How to automate your marketing workflows

From AI to automation triggers, making our jobs more efficient has been a big topic these past few years, and especially in marketing teams where budget reductions have become the norm for many of us, doing more with less is the dream.

But how do you even begin, if you want to automate workflows. How do you go about it, what are the pitfalls, what are the benefits. Those are some of the questions we’ll try to answer in this article.

But before we get that far, let’s take a look at how we define marketing workflows.

What is a marketing workflow?

A marketing workflow is a tool used by marketing teams to consistently execute promotions, campaigns or other projects.

A marketing workflow is made up of a series of steps it takes to get a project from initiation to completion; from brainstorming to the final launch of a campaign, for instance. The marketing workflow specifies every step and task as well as who is responsible for doing what, in which order the steps should happen, and what the deadline is.

The biggest challenge in creating a good marketing workflow is to uncover parts of the process where errors occur and then optimizing the workflow for next time.

Automate workflows—the next step to optimizing your marketing processes

Before we get any further, we need to address the elephant in the room, and the thing many companies seem to get wrong. Workflow automation is not about using generative AI to carry out tasks, it is about connecting tasks across an organization to make sure that initiation, completion and handover is smooth.

In most cases workflow automation relies on a work management software to automatically distribute tasks and information from one person, team or system to another.

For example, when the marketing manager marks a creative brief as complete, the brief is automatically sent to the assigned designer, and when the designer finishes the initial design and marks that task complete, a notification is sent back to the marketing manager, who then needs to review the creative. This is one of the ways that workflow automation saves time and minimizes errors, by eliminating manual handoffs.

You can follow these steps to start automating your workflows:

1. Understand what your current workflow looks like by collecting information from the teams involved. You need to understand how projects are kicked off, what the criteria is for a task to be marked as completed, and where bottlenecks happen. It is essential that you understand what triggers the beginning of each task.
2. Visualize the workflow. This gives you a better way to understand how everything is connected and it helps identify problematic areas.
3. Identify which tasks require data from other systems and make sure that your work management solution can integrate with these systems.
4. Build your workflow in your chosen workflow automation software, describe each task and assign user roles.‍
5. Automate the workflow by creating triggers and actions. This will help streamline recurring tasks and reduce the chance of bottlenecks happening simply because a task wasn’t pushed forward after being completed.

Why Encodify could be the right marketing workflow system for you

With the Encodify system, all your information and communication is collected and stored in one place. Calendars, copyright info, communication channels, and work tools are easily integrated, which ensures that you and your team do not waste time looking through emails to find details such as copyright to specific visuals, or which is the latest version of the campaign copy.

Further, Encodify lets you automate content approval workflows which makes your review rounds significantly faster, because the system will manage sending notifications to the relevant person when they need to review an item.

But Encodify isn’t about workflow automation for the sake of automating. What we actually help our customers with is:

• Improving their time-to-market
• Structuring their workflows
• Getting an overview of all their business processes
• Having fewer repeat mistakes
• Reducing their production costs and freeing up manpower.

The Encodify platform is made to be agile, so you can make micro and macro adjustments and optimizations as you go. If you make changes to your organization, open new channels, outsource parts of the production, or something else, the platform is ready to accommodate your changing needs.