What Is A Marketing Workflow?

Key Takeaways

: Marketing workflows streamline processes, saving time and resources while improving campaign effectiveness.

: Marketing automation tools play a crucial role in implementing and managing marketing workflows.

: Well-designed workflows enhance team collaboration and maintain consistency across marketing efforts.

: Regular optimization of marketing workflows leads to continual improvement in campaign performance.

Modern marketing can be quite complex, and a structured approach—like using a marketing workflow—can make all the difference. Done properly, a marketing workflow puts everyone on the same page, while ensuring the team produces high-quality marketing campaigns.

In this guide, I'll share insights I've gained about creating and implementing marketing workflows. You'll learn how they can help you:

• Maintain consistency and quality content across your marketing initiatives
• Adapt quickly to market changes and new opportunities
• Improve team collaboration and communication
• Increase productivity without extending work hours

Whether you're an experienced marketer looking to refine the way you work, new to the field, or simply seeking more structure, by the end of this guide, you'll better understand how marketing workflows can improve your campaigns and overall marketing strategy.  

What Is a Marketing Workflow?

First, let’s define a marking workflow because it’s not just another buzzword but a practical approach to marketing automation.

Definition: A marketing workflow is a structured, repeatable process that outlines the steps, tasks, and decisions involved in executing a marketing initiative from start to finish. 

Simply put, it helps you structure the approach to planning, creating, reviewing, and distributing marketing content or campaigns, allowing consistency, efficiency, and accountability. Let's break this down into its key components:

1. Structured: It follows a predefined sequence of steps
2. Repeatable: You can use the same process for similar marketing tasks
3. Comprehensive: It covers all stages from ideation to execution and analysis
4. Efficient: It streamlines tasks and reduces redundancy
5. Accountable: It assigns clear responsibilities to team members

Regarding marketing workflows, having a structured approach isn't just a nice to have—it's essential for most marketing teams. Miruna Dragomir, CMO at Planable, puts it perfectly:

SME Insight

“I’m a marketing workflow nerd, no doubt about it. Without a clear plan, we risk missed chances, messed-up tasks, and lacklustre campaigns. I’ve seen it happen firsthand. When we started planning meticulously, we instantly saw it in our results. Take our promotions for example. We used to wing it, like, ‘Let’s post on social’ or ‘Send a newsletter.’ But we’d forget stuff or be late. Our product-centric webinars? Barely 30-40 registrants. Then we put together a solid workflow, and guess what? The last one? Over 300 sign-ups.”

Features of Successful Marketing Workflows

Not all marketing workflows are created equal. The most effective ones share specific key characteristics that set them apart. Understanding these features can help you create or refine workflows that impact actual results.

These critical features are:

• Visible
  • Workflows are documented and accessible to all team members
  • Uses visual representations (e.g., flowcharts, Gantt charts) for easy understanding
  • Provides a bird's-eye view of the entire marketing process
  • Allows team members to see their role in the bigger picture
  • Facilitates transparency and accountability within the team
    
• Logical
  • Follows a straightforward, step-by-step process
  • Eliminates unnecessary steps and reduces redundancies
  • Aligns with the natural flow of your marketing processes
  • Ensures that each step adds value to the overall process
• Iterative
  • Allows for continuous improvement and refinement
  • Incorporates feedback loops for ongoing optimization
  • Flexible enough to adapt to changing marketing trends and technologies
  • Encourages experimentation and learning from both successes and failures

By focusing on these features, you can create marketing workflows that simplify your processes and foster a culture of transparency, efficiency, and continuous improvement. 

Here’s a pro tip: when working with marketing workflows for the first time, the goal isn't perfection from the start. Instead, agree on a starting point you and your teams can build upon and refine over time.

6 Benefits Of Implementing Marketing Workflows

Here are the six key benefits well-designed marketing workflows can deliver.

1. Improves Marketing Campaign Consistency

Marketing workflows provide a clear roadmap for your campaigns, ensuring that every marketing project follows the same steps and passes the same quality checks. This consistency means that no matter who’s assigned to a project or task, the process stays the same, resulting in a unified brand message and consistent quality across all your marketing efforts.

There are also fewer mistakes and less back-and-forth on revisions. Your campaigns come together more smoothly, reinforcing your brand’s identity and making your marketing more effective overall.

2. Improves Stakeholder Communication

Marketing workflows outline each step of the process and outline when and how to involve stakeholders. This clarity improves communication by ensuring everyone knows when their input is needed and how to provide it, keeping the whole process efficient.

