Simple Steps For Optimizing Marketing Team Workflow

Planning your work strategically; you can oversee several potential issues or stumbling points of your workflow. When you have a clear plan, and every member of your team is informed about all processes, it is time for execution. 

"Workflows are the way people get work done and can be illustrated as a series of steps that need to be completed sequentially in a diagram or checklist."  Benjamin Brandall

When I started my business, a digital marketing agency, I had the idea that organizing a workflow will be just managing tasks by email and google doc and stored everything on the cloud so that everyone can easily approach it. It sounded like a perfect plan. But when it came to a realization, I was torn apart between tasks written in the google doc and communicated by email. It was a nightmare to control all of the tasks, and even when we had only five employees at that point. I couldn't imagine what it is like to manage twenty or more employees.

Until one morning, I realized that my way of managing workflow was unsustainable. ​

Productivity was low even when we were highly motivated and worked very hard. Something was missing.

And I know now that my idea of team management was not good enough. There must be a simpler way to organize a team workflow.

At that moment, I didn't know that team management is a complicated and time-devouring process. And to have an optimized team workflow, there are vast minor things to accomplish.

What is a workflow exactly? There is a lot of buzz about optimized workflow. But, what is the definition of a workflow?

"Workflows are the way people get work done and can be illustrated as a series of steps that need to be completed sequentially in a diagram or checklist."  Benjamin Brandall

When we simplify this quote, we can see that workflow is a series of steps toward a common goal. ​

These steps need to be transparent to all team members and drive to productivity and efficiency.

Planning your work strategically; you can oversee several potential issues or stumbling points of your workflow.

When you have a clear plan, and every member of your team is informed about all processes, it is time for execution. ​

You execute, or you don't, that is the ultimate optimization hack.

It would be best if you considered completing your tasks on time and in a collaborative work environment.

These are a few things you need to implement into your marketing team workflow.

• Efficiency 
• Responsibilities clear to all team members
• Consistency in project tasks execution
• Cross-team transparency
• Oversee process gaps

To simplify the process, here are some of the things you can do today for better optimization of your marketing team workflow. ​

Step #1 Analyzing existing workflow

To improve workflow, you need to have a detailed view of where your team workflow arrangement is right now. ​

Take time and analyze your team and start with yourself.

It will include an all-day session with the whole team and hours of discussion and brainstorming, but it is worthwhile. And when you list up all processes, including projects, tasks, deadlines, milestones, and time needed to execute all operations. You are on a great way to systematically optimize your team workflow.

You need to know your limitation, as the starting point from which you can start developing. ​

Analyzing all processes, you will have insight into the background of your team workflow, that hidden information that could give you incredibly valuable data. 

Step #2 Master Workflow Management with a project overview

Workflow management is the ability to plan, control, overview, and execute tasks between team members.

There are a lot of different systems and strategies for workflow optimization. But to avoid a single-handed control, an endless sea of information, tasks, and other processes. By now, you can see that automation of operations is one of the ways to save your time and optimize your workflow. It is firmly considering implementing some of the project management software tools into your arsenal of weapons.

One of the most essential project management tools features is a project overview, as a high point of view for your team performance overview, including monitoring tasks, activities, and time spent on a specific process. ​

In just one sight, you can monitor all projects, milestones, due dates, team communication, file sharing, time consumed, and have a detailed view of the project path. 

In that case, you have a bird-eye perspective and can see a broader picture, and easily manage some potential stumbling stones. ​

Step #3 Creative Requests

For the Marketing team, creative processes are essential. Creating a copy or a visual, you need to make sure that every aspect is transparent and clear. The best practice is to have all creative requests under a single platform. ​

And then create specific guidelines via a short brief: 

• Task description
  
• Technical guidelines
  
• Target audience
  
• Communication channel 
  
• Brand identity
  
• Deadline
  

These six short guidelines will help your team to have a clear and well-organized taskboard. ​

And if needed, you will easily make changes, submit a draft to a client, and create a final version. ​

It is an excellent example of a social media post creating, giving you an insight into what plays a role in team workflow post creation.

Step #4 Plan Your Execution and Collaboration

Every team management planning involves a lot of upfront work. 

Consider that all time spent to create a clean and well-organized workflow is not waste.

It is the long run, and you need to invest in getting results. ​

Well planned execution is half of the work done. ​

The next step is improving communication and collaboration of your team, from the outdated email to innovative apps like Slack, and other project management tools. ​

The collaboration will get a more transparent, dynamic, and accessible to project overview. 

Process of planning includes: 

• Defining the main goal 
  
• Defining team members 
  
• Description of what tasks needed to be executed
  
• Transparent brief to each member
  
• Execution timeline
  
• Deadline
  

After a plan is determined and all processes are transparent, and all members know what their job is, your workflow will stream to productivity and efficiency.

Your productivity will rise, and there will be a minor chance of a misunderstanding within team workflow. ​

Step #5 Measure Team Performance

Once your plan is ongoing, and everyone is doing their job, the next step is to measure performance done in some period. ​

The question is, how do you know that your team productivity is efficient and is workflow giving you the best results?

Using project management tools, you can see your team performance and compare them to last month's achievement or productivity level from the previous projects. Is there progress, what did consume most of the time, did productivity rise. And the final insight - is a project profitable. 

After you acquire that information, you can intervene on time and shut down unnecessary and time-consuming tasks.  Monitoring the performance gives you a chance to prevent potential ​​issues if there is stagnation in project workflow, a problem in communication, or some other necessities.

Step #6 Building consistency in execution

It is the most simple but the most critical step to optimizing team workflow. 

To avoid an accumulation of tasks, you need to start executing every single assignment scheduled for today. 

Consistency in the execution of daily tasks is the first step in creating an optimized workflow. 

But, execution is hard because it takes commitment. 

Marketing is continually changing and evolving through a diversity of communication channels. 

Consistency is even more critical for a marketing team workflow, then for other teams in different industries. 

Marketing team workflow can be disrupted in just one edited task and not delivered in time, like the rescheduled post of a webinar starting date, publishing social media posts with a wrong copy, etc. 

It can have a significant impact on workflow and have big consequences.

Consistency is in overall, the most critical thing to get straight before any other matter.

Conclusion

To create a perfect team collaboration and optimal workflow, first of all, you need to consolidate all of your strengths into a firm foundation on which you can quickly build up a fortress and create a successful and profitable business. 

Make sure that you get straight your:

• Team structure
• Your niche
• Primary goal

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The marketing team organization is a little different than team organizations in other industries. The reason is that your state of expertise needs to be broad. 
There is not only one niche you are working on. There is an army of different clients with a diverse targeted audience, product, and services.

Written by: ​Jovan Miljevic