Proper marketing workflow management is now necessary for CMOs and marketing managers in managing highly-effective marketing teams capable of delivering consistent and accurate results.
With marketing becoming an increasingly highly evolving field, agile management is now necessary, and those who can’t keep up are left behind. This is why a company organizes the marketing department’s workflow, and it is essential to determining its success.
What Is a Marketing Workflow?
Marketing workflow, in a nutshell, is about visualizing (outlining) the steps (tasks) required for the business to execute a successful marketing process and achieve a marketing objective.
By visualizing these tasks and the sequence, marketing managers can have a clearer picture in overseeing the tasks, identifying potential bottlenecks, and implementing strategies to ensure efficiency and productivity in executing the marketing process.
A Marketing workflow can be created with just pen and paper. Still, nowadays, the usage of workflow software like Aproove is the norm, allowing managers and marketing officers to reduce manual tasks and implement automation while at the same time reducing the amount of human error both in the development of marketing workflow and the execution of the marketing process.
An exemplary implementation of marketing workflow management offers more transparency for the project. By adequately defining roles and responsibilities, we can also improve the accountability of every stakeholder and team member involved in the marketing project.
Why Marketing Workflow Management Is Important?
Visualizing marketing workflows and using them in your marketing management processes has virtually endless benefits, but here are some of the crucial advantages you should consider:
- Harmonizing your team in achieving objectives
By correctly visualizing marketing workflows and making them available for all stakeholders and marketing team members, you can ensure everyone involved in the project can get the same information from the same source. So, it will minimize the risks of miscommunications and improve efficiency in collaborations, which can produce more accurate and timely results.
2. Improve output quality
Proper marketing workflows give leaders and team members uniformed, consistent guidelines everyone can follow to create high-quality outputs from their tasks, which will encourage closer collaborations and ensure more satisfied clients.
3. Improving efficiencies
Marketing workflows can be adjusted to incorporate new marketing strategies and techniques to ensure a more efficient business process. For instance, if your creative request process is more efficient when working guidelines are implemented earlier in the planning stage, then you can adjust future workflows so they are more efficient and cost-effective. This way, you can constantly improve your marketing workflow to be better and better over time.
4. Meeting your deadlines effectively
Proper implementation of marketing workflows will also improve communications between leaders and team members, minimizing the need for endless emails about deadlines, roles, tasks, and other details. Instead, workflow software would play the role of a central hub that provides a single location for all the documents, feedback, deliverables, and other necessities. You can also streamline approval processes, allowing you to save time and effort, and everyone involved in the project can focus on the tasks that actually matter in achieving the project’s objectives.
5. Increasing profitability
Since marketing workflow management allows us to complete more tasks within the set deadline, your team can also free up more time to pursue other projects, which can translate into more revenue and profits for your business. Also, workflow management ensures your team can stay on budget while executing each task, improving cost-efficiency and profitability.
Implementing Marketing Workflow Management
Workflow management is essentially about identifying many of the different aspects of the marketing process, visualizing these aspects, and integrating them into a management system that boosts productivity.
While the exact process of implementing the marketing workflow management might vary depending on the organization’s structure, marketing objective, and other factors, typically implementing workflow management would involve these steps:
Step 1: collecting data
The first step of implementing marketing workflow management is to gather as much data as possible about the marketing processes. It’s imperative to define how the tasks should be executed, the deadline, and who is responsible for the execution, and other elements.
It’s best to conduct surveys and interview everyone involved in the marketing process to collect this data. Give them opportunities to voice their concerns and provide feedback on how to improve the marketing processes.
Step 2: planning the marketing workflow
In this step, we will use the gathered data to plan the tasks that must be done to execute the marketing process, who is going to execute the plan, as well as the deadlines and the resources necessary to fulfill these tasks.
Step 3: scheduling
Translate your plan into a comprehensive schedule. Proper workflow tools like Aproove should also provide an intuitive tool to easily create schedules and timelines and assign different responsibilities to different people. Prioritize the tasks as needed.
Step 4: documentation
It’s crucial to have every step of the marketing workflow management well documented to identify issues and bottlenecks. With proper workflow software, this shouldn’t be an issue. With Aproove, for example, you can easily track every comment and feedback left on any step of the workflow, improving the whole process’s transparency.
With proper documentation, you can monitor everything you’ve implemented to refine the marketing workflow to improve efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
Conclusion
Ultimately marketing workflow management allows us to assign the right task to the right people at the right time and improve the overall efficiency of the business process workflow.
The better you know your team, and the better your team members know their workflow, the better you can implement workflow management.