This means less confusion and quicker approvals for marketing teams. Setting clear timelines and milestones also helps manage stakeholders' expectations, leads to better collaboration and faster project completion.

3. Improves the Quality of Creative Deliverables

A well-set up marketing workflows will include review and approval stages. These ensure all creative assets go through a rigorous Q&A before they are rubber-stamped for public consumption.

Marketing teams get the most out of this by creating more polished and effective work. It also reduces big revisions later on, saving time and resources.

4. Improves Time Management

Marketing workflows simplify complex tasks by breaking them down into smaller, manageable steps with clear deadlines. This makes it easier to allocate time, prioritize what needs to be done in less time, and spot potential problems before they become big issues.

This means better time management, less stress from looming deadlines, and the ability to juggle multiple projects without compromising quality. The result? A more efficient and productive team.

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5. Improves the Tracking of Tasks Across the Team

Marketing workflows give you a clear view of who’s doing what and when. This makes it simple to track progress, spot any delays, and adjust resources as needed.

For marketing teams, this means better accountability, easier project management, and the ability to tackle any issues quickly. You also get an end-to-end view of your team’s marketing activities, helping you manage resources better and ensure nothing falls through the cracks.

6. Improves the Customer Experience

Marketing workflows help create a better customer experience by optimizing internal processes. Consistent messaging, timely campaign launches, and high-quality creative work all contribute to making the customer journey smoother and more enjoyable.

For marketing teams, their work has a more significant impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty. It also gives you an edge in competitive markets where customer experience matters.

Types Of Marketing Workflows

Marketing workflows come in various shapes and sizes, each designed to tackle specific aspects of your marketing strategy. Here are just a couple to consider.

1. Social Media Marketing Workflow

A social media marketing workflow simplifies how you plan, create, schedule, and analyze social media posts across different platforms. It usually covers everything from brainstorming ideas and creating social media campaigns to getting approvals, scheduling posts for social media management, monitoring engagement, and analyzing performance. 

This workflow helps keep your brand voice consistent, ensures posts go out on time, and makes it easier to use target audience data to improve your social media strategy.

Here are some tips to get the most out of your social media marketing workflow:

• Use a content calendar to plan your posts ahead of time and keep a good mix of content types for content creation
• Set up a clear approval process to keep your brand consistent and catch any issues before they go live.
• Use analytics tools to track how your content performs and guide future decisions.

2. Content Marketing Workflow

A content marketing workflow keeps everything organized from start to finish, covering everything from brainstorming ideas to distributing and analyzing content. It includes researching topics, planning, creating, editing, optimizing for SEO, publishing, promoting, and tracking performance. 

This workflow ensures you produce high-quality, consistent content that fits your marketing strategy and meets your audience's needs.

Here are some tips to make the most of your content marketing workflow:

• Develop a detailed content brief template to guide your creators and keep everything consistent.
• Use a system to gather and organize content ideas from different team members.
• Schedule regular content audits to find opportunities to update or repurpose existing content.

An effective content marketing workflow helps ramp up your content production and ensures each piece of content serves your broader marketing objectives.

3. Email Marketing Workflow

An email marketing workflow helps you manage every step of your email marketing campaigns, from planning and creating to testing and analyzing. It covers everything from segmenting your list to designing and writing emails, running A/B tests, scheduling, sending, and reviewing performance. 

This workflow helps ensure your emails are relevant, boosts open and click-through rates, and keeps your subscriber list in good shape.

Here are some tips to boost your email marketing workflow:

• Regularly clean your email list to keep your deliverability rates high.
• Use templates for common types of emails to speed up the creation process.
• Use a marketing automation integration to set up automated triggers to send follow-up emails based on what recipients do.

A well-rounded email marketing workflow helps you send more targeted and effective campaigns, saving time and improving overall performance.

4. Marketing Team Collaboration Workflow

Effective collaboration is crucial for marketing teams, especially with many working remotely or in hybrid setups. A collaboration workflow helps by setting up clear communication, task management, and project coordination processes.

It usually involves starting projects, assigning tasks, tracking progress, gathering feedback, and wrapping up projects. This workflow improves team efficiency, reduces miscommunication, and keeps everyone on the same page regarding project goals and deadlines.

Here are some tips to make your marketing team collaboration workflow more effective:

• Use a central project management tool so everyone stays updated on project status.
• Clearly define roles and responsibilities for each team member within the workflow.
• Hold regular check-ins to address any roadblocks or issues quickly.

A well-organized collaboration workflow creates a more productive and harmonious work environment, leading to better results and happier team members.

