How to get the most out of your marketing operations management solution

Today, B2B marketing teams must grapple with the challenge of handling complex workflows, enhancing communication, and fostering effective collaboration. Traditional project management tools may not fully meet the requirements of B2B marketing teams.

This is where marketing work management solutions step in. These solutions go beyond project management to simplify and transform critical business processes for better results and performance.

What is a marketing operations management solution?

Work management solutions cover the management of individual and team workflows and workloads, whether running a project or an organization. They bring structure to daily work, streamline and automate workflows, and enhance communication and collaboration between teams.

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

Let’s dig deeper: What is marketing operations management?

The role of marketing operations management solutions

Marketing work management platforms are not just for project management. Give your team 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 of the team’s daily work: A marketing work management platform can help bring order to your chaotic daily routine by providing a one-stop hub to manage all your work activities.
• Workflow optimization and automation: These platforms have automation features that make your life easier by eliminating manual work and simplifying repetitive tasks. By automating project templates, assigning tasks and setting deadlines based on project start dates or deadlines, your team can save time and avoid mistakes.
• Using project templates: A marketing work management platform allows teams to create standardized templates for frequently occurring and reproducible projects. This ensures consistency and efficiency across similar projects such as webinars, newsletters, and blog posts.
• Resource management and time tracking: Efficient resource allocation is essential for project success. These platforms help teams effectively manage their resources and track time spent on each task to ensure they are used optimally.
• Communication and collaboration: These platforms make it easy to see who is working on what and the status of projects, facilitating smooth communication and collaboration. Team members can easily share and discuss task-specific details within the platform, increasing productivity and collaboration.

Building a knowledge base for effective implementation

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

• to understand When to use work management tools and other tools This is to make sure everyone on the team is on the same page.

• Start projects and tasks through different channels Email, Slack/Teams, meetings, request forms, and more. Sharing examples and best practices for managing requests from each channel ensures clear and efficient communication.
• Setting role-based permissions Create a project and update key project details such as task due dates, assignees, and milestones.
• Then, Outline the processes in the system, It’s important to document your work in the task description, use comments for task-specific discussions, and update the task status for easier tracking and accountability.
• have Clear and concise naming conventions for projects and tasks It’s the key. You can use drilldown methods like Project > Project Folder > Project Tasks Follow naming conventions using numbers, dates, and verbs. This not only improves understanding but also saves time.

Creating dashboards for effective monitoring

Dashboards are critical because they allow stakeholders to stay informed of project progress without overloading them with information. Marketing work management platforms offer different types of dashboards. Cool, right?

Here’s a breakdown of the types of dashboards available in marketing work management solutions:

• Team dashboard: This type of dashboard provides a bird’s-eye view of all projects, allowing team members to see their workload at a glance. This is a very useful tool for chatting about project status in team meetings and making sure everyone is on the same page.
• Separate dashboards: Team members can create their own personal dashboards to stay on top of current and upcoming projects, tasks awaiting review or approval, and mentions they’ve received. Managers can also use these dashboards in one-on-one meetings to track progress and discuss performance.
• Read-only stakeholder dashboard: Creating read-only dashboards for stakeholders ensures they have access to all the department or project-specific information they need, from status updates to deadlines and important details. . This allows stakeholders to stay informed without having the ability to edit important elements of the project.

Let’s dig deeper: 6 reasons why you need a marketing work management tool

Leverage blueprints and templates for reproducible projects

To make your life easier when working on recurring projects, marketing work management solutions support standardized templates. These templates serve as blueprints for repeatable projects such as webinars, newsletters, trade shows, and blog posts.

Clone a template to automatically assign project owners, task owners, reviewers, and set due dates and dependencies based on your project timeline. This saves time and ensures consistent project execution.

Streamline project requests with request forms

Efficiently managing project requests is critical to keeping your team productive. Marketing work management platforms provide convenient request forms that make it easy to submit project requests. By having all your requests in one place, your team can get all the information they need upfront, without delays or back-and-forth. Additionally, you can use templates to assign projects and set up automation for creating tasks. The key is to streamline the planning process.

In short, marketing work management solutions are a way for marketing teams to make processes smoother and collaborate better. Increase productivity, improve results, and achieve peak performance. With knowledge bases, dashboards, templates, and request forms, you can harness the power of marketing work management software to ensure your projects run like clockwork.

Brianna Miller talks more about keeping your finger on the pulse of marketing: 5 benchmarks to monitor and strategies for transformation At the martech conference. Register for free here.