire event planning process much more efficient and successful.

Marketing Automation Workflow

A marketing automation workflow is an essential tool for any business looking to streamline their marketing efforts and improve overall efficiency. It involves the use of marketing workflow management software or technology to automate repetitive marketing tasks, such as sending out emails, social media posts, or targeted advertisements.

The marketing automation workflow examples can include the following tasks:

• Documenting marketing process
• Identifying repetitive tasks
• Selecting triggers and identifying actions
• Programming automation using marketing automation software or marketing workflow tools
• Testing automation
• Evaluating automation

Marketing automation can help businesses save time and resources while still delivering personalized and timely messages to their audience. By automating processes, businesses can also ensure that their marketing efforts are consistent and coordinated across different channels.

How Workamajig Can Help You Create And Execute Your Marketing Workflow

Workamajig is an incredible tool that can revolutionize your marketing workflows and make them more efficient than ever before. With its user-friendly interface and powerful features, Workamajig allows you to seamlessly create and implement effective marketing strategies. 

By providing a centralized platform for project management, task tracking, and resource allocation, Workamajig streamlines the entire workflow process. This not only saves you time and effort but also ensures that every step of your marketing campaign is executed flawlessly. 

Whether you are a small business or a large enterprise, Workamajig is the perfect solution to help you achieve your marketing goals. So why wait? Start using Workamajig today and experience the difference it can make in your marketing efforts.