Making Marketing Workflows Work For Your Team

When I moved roles recently to a healthcare technology company after nearly 15 years at a large tech brand, I transitioned from running a group with deep expertise in communications and content to helping accelerate a broad-scale marketing program. In both jobs maximizing marketing workflows and bringing transparency across projects, team members, and stakeholders is extremely important. Plus, we all know reporting on our activities – our output – helps us merchandise the work our team does and do it better. More importantly, once we set up our dashboard of marketing impacts, we’ll be able to link what we do and the results they produce in a meaningful way that really showcases our work. Seeing the left hand and right hand together will help us make draw insights and make smarter decisions on where we spend our time, money, and resources in the future.

First though, we needed to find a good tool to manage our workflows. While there are lots of good ones out there, we chose Monday.com to set up our marketing projects, social media, events, and training schedules. And we may add budgeting and other elements as we move forward. We’re getting ready to roll out forms, so we can remove some of the inefficiencies in the daily email requests we get from our stakeholders across the business. The ability to collaborate and message with our agency outside of IT constraints has given us near real-time efficiency, and certainly saved time back and forth over email, and kept our materials in one place, which helps with version control.

While mapping and tracking our workflows is where we started our search for a tool, the need to chart and dashboard our completed work quickly surfaced. While there’s no shortage of what you can measure (depending on your needs) we’ve spent the most time in the set up process in deciding how to organize measurement – ie, which activities matter. Just because we can measure something doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to measure. A few of the parameters we choose are: brand vs. demand generation, audience, channel, type of material, and requestor. We had thought about measuring the time spent on a project or number of resources assigned to it, but decided to hold off on that for the time being. The good thing is we can add, subtract, or change any of them at any time as we refine our needs. We also had to consider how we count the deliverables we create. While we don’t want to get in the habit of measuring our success by number of “things” produced, it is a parameter we want to keep tabs on, especially as we look at which “things” drive the most impact. More on that in a later post when I talk about how to set up a marketing impact dashboard.

In summary, when you’re looking to optimize your marketing workflows and use a platform to manage it, make sure you take into consideration:

1.??????Which functionality is most important to create for your team - focus on a few key ones

2.??????Which inputs you want to track

3.??????What’s important to measure and report on to demonstrate the value marketing is bringing to the organization?