A typical marketing department can involve many creative processes, including a lot of requests and approval cycles. The thing is, these requests and approval processes can come in a wide variety of ways from emails, phone calls, and in-person meetings, often resulting in the marketing team spending more time in meetings and back-and-forth emails rather than working on the crucial tasks.
Due to a lack of standardized processes, these inefficient communications and collaborations may lead to lengthy approval wait times, bottlenecks, and endless cycles of revisions, among other issues, resulting in missed deadlines and clashes between management employees and ticked-off customers.
This is where marketing work management comes in.
What Is Marketing Work Management
Marketing Work Management, or MWM, is an initiative to manage marketing work to improve its efficiency throughout its entire workflow.
Proper implementation of MWM can help the marketing team improve its productivity, enabling the members of the marketing team to focus on their core competencies rather than spending their time on administrative tasks, so they can contribute more to accomplishing the marketing team’s objectives and overall business goals.
Marketing Work Management is achieved with the help of workflow management system like Aproove, providing a centralized place for marketing and creative teams to create, edit, organize, and monitor tasks, eliminating common redundancies and inefficiencies in marketing workflow such as:
– Lacking a standardized set of workflow and processes, causing miscommunications and ineffective collaborations
– Time-consuming meetings that are often ineffective
– Back-and-forth emails
– Confusing spreadsheets that are time-consuming to update manually
– Using too many tools and software solutions that are not properly integrated with each other
These issues often cause the valuable marketing team to spend more time on administrative tasks rather than performing the tasks that matter. Applying MWM can help eliminate these issues and allow the marketing team to experience more transparency, increased accountability for each task, and experience greater overall productivity.
Implementing Marketing Work Management: Step-By-Step
While the actual implementation of MWM can vary depending on the marketing team’s unique needs and the objectives of the implementation, we can generally divide the implementation into several different stages.
Each of these stages must always get executed while keeping these MWM objectives in mind:
– 1. Eliminating bottlenecks, redundancies, and inefficiencies by implementing standardized processes
– 2. Providing a centralized place to track and manage all marketing tasks
– 3. Integrating all tools and processes in one place
– 4. Facilitating transparent collaboration with improved accountability for all stakeholders
Stage 1: Identifying marketing work
Before anything else, the first step in applying marketing work management is to conceptualize what the marketing process (or project) will be and the requirements for completing this process.
Next, it’s time to figure out how we can meet these requirements by determining the tasks that will help achieve this objective. We should also estimate the timelines, required resources, and budgets.
Here are the essential activities in this step:
– Defining objectives: it’s very important to identify clear, comprehensive, and measurable objectives for your marketing processes. We should be able to determine the KPIs and metrics we’ll use to track the progress.
– Data collection: interview stakeholders and team members involved in the marketing process to collect feedback and insights about the process. Gather as much data as you can, and we’ll use these insights in the next stages of the MWM implementation.
– Visualizing marketing workflow: it’s best to visualize the existing marketing processes into a proper workflow diagram while including the data and insights we’ve collected above. This will allow us to better analyze the efficiency of the workflow, identify bottlenecks and areas where the workflow can be improved upon.
Stage 2: Plan The MWM Implementation
This is where you can use workflow management software like approve to build your plan and monitor your progress, and here are the steps you should cover:
– Add the tasks: add the list of tasks to your workflow management solution. Identify tasks that are dependent on other tasks and/or must be performed in sequence.
– Add other elements: for example, the estimated timeline to complete each task, resources needed, budget, and other details.
– Assigning roles and responsibilities: assigning tasks at different levels makes it easier to manage your existing resources. Assign milestone tasks, and move down to the next level of detail and assign roles and responsibilities for smaller tasks.
Stage 3: Implementation
The implementation of MWM will turn into fruition once marketing works are also executed. In this step, we should pay attention to the following principles when executing marketing work using the MWM methodology:
– Centralized monitoring: by using a cloud-based work management tool, we can create a central location where all stakeholders and team members can update their progress at any time from anywhere.
– Standardization: standardization of processes are essential in optimizing all marketing processes, including approval processes and revision cycles. Develop process templates and automate the processes when possible.
– Tracking time: tracking time is an essential part of developing visibility into all your processes, even if your team doesn’t bill clients by the hour.
Stage 4: Monitoring and Evaluation
MWM isn’t a one-off thing but rather a continuous effort where business processes are continuously optimized to be more efficient. This is why evaluation is critical so we can move into the next cycle of MWM implementation:
– Measure KPIs: evaluate performances to the designated KPIs. Analyze both your successes and failures.
– Collect feedback: collect feedback for your stakeholders, which areas would they like to improve.
Conclusion
Implementation of Marketing Work Management (MWM) allows us to manage marketing processes throughout their entire life cycles, eliminating inefficiencies and redundancies and centralizing work to improve productivity. Using the four stages above, we can ensure marketing work is better aligned to achieve organizational objectives, allowing marketing projects to stay on time and budget to maximize their ROIs.
