Improving Marketing Workflow with the Best Marketing Workflow Tools for 2024

marketing workflow automation software

Key takeaways

  • Marketing workflow tools are necessary to plan, manage, and execute marketing strategies in an effective and planned manner.
  • These tools beat the challenges that marketing teams face such as unrealistic client demands, long team meetings, unrealistic expectations, etc.
  • Content marketing workflow, email marketing workflows, social media workflow, etc are some of the key marketing workflows.
  • Marketing automation can be of different types, namely, CRM automation, email marketing automation, and lead qualification automation.

Understanding Marketing Workflow Tools

If you are running a business, you will know the importance of marketing workflow tools. Marketing workflow tools automate marketing tasks and streamline them. These tools are necessary to plan, manage, and execute marketing strategies in an effective and planned manner. A marketing workflow tool aids in running campaigns in a budget-friendly and successful way, making the right impact. 

The challenge of designing and strategizing a marketing campaign is taken care of by workflow tools, helping manage every aspect of it. It also has a provision that integrates the solution with current platforms by effectively managing data.

Table of Contents

Why do you Need a Marketing Workflow?

The challenges that marketing teams face include missed or overly ambitious marketing goals, constant interruptions, unrealistic client demands, and endless team meetings. The best way to deal with the chaos that prevails within marketing teams and operations is to have a clearly defined marketing workflow for each marketing process. What is a marketing workflow? Marketing workflows outline the sequence of steps that define marketing processes. Having a workflow for marketing helps marketing teams streamline the way the teams work. Effective marketing workflow management helps improve the marketing team’s satisfaction, efficiency, and overall performance.

Marketing workflows come in all sizes and types. The magnitude depends on the task, company profile, and industry. Successful workflows are defined by the following features.

Logical – Marketing workflows must present the process in a logical manner. Marketing workflows must help the team establish a consensus on the information they need to be able to work predictably. It is therefore essential that the workflows are logical and easy to follow.

Visible – Workflows are effective when every team member understands the process flow. To make sure that the workflow is effective, introduce the workflow to the member during the onboarding. Any updates on the workflow must be shared in a consistent manner via a consistent channel.

Iterative – As businesses grow, process workflows need to change to accommodate the new changes. It is important that workflows are flexible enough to be tweaked and adjusted according to business requirements.

Why do you need marketing workflows? Maintaining project calendars and keeping track of the performance of marketing teams scattered across various locations can be challenging when organizations rely on outdated methods. A well-planned marketing process workflow helps address such challenges. Here are 5 reasons why marketing workflows are needed:

Team alignment – Marketing workflows help your teams remain aligned with the overall organizational goals. Marketing workflows ensure that teams are aware of their core tasks and who is responsible for which task. Marketing managers and employees can see the current status and progress of relevant projects and tasks via workflow mapping. The process maps out the roles and responsibilities of each team member clearly. Marketing workflows ensure smooth collaboration and visibility across teams in an organization.

Improved project management – A marketing workflow management system enables supervision of the team’s activities from a strategic outlook, instead of tracking every task in detail. A process workflow helps improve project management capabilities.

Produce high-quality results – Marketing workflows bring consistency across operations. Every project is regarded with equal importance in the workflow so that teams can efficiently build out each campaign component.

Meet deadlines effectively – Marketing workflows minimize email trails about work assignments, deadlines, payment, and publication dates. Workflows provide a centralized location for access and storage of all documents and deliverables, which provides duplication among team members. Approval tasks can be accelerated via marketing workflows. A significant amount of time and effort is saved by using marketing workflows.

Improve campaign success and profitability – Marketing workflows enable teams to complete more work in less time. They can use their free time to pursue projects and clients that add more value to the organization. Workflows ensure that team members follow the right order of marketing and sales processes.

Key Marketing Workflows

The marketing function is made up of several processes, each of them having a specific purpose. Improving the throughput of the function requires a complete understanding of the key marketing workflows. A brief description of key marketing workflows is given below:

Content marketing workflow – The success of inbound marketing campaign workflow is heavily dependent on the quality of the content. Effective and quality content is vital for inbound marketing tactics. Developing and delivering value-packed and engaging content engages your prospective audiences. The greater value you provide to the audience, the easier it will be to transact with them. Content marketing workflows help teams produce content that strikes the right chord with the target audience. Effective content workflow management ensures that the team can plan, write, approve, publish, and monitor the content’s performance. Meaningful insights can be derived from content workflows so that strategies can be altered for better outcomes. Tasks within the content marketing workflow are:

