Rethink your marketing workflow MarketingProfs
One of our most important tasks as marketers is to build trust and strengthen relationships with our customers through personal and appealing content.
However, the emergence of new channels, formats and technologies has changed the expectations of our customers and created intense competition for their attention. All of this puts pressure on marketing organizations to be more agile, faster, and more productive in delivering their creative content.
However, content operations have inefficiencies. The teams are busy managing the details of the process instead of the content themselves.
And the pandemic has further exacerbated the operational burden as the workload increases and remote work reconfigures the way everything is done.
Marketers today need to rethink every aspect of their playbook.
Agility creates more productive workflows
Airtable recently interviewed senior marketing executives to better understand their challenges. More than 70% of respondents said the volume of campaigns and content they need to deliver has increased year over year, and 38% said their workload has increased by 50% or more. Changes were not limited to customer content, however. Internal communication and communication with stakeholders have also changed significantly.
Such changes are easy to relate to when they are so widespread, intense, and driven by something as big as a global pandemic. However, with the introduction of every new channel, medium, geographic region, new product, or new competitor, marketers have learned that speed, iteration, and adaptability are keys to keeping up with customer preferences and employee expectations.
Cross-functional workflows require flexibility
If agility and adaptability are keys to staying relevant, efficient and flexible processes are mandatory to execute. However, most marketing workflows are not linear or set up to work well in today’s cross-functional environments. Modern workflows are a complex mix of plans and resources that are used across many teams and managed by complicated tools.
Marketing teams use an average of 23 marketing tools, according to our research mentioned earlier. The more tools marketers add to their martech stacks, the more fragmented their work becomes. Data is duplicated in some places and missing in others. Teams struggle to show their real impact on the business, and executives don’t have the visibility they need to make quick decisions.
Marketing teams need a single place to connect their people, processes, and systems, and they need a reliable source of truth for their data. And they need tools that can be tailored to their unique business and working method, rather than rigid, isolated applications that force teams to bypass them.
The production of content and campaigns must be true to scale
With many companies managing hundreds of campaigns and thousands of assets in a year, even the slightest change can disrupt the overall operation of a team.
That became painfully clear at the beginning of the pandemic. Almost 70% of the 1,700 B2B marketers surveyed by MarketingProfs and the Content Marketing Institute stated that they had adjusted their content strategies accordingly.
So it’s no surprise that the no-code movement is being embraced by marketers to bring order to chaos. Marketers crave simple solutions and need the flexibility to refine processes over time.
Imagine if your team could integrate workflows across different tools, automate processes and expand your data with just a few clicks. In a world of simultaneous scaling and scaling, you can safely and seamlessly coordinate workflows between internal stakeholders and external providers and share controlled parts of your data if necessary.
It’s time to focus your energy on innovation again
Modern marketing teams cannot rely on older marketing technology to achieve their goals and produce positive business results. You need flexible solutions that enable marketing teams to streamline their work, act quickly, and raise the bar even higher on marketing programs, content, and campaigns.
It’s important that these solutions allow teams to create a single source for their marketing work, keep multiple projects in one place, and stay on track even as business needs change and evolve.
By investing in these types of tools, teams can get a holistic view of all data, people, and assets in a single place to better understand the complex relationships between them and gain access to real-time information that drives decision-making. Having access to this data and the ability to make better business decisions will help marketers adapt quickly to changes and raise the bar for quality, fast content.
To be competitive, marketing leaders need agile, flexible platforms that scale and provide context for the critical and relevant data their businesses need.