Blog posts filtered by: Marketing Operations

“How do we keep working efficiently when we can’t go to the office?”

That’s on the mind of almost every manager and executive this week. Even though remote work has become a rising option for many teams in the past few years, the global crisis around COVID-19 has shockingly and very quickly upended the traditional workforce model across industries.

So many organizations are now scrambling to figure out work-from-home scenarios and implement remote collaboration policies that will minimize the ongoing disruption to the business and employees’ lives.

At Ziflow, we’re part of a growing population of companies that is 100% remote, and because our team has worked this way since the day we launched Ziflow, we’ve refined a company-wide remote work strategy that ensures our global marketing, product development, sales, and customer service teams operate as one productive unit every day to reach our goals. If this sounds like the situation you and your team has just been thrust into, keep reading for some helpful guidance on how creative teams can make the jump to remote collaboration.

On the surface, the words “creative” and “operations” might not appear to go together.

We typically associate “creative” with things like advertising, marketing, and branding. But these functions need managing by operational experts to avoid missed deadlines often caused by bottlenecks in the review and approval process.

A few years back, the Marketing Operations role didn’t exist. Instead, the marketing department drafted in Project Managers to help run and coordinate their more extensive campaigns.

One of the most challenging parts about managing marketing, design, and creative content projects is the internal-external collaboration flow between clients, partners, and freelancers.

Rush jobs are a fact of life in creative production. Whether they are driven by the need for new campaigns on a short fuse, or last-minute feedback arriving which changes the scope of a creative project dramatically, these requests disrupt the best-laid project plans.  

Feedback for creative marketing projects often come from (and touch) many different parts of the business, so much so, that it can be tough to know who truly “owns” the entire process - and who’s responsible for making it more efficient. Depending on the type of organization you work within, review and approval processes can vary, as can the roles responsible for them.

For those working in the creative production universe (agencies, internal agencies and marketing teams), facilitating the review and approval can end up like chasing a shadow: Feedback and files are shared across  many disconnected email chains, Slack channels, phone calls, and intranet sites - or worse, physical printouts.

Today’s modern marketing organization relies on a wide range of technology (MarTech) to create a multi-channel approach of relevant, personalized experiences for their customers and prospects.

There is an opportunity in your organization to accelerate creative project delivery, and it’s hiding in plain sight - your creative content production, review, and approval processes.

The proliferation of digital marketing channels has rapidly increased the demand for content from marketing teams. In addition, marketing cycles have shortened dramatically. As a result,  marketers need to produce more high quality content in less time. And each piece of content needs review at least once before approval and release.

The rate at which new marketing projects and campaigns are being requested today doesn’t allow for any wasted time. This means organization of your work is a must. With our most recent release of Ziflow we’ve delivered our new folder functionality to just do that, help you keep your projects and proofs organized.

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Hopefully you’ve never had to have the discussion that starts with “we need more time” “or we’re not going to hit our deadline”, but the reality is, if you’re working in marketing today it will probably happen at some point if it hasn’t already happened this week.

Effective marketing project management goes beyond the Excel spreadsheet of tasks and color codes. If deadlines are getting the best of you more often lately, I’m happy to assist! I’ve spent time talking with marketing teams and agencies to identify why marketing teams most often bump up against (and past) their due dates. Here are Four Early Warning Signs that your delivery deadline might be in jeopardy, and some ideas on how you might avoid them in the future!

Not a news flash: Being busy isn’t the same as being productive. All of us in marketing have no shortage of tasks and projects that keep us busy, but we’re often most challenged with ensuring we stay productive - moving the ball forward on key projects and deliverables.

Dropbox recently announced Showcase, a new capability within their Dropbox Business offering. In their words, Showcase is “a new way to share that puts your work in the best light”.  As Ziflow is singularly focused on helping marketers deliver their best work, we were interested to see how we might help our joint customers make the best use of Showcase.   

With our new integration with Basecamp, our joint customers can link their cloud storage with Basecamp to automate many of the manual tasks that go into keeping your projects organized, updated and on schedule.   

(Note: This post is part of our series of posts on Improving Your Marketing Workflow,  aimed at giving marketers ideas on how to simplify their lives by automating the repetitive tasks that go into creative production. Check out our two earlier posts on Getting Organized and File Conversions.)

When it comes to criticisms of team performance, there probably isn’t a more cringe-inducing description than “not being on the same page”. Clearly there isn’t a shortage of communication methods available (email, IM, status updates in project management apps, etc.), but we still sometimes fall short on keeping everyone updated on what’s being asked of them or what their next steps are.   Let's fix that. 

(Note: This is the first post in our series of posts on Improving Your Marketing Workflow,  aimed at giving marketers ideas on how to simplify their lives by automating the repetitive tasks that go into creative production. Be sure to check out the other posts as they’re released)

As we’ve written about before, there’s a big difference between being “busy” and being “productive”. Often times, that distinction comes down to how well you organize your marketing workflow - the way you get work done and how much time is spent on high-value activities.