  • Identifying goals and target audiences
  • Planning editorial calendar
  • Assigning content to the team
  • Developing content
  • Proofreading and peer review
  • Creating or choosing images appropriate for the content
  • Writing and scheduling social media messages
  • Publishing content
  • Distributing content via external sites
  • Respond to comments on posts
  • Repurposing content into other formats

Email marketing workflows – Email marketing workflows can simplify email list processes and strengthen the sales funnel process. Email marketing workflow automation coupled with the right strategy empowers marketing teams to achieve better outcomes and derive maximum value from their email campaigns without much investment. Tasks in the email marketing workflows include:

  • Planning and setting goals
  • Designing the layout
  • Writing email copy
  • Creating workflow in marketing automation tool
  • Testing and tweaking emails
  • Scheduling emails
  • Analyzing results to improve future emails

Online PR Workflows – Establishing good public relations (PR) is important for marketing a business. An online PR workflow helps find the target and gather information about potential media and influencers, and build relationships with them. Tapping on online PR expands the reach of outreach campaigns. The online PR workflows are made up of the following tasks:

  • Auditing the current media coverage
  • Setting goals
  • Determining audience
  • Identifying interested and influential reporters
  • Defining key messaging
  • Developing pitch
  • Following up with targets
  • Assessing results and setting new goals

Social media workflow – Successful social media campaigns require the marketing teams to invest substantial amounts of time and effort. Appropriate social media workflows simplify the process for the marketing team. Creating a social media workflow enables you to increase traffic engagement and sales. A good marketing workflow also enables teams to formulate content ideas, create engaging content, and automate the content posting schedule. The social media workflow includes the following tasks:

  • Sourcing internal content and managing posting calendar
  • Monitoring feeds and curating external content
  • Posting internal and curated text, photo, and video content
  • Monitoring responses and engaging with followers
  • Running analytics on strategies

Search engine marketing – A workflow management system helps teams easily plan and execute long-term SEO projects. The right SEO workflow management tool helps you manage and optimize marketing efforts. The search engine workflow is made up of the following tasks:

  • Deciding the audience of PPC campaigns and goals
  • Defining the campaign budget
  • Determining optimal keywords for the target audience
  • Writing an ad copy
  • Creating the ad landing page
  • Gathering feedback from team members
  • Performing split tests and tweaking
  • Scheduling the ads
  • Measuring and analyzing the results of the ads

Automating the Marketing Workflow

Marketing workflow automation software is a valuable tool in inbound marketing when it is set up and maintained correctly. Marketing workflow software can simplify several tasks in the marketing workflow. Sending personalized emails, prioritizing and scoring marketing leads, and managing data in the company’s CRM are some of the tasks that can be automated using marketing workflow management software.

Marketing automation tools can work wonders in the marketing function, provided you choose the right tool for your business and implement and manage them correctly. Before making the decision on what to automate in the marketing function, it is important to understand how marketing automation software works.

Marketing operations software addresses predetermined steps in a business process for completing a given task. Each marketing automation workflow can be customized as per the unique requirements of the business. However, there are certain basic automation rules that apply to all marketing automation flows. All workflows are characterized by a trigger, actions or tasks, and conditional logic.

Trigger in a workflow is usually the point where the workflow begins when certain criteria are met. Next, come the activities or tasks. These can be scheduled to be executed in a sequence. Activities include time delays, sending communications, changing properties, and assigning contacts to team members. All through the workflow certain condition logic (If-Then, or And-Or) is applied to all tasks. The path the workflow takes depends on whether the condition is met or not. Marketing automation uses software to automate monotonous marketing tasks. Repetitive tasks like email marketing, social media posting, and even ad campaigns can be automated to provide a more personalized experience for existing and prospective customers. When done right, marketing workflow automation can deliver 3 main benefits for your business.

Personalized workflows – Tracking and understanding each prospect’s actions is an important part of the marketing strategy. Effective tracking of these data points throws light on what customers are looking for at the moment. Manual tracking of this information is impossible. Using marketing automation, marketing teams can track these inputs across multiple channels to gain deep insights into customer needs and deliver the right content at the right time. Automated workflows help deliver qualified prospects to helpful content, which results in warm leads that can be nurtured thoughtfully into customers. Personalized workflows enable businesses to engage with customers and establish long-term relationships and customer loyalty.

Streamlined processes – Workflows that are automated improve the coordination between processes of the business. Automation helps build processes that work across different functional teams so that customer effort is reduced at every stage of the journey. Process silos are broken down for a unified customer experience with marketing workflow automation. The need for complex hand-off procedures is eliminated with automation.

