Section 5 of 9

Workflows

Ten playbooks for the jobs marketing operations teams bring to Planning most often. Each page says what to build, what to leave in Workfront Workflow, and what goes wrong.

1. 1The front door: request intakeAlmost every marketing operations project starts here, because it is the problem everyone feels: work shows up by email, chat, and hallway conversation, with no brief, no deadline, and no way to say no.
2. 2One source of truth for campaignsEvery marketing team has a calendar. Most have several, and none of them agree — because each one is copied by hand from wherever the work really lives.
3. 3From brief to approved assetCreative teams lose time in two places: chasing the brief that should have come with the request, and chasing the reviewer who should have answered by now.
4. 4A content calendar that tells the truthSpreadsheet calendars fail quietly. A piece slips, a channel goes dark for a week, and nobody notices until the publish date has passed.
5. 5Budgets, POs, and the money in betweenBudget versus actual gets reconciled by hand at the end of every quarter, from a spreadsheet nobody fully trusts, for a finance team that has already closed the books.
6. 6ROI starts with a clean taxonomyMost attribution problems are not analytics problems. They are spelling problems: one campaign tagged three different ways by three different people.
7. 7Capacity: measure the demandTeams ask for headcount with anecdotes and get told no with numbers. The numbers they need already exist, split across two systems.
8. 8One campaign, many marketsA global launch becomes eight regional launches the moment it leaves headquarters — and the global team loses sight of all eight.
9. 9Brand and compliance review that survives an auditIn regulated marketing, the question is never only “was it approved?” It is who approved which version, against which claims, and when.
10. 10A lightweight tracker, and the agency versionNot every team needs an enterprise build. Some need a spreadsheet that stops breaking. Some need to run forty clients from one front door.

Twelve shorter playbooks — events, PR, email production, product launches, and more — are collected on More workflows.