Why Marketing Workflow Management is essential for your business

Marketing workflow management is now more critical than ever when delivering business results. An ever-increasing number of digital touchpoints with our clients necessitates an urgent need to provide superior personalization. The demand to directly attribute marketing efforts to business performance has made managing marketing workflows a key feature of any well-thought-through business strategy.  

Marketers today have a host of tools that help companies systematically execute their marketing and sales activities. In this blog by the Aproove team, we unpack the why, the how, and the what of implementing marketing workflow software and outline the benefits, key features, and some practical tips on implementing workflow management in your business. 
 

The Importance of Marketing Workflow Management 

Streamlining Processes and Enhancing Efficiency 

Marketing work management is the organized practice of scheduling stages and tasks for your marketing team. By defining the steps and stages each marketing activity goes through, businesses gain control over their projects and deliverables, ensuring they are kept in an organized order. When work is done in a discrete sequence that avoids redundancy and slipups, projects are not just completed but completed faster, empowering your team with efficiency and an entire audit trail. 

For instance, marketing a product from a company requires a workflow that starts with researching the market, writing, designing, receiving approval for content, distribution, and finally checking performance. If a workflow is not created, several team members can perform the same task or otherwise miss several essential steps, resulting in delayed completion or, worse, complete abandonment of the task. Good marketing workflow management ensures that the task for a specific step is followed by its neighboring steps, using resources optimally and improving overall productivity. 
 

Improving Collaboration and Communication 

Clearly defined marketing workflows will enable internal team members to collaborate more effectively and communicate better. Many marketing campaigns include co-creation (i.e., the need to get input from other departments such as design, content, sales, and analytics). A structured workflow using marketing workflow software helps define who is responsible for what and what deliverables are required at different stages. It enables respective team members to understand their role within the project and their dependency on other members. 

Marketing workflow software, project management software, task tracking, and communication between team members can help in the process, providing a single space where all team members can follow progress and continually update the information. The risks of miscommunication also decrease because of the transparency in developing goals and assignments. More importantly, this promotes a culture of being held accountable, as each team member can see how their work is linked to the project’s overall objectives. 

Ensuring Consistency and Quality 

If the audience is to recognize something continually, you need to maintain consistency, which applies just as much to marketing as it does to everyday life. In marketing, consistency means your brand voice and message should be speaking to your prospects firmly and in a unified manner. It also means having coherence across the different communication channels you use. Your brand should feel the same on your social channels as on your website, and all this needs to be driven by a set of quality benchmarks and a workflow that stays true to the brand. 

The following stages in content marketing workflow management may apply:   

• Topic ideation 
• Drafting 
• Editing,   
• Approval 
   

Adhering to the workflow ensures that each step reaches the minimum quality bar to appear externally. This enhances the quality and consistency of the company’s marketing outputs as well as the company’s brand, reliability, and credibility.  

Enabling Data-Driven Decision Making 

Data has become one of the most valuable commodities in the digital marketing age. Effective marketing workflow management should weave data collection and analysis into every aspect of the marketing-sales cycle. If businesses work systematically to collect and analyze their data, they can start to discern the footprints of the marketing journey in the company. 

These can include such things as looking at engagement stats after a social media campaign or conversion rates after a blast email has gone out. This feedback loop means you can manage a marketing campaign continuously. Your marketer can adjust campaign elements in real-time, testing whether the changes improve your results. This also makes it easier to engage in long-term planning by identifying trends and patterns that can inform future marketing campaigns. 
 

Key Components of Marketing Work Management 

1. Planning and Strategy Development

The basis of any marketing process is a sound plan and strategy. This covers defining goals and KPIs, identifying target customers, and delineating tactics and the media in which to execute them. Strategic planning with marketing workflow management ensures that all activities contribute to business objectives and provide the framework of an actionable plan. 

2. Task Assignment, Management and Scheduling

Next, it’s a matter of developing work packages and timelines, what needs to be done and by whom or what department, with precise due dates and dependencies that need to be met before others commence. 

3. Content Creation and Approval

Content creation is often at the heart of marketing activities. If the workflow focuses on content management, it could involve multiple stages, such as Creating the content, reviewing it for alignment with the brief/theme/brand tone, getting feedback from the stakeholders, revising the content based on feedback, obtaining approval to publish it, making final corrections, and publishing. An organized content approval workflow helps maintain consistency and quality of communications. 

4. Distribution and Promotion

Once the content has been created and approved, the next stage is distribution and promotion. How to distribute each type of content, schedule posts, and manage paid promotion must be decided. Keeping each task’s workflow up-to-date is another way to ensure that your content is distributed regularly and timely to ensure high visibility. 

5. Performance Tracking and Analysis

Performance tracking and analysis, the last part of the marketing workflow, entails monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) to evaluate the performance of marketing campaigns. Marketing teams should generate reports on a regular basis using marketing workflow management, draw insights from the gathered data, and use it to refine strategy to ensure better results in future endeavors. 

Practical Tips for Implementing Marketing Work Management  

1. Choose the Right Tools

Choose marketing workflow software that helps with different aspects of your workflow. You might want to choose software, such as that from Aproove, that combines project management software to help sort your actions, timeframe, and progress, as well as encompassing task management software as a marketing automation tool that takes care of tasks you frequently do and leaves you with space to concentrate on valuable work. Online proofing capabilities are also advantageous (and Aproove caters seamlessly to these, too!)

      2. Define Clear Roles and Responsibilities 

Good marketing work management requires clarity in each team member’s role and responsibilities. It means there is no confusion about what the worker should do and how the work contributes to the project. Clear-cut responsibilities provide ample room for accountability, boosting workers’ sense of ownership and engagement. 
 

3. Document Your Processes

Documenting the workflow so you can easily remember it is a best practice and will be a future reference for your team (including yourself). You should document the stages of your workflow, which tasks you or your team return, and what standards you keep up with. The documentation should be reviewed on a regular basis and updated in line with changing business needs. 
 

4. Encourage a Culture of Collaboration

Don’t forget to encourage open communication and collaboration and empower employees to excel at work from your side. This is very crucial because if a team cannot communicate well with each other and work together, your team will suffer. Have regular meetings and brainstorming sessions. A great collaboration tool could also help in this effort. Don’t ever be afraid to listen to the employee’s opinions and feedback about work because sometimes they have great ideas than before. 
 

5. Continuously Monitor and Improve

Marketing work management is not set-it-and-forget-it. Constant monitoring of your workflows and seeking feedback from your team can improve your processes and create a team-led approach to enhancing tasks. Your processes will be tailored to your needs and preferences through iterative refinement. 

Businesses that want to succeed today need to implement better marketing workflow management. Better management of each step or stage of the process improves collaboration, consistency, and efficiency while making it possible to use data and reporting to assess the success of your marketing and make improvements. By implementing marketing workflow software, you will ensure structured approaches to each stage of the process, with tangible outputs along the way. You can transform your marketing operations for the better, making them more effective and helping you stand out from the crowd.   

However, the successful application of marketing workflow software will do more than that: it will provide a backbone that makes it easier for your business to evolve to meet changing market conditions. The companies of tomorrow that will keep growing through the economic swings of the new normal will be the ones that employ modern workflow management in their marketing process.