Marketing work management tools assist marketing leaders and their teams in structuring their day-to-day work to fulfill goals on time and under budget, all while managing resources and facilitating communication and cooperation. Task assignments, time tracking, budgeting, team communication, and file sharing are a few examples of functions.
Before the pandemic, many marketers had been accustomed to working on initiatives that required collaboration with people outside of their own offices, as many brands operate across regions or throughout the world. Furthermore, marketing efforts, whether they are campaigns, websites, whitepapers, or videos, frequently require collaboration with external resources, such as an agency, a contract designer, or a photographer.
All of this has increased the demand for marketing task management software, which tracks and improves the processes, workflows, and projects conducted by digital marketers, and frequently integrates with other systems such as digital asset management (DAM) or creative suites.
Benefits of Marketing Work Management Tools
Marketing leaders encounter more complex workload challenges. Enterprise marketing work management technologies can provide considerable benefits to assist marketers get a hold on their work and effectively communicate with colleagues, including the following:
- More effective administration of worldwide operations. Marketing task management software can assist scattered staff in collaborating with one another, enabling accountability and uniformity across markets. Some solutions are designed expressly to facilitate cooperation and approval processes for marketing content.
- Reporting is easier and more transparent. Manually updated spreadsheets can be used to manage projects, but they lack the native reports and dashboards that marketing work management software gives. Many of these platforms have highly customizable reporting tools that use widgets and wizards to make reporting faster and easier. These reports are frequently shareable and can be distributed to executives at the VP and C levels, providing all stakeholders with an overview of success across numerous programs.
- Visualizations that help with planning and resource allocation. Most marketing work management software provide visualizations that allow marketers to monitor many projects at a glance, allowing them to alter schedules or tasks as needed to avoid overworking or underutilizing resources.
- Better coordination with clients and other stakeholders. Many marketing work management platforms have “guest” access or other flexible permission hierarchies that allow for the sharing of some information while keeping others private. This is especially useful for marketers working at agencies or as outside consultants since they can document what they need to within the application without fear of appearing unprofessional when the client logs in and sees their own view.
- Manage digital assets and share files. Most marketing work management applications allow users to upload or link to files in cloud storage, thereby acting as a DAM “lite.” Some are even integrated with a full-fledged DAM or creative suite, allowing creatives working on marketing materials to complete their work, receive reviews and approvals, and track the status of work for stakeholders.
- More efficient contact between the development team and other parties. Digital marketing projects frequently have a technology component that requires the skills of developers. When marketers and developers are in different functional areas but use the same marketing work management solution, their collaboration flows more smoothly. The same is true for any other department with which marketing communicates.
- Billable hours and human resource management can be tracked more easily. Many marketing work management tools track the time that passes while an assignee works on a task, allowing agency account managers to readily calculate the number of hours spent on a certain client’s projects. This tool can also assist managers monitor staff productivity levels.
- Clear responsibility prevents work from sliding through the gaps. Most marketing work management applications are built around a to-do list, with specific tasks assigned to the individual or group in charge of completing them. Managers can prevent delays and confusion regarding expectations by utilizing dependency functionality and tracking these actions.
- Automate repetitious chores. Many marketing job management tools enable the creation of templates or reproducible sets of activities, which can help to minimize repetitive repetition. If an agency has an onboarding or frequent check-up procedure for each of its clients, a manager can design the framework once and reuse it every time the use case arises. Some programs also feature recurring tasks, which can be used to document operations that repeat at regular periods.
Relationship With Agile Marketing
To keep up with the rate of change, several marketing firms have implemented agile marketing, a mindset and practice pioneered by software engineers. Though it has been around for a while, the transition to agile marketing workflows looks to be quickening.
Agile marketing does not require any specific software, but marketers who use this methodology are likely to hunt for solutions that align with their new attitude. Many marketing work management products provide reports and interfaces designed for agile, such as Kanban boards and a place to enter backlog items.
