3 Important Marketing Processes You Should Automate Right Now

Marketing processes are the backbone of your team’s marketing efforts, providing them with a framework for planning, producing, and delivering their strategy.

Indeed, each area of your marketing strategy – from content marketing, email marketing, and PR to market research, web design, and advertising – has its own set of processes that form a coherent marketing plan. For example, advertising requires separate processes for producing ad copy, requesting creatives, and deciding budgets, whereas market research requires investigations into your target customers as well as market share analysis.

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Your marketing processes also require input from various stakeholders, beyond those on the frontline. Your c-suite, project managers, product owners, and website developers should have the ability to make contributions to your marketing strategy with ease.

But if you’re still relying on outdated tech like spreadsheets and emails to collaborate, these will stand in the way of productivity, especially as we continue to work from home.

Still relying on spreadsheets to run your marketing processes? It’s time for a rethink.

 

As it stands, our Remote Work in the UK Report found that 28% of employees think their organisation needs to invest in better technology to improve productivity. Staff are clearly in need of more effective tech to get their work done, and this is certainly apt for busy marketing teams.

One particular piece of technology that can boost productivity in your marketing team is automation.

Automation technology utilises a combination of online forms, workflows, and conditional logic that streamline your internal business processes. And unlike spreadsheets and emails, all of your tasks, project work, and assets are centralised in one place, giving teams complete visibility of current activities, as well as the ability to collaborate and assign work to other team members.

In other words, it’s the ultimate tool for making your marketing processes more efficient.

Here are 3 examples of marketing processes that you should automate today:

Marketing creatives requests

Creative assets such as images, illustrations, or infographics are essential for multiple areas of your marketing strategy. Without them, your website, blog posts, social media posts, and press releases would look very dull indeed, and are unlikely to make much of an impact on your target market.

In fact, a study by Buzzsumo found that adding images to Twitter posts generates 150% more Retweets than text-only updates, and Facebook posts with images had 2.3x more engagement than those without. Blog posts with an image every 75-100 words also received double the number of shares than those with less or more.

Clearly, your marketing team needs to be maximising the use of creative assets to reach potential customers as much as possible.

By using automation software, you can build a creative assets request process that will speed up collaboration and production.

Staff can submit essential details upfront – such as image dimensions, file type, and design brief – so that your team has all the information they need to start work straight away, with no email chasing required.

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Build a workflow to automate parts of your creative requests process

 

Once the assets have been created, staff can upload the files to the original request, where they can collaborate with others and share feedback until the final proof is signed-off. At this stage, your team can mark the request as ‘complete’ and the creatives are ready to download and share throughout your marketing channels.

Marketing campaign project tracking

Marketing campaigns are a set of organised processes that have one ultimate goal, such as raising awareness of a new product or service.

Normally, marketing campaigns will include various promotions such as email marketing, advertising, and social media, in order to reach as many marketing segments as possible. They’re an essential part of your marketing mix, and it’s important that your team can manage and track them as effectively as possible.

Each marketing campaign is essentially a full-on project, with many different processes and people involved. Automation software can help your teams keep track of project progress, so they know exactly who is working on what at any given stage.

For example, you can create a workflow that automatically assigns a task to your email marketing team to contact prospects before a particular deadline. As soon as a task is assigned to a team member, they’ll get an automatic notification to let them know.

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Staff will get automatically notified when a task is assigned to them

Social media post approval process

However amusing it is to bystanders, no company ever wants to be at the centre of a social media fail.

Avoid the mishaps by using automation software to build a social media post approval process. Staff can simply submit their social media post ideas via a form on your intranet, and you can set up rules that automatically assign submissions to senior team members for review. From here, managers can either approve a post, or decline it whilst providing feedback for improvements.

Team members will be automatically notified at each stage of the workflow and receive confirmation that they can go ahead and share their post to the real world.

Formalising this particular marketing process will mitigate any social media storms, increase accountability in your teams, and improve consistency in your marketing messages – all key ingredients for successfully reaching your target audience.

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