Improved customer experience – When marketing processes are streamlined, redundancies and repetitions are eliminated from the workflow. This accelerates the process workflows so that customer engagement and experience are improved.

Types of Marketing Automation

There are many types of automated marketing processes, most of which comprise repetitive and redundant steps. Here are 3 of the most popular types of automated marketing workflows.

CRM Automation 

CRM systems depend on a variety of automated processes running in the background that provide valuable insights into contact records. Automating the CRM system helps organizations to get accurate data on various processes. For example, suppose your marketing brings a lead from a specific source on the Internet. In that case, the data about the lead can be captured from the “lead source” property and then set up an automation that copies the same information into the associated Company and Deals records.

Email marketing automation

Automated email marketing is usually the first step that companies take while automating the marketing process. Enrolling contacts into email campaigns makes it easy to follow up when a prospect downloads a piece of content or takes specific actions. Companies sometimes automate a barrage of sales pitches the minute a prospect downloads a resource from the website, which puts off prospects. It is better to nurture prospects with short series of messages that address immediate challenges so that they will hire your company for a bigger objective. Email marketing workflows can be built out to guide your prospects through any stage of their lifecycle, even after they signed on as a customer.

Lead qualification automation

Automation of lead qualification keeps the sales team from wasting time on the wrong prospect. As the lead moves throughout the campaign, marketing teams need to make sure that the ones most qualified are passed along to sales. This can be done by setting up automation that identifies a lead that meets the criteria for an “ideal customer profile”, and labels them as a qualified lead. This criterion might depend on attributes like company size, industry, location, behaviour on the website, and purchase frequency. These attributes may be captured when a contact record is created in CRM.

End-to-end workflow automation

Build fully-customizable, no code process workflows in a jiffy.

Marketing Automation Workflows a Business Must Have

Automation can play a crucial role in establishing long-standing customer relationships. Automating the marketing workflow helps businesses secure new customers and also ensure that they remain loyal to the brand. The top marketing workflows that a business must have are listed below:

Welcoming subscribers – His simple automation sets the tone for long-lasting relationships with customers and shows that you care about customers.

Re-engagement workflow – When prospects stop interacting with your brand, you need to start re-engaging with them to remind them about aspects of the brand that they find appealing.

Feedback workflow – When customers have just completed interaction with the team, it is important to collect their feedback.

Cart abandonment workflow – When a potential customer leaves the website before completing the checkout process, it is important to overcome the obstacles and get the customer back into the purchasing frame of mind.

Topic workflow – This workflow requests information from the user in exchange for digital downloads or other types of valuable content.

Lead nurturing workflow – Lead nurturing workflow is the next step forward from the topic workflow.

Upsell workflow – This workflow personalizes the sales pitch by referring to items within a user’s purchase history.

Renewal purchase workflow – Subscription services fall naturally into a renewal marketing automation workflow. Marketing automation for subscriptions ensures that you are aligned with customers’ purchase cycles.

Top Marketing Automation Tools for 2024

Choosing the right marketing workflow softwaris an important decision that the marketing team needs to make. To choose the best marketing workflow management solution for your business you need to focus on the following points:

Pricing – The first and most important aspect that the company must consider is the pricing of the software. No matter how amazing the product may be, it must provide complete value for the price.

Features – The number and diversity of features are the keys to choosing the best workflow management tool for your needs. The business needs to identify current workflow challenges and find out what is lacking. The features provided by the software must address the workflow challenges.

Support and onboarding – The best workflow management software must be easy to onboard and provide stellar support to its customers.

The best marketing automation software that your business must consider for 2024 is listed below:

  1. Cflow
  2. Salesmate
  3. Marketo
  4. Circleboom Publish
  5. Pardot
  6. Hubspot
  7. EngageBay
  8. Mailchimp
  9. Flipsnack
  10. Oracle Eloqua

Conclusion

Streamlining marketing processes can be effectively done by automating key workflows like email marketing, lead qualification, lead nurturing, etc. Marketing automation software helps standardize the marketing process for better customer engagement. A no-code BPM software like Cflow can automate key business workflows like procurement, sales and marketing, finance, and HR. Structure your marketing workflow management with Cflow. You can design and control the way you receive and manage marketing requests with an easy-to-deploy, no-code marketing workflow software like Cflow. To explore the features of Cflow, sign up for the free trial today.

What should you do next?

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