How to make the most of your marketing work management solution

Today, B2B marketing teams must tackle the challenge of handling intricate workflows, enhancing communication and fostering efficient collaboration. Traditional project management tools might not fully meet the requirements of B2B marketing teams.

That’s where marketing work management solutions step in. These solutions go beyond project management, simplifying and revolutionizing critical business processes for better outcomes and performance.

What are marketing work management solutions?

Work management solutions cover the management of individual and team workflows and workloads, whether for a project or organizational operations. They bring structure to day-to-day work, streamline and automate workflows and enhance communication and collaboration across teams. 

These solutions offer flexibility and empower B2B marketing teams to effectively coordinate individual workloads and team workflows. Examples of marketing work management solutions include Wrike, Asana and Monday.com.

Dig deeper: What is marketing work management?

The role of marketing work management solutions

Marketing work management platforms do more than just project management. They give teams a shared workspace to collaborate, organize tasks, manage resources, track time and streamline communication. These platforms go beyond traditional project management and offer the following benefits:

• Structure to team’s day-to-day work: Marketing work management platforms help bring some order to the chaos of daily tasks by providing a one-stop hub to manage all work activities.
• Workflow optimization and automation: These platforms come with automation features that make life easier by getting rid of manual work and simplifying repetitive tasks. By automating project templates, assigning tasks and setting due dates based on project start or due dates, teams can save time and avoid mistakes.
• Utilization of project templates: Marketing work management platforms let teams create standardized templates for reproducible projects that happen often. This guarantees consistency and efficiency across similar projects like webinars, newsletters, blog posts, etc.
• Resource management and time tracking: Efficient resource allocation is a must for successful project execution. These platforms help teams manage resources effectively and track time spent on each task, making sure resources are used optimally.
• Communication and collaboration: These platforms make it easy to see who’s working on what and the status of projects, promoting smooth communication and collaboration. Team members can effortlessly share and discuss task-specific details within the platform, boosting productivity and alignment.

Building a knowledge base for effective implementation

To get the most out of a marketing work management solution, it’s crucial to create a knowledge base that explains how to use the tool within your team or organization. This knowledge base should include guidelines on:

• Figuring out when to use the work management tool versus other tools to make sure everyone on the team is on the same page.

• Starting projects and tasks through various channels like email, Slack/Teams, meetings or request forms. Sharing examples and best practices for managing requests from each channel ensures clear and efficient communication.
• Setting role-based permissions to create projects and update key project details like task due dates, assignees and milestones.
• When it comes to outlining processes within the system, it’s important to document your work in task descriptions, use comments for task-specific discussions and update task statuses for easy tracking and accountability.
• Having clear and concise naming conventions for projects and tasks is key. You can use a drill-down method like Project > Project Folder > Project Task and follow naming convention rules by using numbers, dates and verbs. This not only improves understanding but also saves time.

Creating dashboards for effective monitoring

Dashboards are super important because they keep stakeholders in the loop about project progress without bombarding them with too much info. Marketing work management platforms have different types of dashboards available. Cool, right?

Here is a breakdown of the type of dashboards you can utilize in your marketing work management solution:

• Team dashboard: This type of dashboard gives you a bird’s-eye view of all the projects, helping team members see their workload at a glance. It’s a super helpful tool for team meetings to chat about project status and make sure everyone is on the same page.
• Individual dashboards: Team members can create their own personal dashboards to stay on top of their current and upcoming projects, tasks waiting for review or approval and any mentions they receive. Managers can also use these dashboards in one-on-one meetings to track progress and discuss performance.
• Read-only stakeholder dashboards: By creating read-only dashboards for stakeholders, you can make sure they have access to all the department or project-specific info they need – from status updates to deadlines and important details. This way, stakeholders can stay informed without having the power to edit critical project elements.

Dig deeper: 6 reasons why you need a marketing work management tool

Leveraging blueprints and templates for reproducible projects

To make things smoother when working on recurring projects, marketing work management solutions have your back with standardized templates. These templates act as blueprints for repeatable projects like webinars, newsletters, tradeshows, blog posts and more.

By duplicating templates, you can automatically assign project owners, task owners and reviewers and set due dates and dependencies based on project timelines. This saves you time and guarantees consistent project execution.

Streamlining project requests with request forms

Efficiently managing project requests is super important for keeping the team productive. Marketing work management platforms have these handy request forms that make it a breeze to submit project requests. By having all the requests in one place, teams can get all the info they need upfront, without delays or back-and-forth. Plus, you can set up automation features to assign projects and create tasks using templates. It’s all about streamlining the planning process!

In a nutshell, marketing work management solutions are the way to go for smoother processes and better collaboration in marketing teams. They boost productivity, improve results and deliver top-notch performance. With knowledge bases, dashboards, templates and request forms, you can fully tap into the power of marketing work management software, making sure your projects run like clockwork.

Brianna Miller is giving an in-depth talk on taking the pulse of your marketing: 5 benchmarks to monitor and strategies to move the needle at The MarTech Conference. Register for free here.