HOW TO AUTOMATE YOUR MARKETING WORKFLOWS

- and all the advantages you could expect when doing so.

What is a marketing flow?

Before diving into automated marketing (work)flows, a brief definition of marketing workflows as a concept is necessary.
A marketing workflow is the series of actions and processes it takes to get tasks or projects done: from brainstorm to final launch of a campaign or similar. It covers all steps and tasks – who is responsible for what and when.

Since a workflow is the process by which e.g. a campaign is put together and run, the workflow will run its course regardless of it being managed or not. So why should you get involved and practice workflow management for your campaigns and projects?
Well, the devil is in the detail: when you manage your marketing workflows, you quickly uncover parts of the process where errors often occur, where bottlenecks tend to form, and where optimizations can be made.

Once you have the full picture, it gets fairly easy to improve the marketing workflow process, thereby shortening time to market – which in return creates greater value at a lower cost.

Read more about time to market optimization here

Time to market optimisation

Automation – the next step to optimizing your marketing workflows

Once you have made the decision to analyze your marketing flow, a natural and value-adding next step will be to automate parts of the marketing workflow.

Forget your manual checklists and spending excessive amounts of time managing each step of the project or campaign workflow. Approval processes, reminders about deadlines and communication with freelancers and partners can all be automated with the right marketing automation workflow system.

But what exactly is that? Whether you are looking to automate print or digital project workflows in connection with e-mail marketing, printed marketing, content marketing, general inbound or digital marketing, you should firstly take a look at your needs. 

How many people are involved in the process?
How complex is the workflow?
Are there any specific needs or rules regarding accountability or audit trail?
Which flow forward or backwards do you need - and allow?
Do you need specific briefing templates for different kinds of content at different steps?
Are there any specific needs in terms of language, tone of voices, or CVI? (international departments or subcontractors)
Which systems and software do you use – for communication and solving tasks?

 With the Encode system, all your information and communication is collected and stored in one place. Calendars, copyright info, communication channels, and work tools are in most cases easily integrated, which ensures that you and your team do not waste time looking for e-mails or details on copyrights to specific visuals – or on sorting out which is the latest version of the copy.

Furthermore, the time-consuming content approval workflows and general approval flows are reduced when automated, because the system will manage sending notifications to the relevant person, as well as sending reminders about deadlines.

Automating parts of your marketing workflow management will bring you several further advantages – contact us today for a non-binding dialogue about your options.

Why Encode could be the right marketing workflow system for your company

Encode offers a well-established solution for workflow management. With more than 18 years of experience and about 43.000 users of the system worldwide, you will get a solution built on best practice and tailored to your company’s needs.

Furthermore, choosing Encode as your partner ensures you two beneficial things: the system itself, but also an initial analysis of your workflows done by our consultants, which is meant to uncover your specific pains.

What we typically help customers with is to:

• Improve time-to-market

• Structure workflows

• Get an overview of all processes

• Have fewer repeating mistakes

• Save costs in production and manpower.

After the analysis, we adapt the Encode software to your needs. Encode is an aPaaS (application-platform-as-a-service) enterprise solution hosted in the cloud – for instance, Azure, Google Cloud, or something else depending on your wishes and needs.

We know that great value is often found in the right time to market – which is why implementation of the Encode solutions is inherently made to be as swift as possible. Depending on the size of your project, we are often able to implement your unique solution within 4-8 weeks!

Finally, with the Encode marketing workflow software, you do not have to worry about spending a large part of your budget on a quickly outdated, set-in-stone solution. Our configurable software is made to be agile, so you can make micro and macro adaptions and optimizations as you go, reshuffle your organization, open new channels, outsource parts of the production, or similar.

In that way, your Encode solution can change to support your business goals continuously - so you are ready for the challenges that your company faces today and in the future.

Curious to learn more? We offer specific solutions for an array of industries – find yours here.