Marketing teams responding to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis and worldwide social tensions have witnessed their workloads, budgets, and priorities being put under scrutiny during this time of upheaval. Events have either being cancelled, put on hold, or switched to a virtual environment. Social media and digital campaigns, along with increased demand for targeted content, have proliferated. At the same time, the workforce has moved online. Those water cooler conversations and the ability to drop by someone’s desk in the office has also been curtailed.
Marketers face a new beginning
This environment has created both opportunities and challenges for marketers. With an ever-increasing focus on content, they now face the demand for larger volumes and faster speed of delivery, while maintaining quality. Often, they lack a single, unified view to visualise all their campaigns, content and every other marketing project. There is increased noise in the collaboration and communication process as a result of remote working. There are seemingly endless email threads and instant messages popping up on the screen every other minute. Projects are being managed in spreadsheets scattered across various locations with often tedious long-winded processes to manage them.
This is all compounded with unstructured requests coming in left, right and centre, resulting in misalignment around projects and tasks. Duplicated tasks, version control problems and issues over ownership can decrease effectiveness and efficiency.
Tools and platforms that help marketing teams
Tools like Google Drive and Dropbox, among others, do help to alleviate some of the problems. However, that only solves the ‘storage’ of assets, not the processes, the communication issues, or the project management.
Without a tool that acts as a single source of truth, keeping track of all marketing initiatives can be very time-consuming. The issue is exacerbated if your team is spread across different regions. Whether it is a webinar, PR or social and content campaigns, all marketers need visibility into what’s on the docket. A spreadsheet is no longer efficient enough (was it ever?) to track the intricacies of today’s multichannel campaigns. A unified way of keeping the team aligned will also help avoid duplicated tasks, enabling the marketing team to deal with multiple requests. An efficient organisation will ensure that no deadlines are missed, but equally, the right work is prioritised.
Having clearly defined processes is the obvious first step, but tools are needed to support those in an effective way. Without the right tools that help marketing teams manage and prioritise these requests – providing visibility into workloads and how projects are progressing – activities can quickly get out of hand.
Here at Clearvision, we use Monday.com. More than a project management tool, it enables us to govern every aspect of our work. This includes the projects and tasks, the team’s workload, the calendars and deadlines, the approval workflows, and most importantly, all communications related to each of those activities. This promotes collaboration and provides transparency, increasing team efficiency.
Maximising productivity and avoiding admin overload
This is where Monday.com makes every marketing initiative incredibly efficient, from a simple collateral request to a full product launch project. This is available to everyone who needs access, whether they are part of the marketing team or from another area of the business. Monday.com enables the tracking and collaboration on multiple projects simultaneously. It also provides the desired clarity and visibility needed to run them successfully. This sounds straightforward, but for geographically dispersed teams that work on several projects at any given time, it isn’t. They frequently need input and/or approval from other teams (e.g. a technical product datasheet). This is crucial and often very time-consuming.
You also need to know that productivity is being optimised, but that no team member has an overwhelming list of tasks to work through. You need to be able to answer questions such as:
- Do I have enough resources?
- How busy is my team?
- How are my projects progressing?
- Where does this request that I have just received fit around other initiatives that are currently underway?
Of course, people have been answering these questions throughout their careers. Monday.com provides a visual and intuitive tool that is easy to use and doesn’t require technical skills to operate. It also provides a holistic view of all campaigns and projects in one place.”
Everyone in the team has more time to exercise their talents; we saved an incredible amount of time on project meetings, which are now shorter and more effective. Our inboxes have fewer – and shorter – emails. We don’t waste time looking for things. It is also much easier to plan the next project, or activity for the next quarter. In 2021, we’ll have more time to deliver higher quality work; and together we can be a better, more collaborative team.
Clearvision is a Cyber Essentials and ISO27001-certified software services company, with offices in the UK and USA. For over 20 years Clearvision has been helping teams in the public and private sectors reach their full potential, by providing them with licensing, consulting, training, hosting and support services.
Clearvision has established partnerships with Monday.com, Atlassian, AWS, Mendix, Checkmarx and other leading technology vendors that bring added value to its customer base.
For further information, visit www.clearvision-cm.com. Follow Clearvision on Twitter @clearvisioncm or LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/clearvision/