How To Create A Custom Marketing Workflow 

Now that we've discussed the different types of marketing workflows, you might be wondering, "How do I create one that fits my team's needs?" Don’t worry—I’ve got you covered.

1. Align with Leadership on the Goals for Your Marketing Workflow

Creating a solid marketing workflow starts with getting clear direction from the top. This means sitting down with leadership to understand the big-picture business goals and determine how the marketing workflow can support them.

In this stage, you’ll set specific, measurable goals for your workflow, like speeding up campaign turnaround, boosting content production, or improving teamwork. The key is to ensure that your workflow aligns with the company’s overall objectives and gets the support it needs from decision-makers.

Here are some tips for aligning with leadership:

• Create a presentation that shows the benefits of having a structured marketing workflow.
• Go into the meeting with clear, measurable goals, but be ready to adjust based on their feedback.
• Talk about how you’ll measure the workflow’s success and keep leadership updated on progress.

2. Document Current Marketing Workflow Approach

Before you get going, you need to examine how things are currently running. This means mapping out your existing marketing processes, spotting any issues, and identifying areas for improvement.

Gather feedback from everyone involved in the marketing process and document each step from brainstorming to execution and analysis. This step is crucial for understanding your current situation, which will help you design a more effective workflow.

Here are some tips for documenting your current approach:

• Use visual tools like flowcharts or process maps to make the workflow easier to understand.
• Get honest feedback from your team about what’s working and what isn’t.
• Look for any redundant or unnecessary steps that could be streamlined in the new workflow.

3. Agree on Roles and Responsibilities Across the Team

Defining roles and responsibilities is key to making your marketing workflow run smoothly. This step means figuring out who’s involved in your marketing process and specifying who is in charge of each task and decision.

You’ll need to consider not only your core marketing team but also other departments that work with marketing, like sales, product, or legal. This step helps eliminate confusion, reduce bottlenecks, and ensure everyone knows their responsibilities, leading to a more efficient workflow.

Here are some tips for defining roles and responsibilities:

• Use a RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) matrix to clarify who does what in your workflow.
• Get input from your team to make sure the roles are accurate so that  onboarding goes smoothly
• Consider writing detailed role descriptions that specify each person’s responsibilities within the workflow.

Clear roles and responsibilities create a more efficient workflow by ensuring everyone knows what's expected of them at each stage.

4. Choose Your Marketing Workflow Tool

Choosing the right tool for managing your marketing workflow is crucial for its success. This means taking the time to research and pick a tool that matches your team’s needs and works well with your existing tech setup.

Think about things like the tool's user-friendliness, customization options, collaboration features, and reporting capabilities. The goal is to find a tool that supports and improves your workflow, not one that makes it more complicated.

Here are some tips for choosing the right workflow tool:

• List out the essential features you need based on your workflow requirements.
• Involve key team members in the selection process to make sure the tool works for everyone.
• Use free trials to test the tool in real-life situations before deciding.
• Consider marketing integrations you'll be needing to hook everything up together.

Choosing the right workflow tool can boost your team’s productivity and improve your marketing results, so take your time to find the best fit.

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5. Run a Pilot with Your Marketing Workflow Tool

Before rolling out your new marketing workflow, testing it on a smaller scale is essential. Pick a specific project or campaign to run through the new workflow with your chosen tool.

During this trial run, monitor progress closely, gather feedback from your team, and note any issues or areas for improvement. This step helps you catch and fix potential problems before going all in, saving you time and resources in the long run.

Here are some tips for running a successful pilot:

• Pick a project that reflects your usual work but isn’t too critical.
• Encourage honest feedback from everyone involved during the trial.
• Keep track of all observations, whether they’re positive or negative, to make any needed adjustments.

A successful pilot gives you valuable insights to refine your workflow, making the full-scale rollout smoother and more effective.

6. Review and Approve Workflow

After the pilot, you must review the results and tweak things before getting final approval. This means analyzing how the pilot went, using the feedback you gathered, and fine-tuning the workflow design.

The updated workflow will then be approved by leadership and key stakeholders. This step is crucial because it ensures the workflow is fully optimized based on real-world testing and has the organization's backing before it is rolled out more broadly.

Here are some tips for reviewing and approving the workflow:

• Put together a detailed report on the pilot results, including key metrics and team feedback.
• Be prepared to explain any changes made to the original design and the reasons behind them.
• Develop a clear implementation plan to present with the final workflow design.

7. Review Progress with Implementation and Marketing Team Regularly

Implementing a new workflow is just the beginning—it's an ongoing process that needs regular attention. This means scheduling regular check-ins with the implementation team and the marketing team using it.

During these reviews, discuss what’s going well, tackle any issues that arise, and look for ways to improve. This step is crucial for ensuring that the workflow continues to meet your team’s needs and stays aligned with your business goals over time.

Here are some tips for effective progress reviews:

• Schedule these reviews regularly to keep them a priority.
• Use data from your workflow tool to guide discussions on how well things work.
• Encourage team members to bring specific examples and suggestions to the meetings.

Regular reviews help keep your marketing workflow relevant and effective, supporting ongoing improvements and ensuring long-term success.

10 Marketing Workflow Tools To Consider

Now that you’ve designed your custom marketing workflow, it’s time to pick the right tools to bring it to life. There are many options, each with features to help streamline your processes and boost team productivity - but don’t worry, choosing the right marketing workflow software doesn’t have to be complicated.

1. 1. Wrike — Best for universal work management
2. 2. Smartsheet Integrated Marketing — Best for review and approval workflows
3. 3. Qntrl — Best for centralized workflows
4. 4. Notion — Best unified workspace
5. 5. HubSpot Marketing — Best for comprehensive CRM integration
6. 6. Airtable — Best spreadsheet-like framework
7. 7. Trello — Best for startups and small businesses
8. 8. Teamwork.com — Best for marketing client workflows
9. 9. Asana — Best for cross-functional teams
10. 10. Keap — Best for marketing workflows for the sales pipeline

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Marketing Workflow Management Best Practices 

Good management is critical to getting the most out of your marketing workflow. These best practices boost your workflow’s performance, improve team collaboration, and improve things over time.

1. Host Regular Check-ins with Your Team

Communication is crucial for keeping your marketing workflow running smoothly. Regular check-ins with your team help you discuss how the workflow is performing, tackle any issues, and celebrate successes.

These meetings create a space for ongoing feedback and improvement. They help spot any roadblocks early, make sure everyone is on the same page, and encourage open communication. This approach keeps your workflow flexible and responsive to your team’s changing needs.

Here are some tips for making your check-ins effective:

• Stick to a consistent weekly or bi-weekly schedule to make them routine.
• Use a structured agenda to keep meetings focused and efficient.
• Encourage everyone on the team to share their insights and suggestions.

2. Know When to Optimize Your Marketing Workflow

Timing is everything when it comes to optimizing your workflow. It’s important to notice when things might need a tweak—like if productivity drops, bottlenecks keep popping up, or your marketing strategy changes.

By staying proactive, you can keep your workflow effective and efficient. This approach helps catch minor issues before they become big problems and keeps your workflow in sync with your changing marketing goals. Maintaining a workflow that continually supports and boosts your marketing efforts is vital.

Here are some tips for optimizing your workflow promptly:

• Keep an eye on workflow metrics to spot any trends or issues early.
• Pay attention to team feedback—they’re usually the first to notice when something’s off.
• Stay updated on new marketing trends and technologies that could affect your workflow.

3. Keep Things Simple

Simplicity is often the secret to making your marketing workflow more efficient. This means eliminating unnecessary steps and keeping things as straightforward as possible.

A simple workflow is more straightforward to grasp, follow, and maintain. It helps reduce errors, speeds up processes, and helps bring new team members up to speed. The goal is to build a workflow that boosts productivity without adding extra complexity.

Here are some tips for keeping your workflow simple:

• Regularly review each step and ask if it’s needed.
• Use clear, straightforward language in your workflow documentation.
• Choose intuitive and easy-to-use tools so your team doesn’t need a lot of training.

4. Ensure the Workflow Serves the Team, Not the Other Way Around

Your marketing workflow should be a tool that supports and empowers your team, not a rigid framework that holds them back. The goal is to create a workflow that’s flexible enough to fit different working styles and adapt to changing project needs.

A well-designed workflow boosts creativity, morale, and productivity by balancing structure with flexibility. It should guide without stifling innovation or making team members feel constrained. The key is to find that sweet spot where consistency and adaptability work together to help your team do their best work.

Here are some tips for creating a workflow that genuinely serves your team:

• Get team members involved in designing and refining the workflow.
• Allow for flexibility to accommodate different types of projects and tasks.
• Regularly ask for feedback on how the workflow affects their day-to-day work.

Enhance Your Marketing By Starting With A Robust Marketing Workflow

Marketing workflows are the backbone of successful campaigns, helping everything run much more efficiently. Setting your workflows up properly also means you get the full benefits of your marketing automation strategy.

It's also important to stay flexible. Regularly check your processes and tweak them as your marketing and business goals change. This way, you’re not just improving what you’re doing right now but also setting your team up for long-term success. 

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