The Marketer’s Ultimate Guide to Marketing Work Management

What kind of music is your marketing team making? As a marketing leader, you’re like the conductor of an orchestra, trying to produce a beautiful sound for your next campaign. 

But you’re also juggling a lot of tools, timelines, and tasks. And if you don’t have a clear, central structure and strategy to tie them all together into a strong performance, your audience is going to get up and walk right out of the symphony hall. 

Marketing work management gets everyone performing in the same key by combining clear structure with automation to streamline the process and keep projects moving. It’s critical for eliminating bottlenecks and executing your best work possible at scale.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to bring harmony to your processes and deliver a show-stopping performance. 

What is marketing work management?

Work management is the process of organizing, streamlining, and tracking marketing workflows and scheduling. Companies and departments use marketing work management on a day-to-day basis to keep things moving and reach productivity goals. 

Work management also combines structure and visibility—helping people understand what’s expected of them, what tasks are on their plate, and how they can communicate best. 

Modern work management incorporates automation as a key ingredient of the process. Your team might automate tasks like routing forms, updating project statuses, or approving work—anything that’s manual or repetitive. 

Automation is helpful because it speeds up your operations while reducing errors, ultimately leading to the consistent, standardized workflows that help you scale up. 

So you have a marketing work management strategy with a cup of marketing automation thrown in. But what about project management? Where does that term fit into the recipe? Here’s a quick breakdown:

• Project management: Project management is the recipe that walks you through the steps to get a single dish (or campaign) on the table by dinnertime. 
• Marketing automation: Think of automation as the kitchen gadget (like a stand mixer or air fryer) that runs in the background while you focus on other, more hands-on tasks.
• Marketing work management: This is the full kitchen setup. Marketing work management brings everything together so your team has the space, tools, and automation for efficient execution. 

Marketing work management organizes and accelerates your team’s work to help you achieve stronger campaigns with measurable results.

Common challenges to effective work management

No matter how strong your marketing strategy is, it’s still all too easy to get bogged down in the day-to-day execution. Even a high-performing team can get derailed by issues like:

• Approval bottlenecks that delay campaigns
• Manual updates that take up unnecessary time
• Unclear ownership that frustrates employees as they try to figure out who’s responsible for what
• Inconsistent workflows that make it difficult to scale campaigns
• Scattered tools that require constant back and forth or duplicate work

Problems like these lead to inefficiency, missed deadlines, and failed campaigns.

Work management solutions can help. These apps let teams plan, organize, execute, and track their work all in one place. They use automation to design clear workflows and help organizations stay aligned through every part of the marketing process. 

Why efficient marketing work management matters

When marketing teams struggle, it’s often because they don’t have the structure or systems to efficiently complete their work. The right processes and the right automation can help you move smoothly from strategy to execution at scale. 

Improve campaign outcomes

Effective work management helps your marketing department plan and execute high-quality campaigns on time and within budget by:

• Establishing clear goals and objectives
• Defining project plans and timelines
• Closely monitoring progress

Automation helps you move from the planning stage to launch even more quickly by automating tasks like approvals and progress updates, reducing bottlenecks and keeping the team aligned. 

Strengthen communication and collaboration

Successful marketing campaigns must have clear communication and collaboration between team members, stakeholders, and anyone else involved. This helps ensure everyone is on the same page throughout the process. 

Centralized communication is especially key for content marketers, who often need to work with a range of different people (clients, coworkers, other teams within the company) to create an end product. 

A survey conducted by Project.co revealed that 73% of employees who use a project management tool to communicate with coworkers say it leads to improved internal communication, and 59% say it delivers an increased rate of project success. 

Software that incorporates automation helps employees thrive in fast-paced marketing environments by triggering communication (like task assignments, reviews, approvals, or status updates) at just the right time. 

Increase efficiency 

Work management can help marketing departments streamline workflows, reduce wasted time and resources, and increase overall efficiency. By implementing project or work management tools and methodologies, marketing departments can get their work done as efficiently and effectively as possible.

According to a 2024 report from Wrike, marketers spend around 13 hours each week on administrative tasks like project coordination and task management—busywork that could be automated instead. Automating repeatable tasks will help you avoid wasted time and speed up projects and deliverables.

Enhance risk management

You’re investing a lot of time, money, and other resources in your marketing initiatives, but even a small mistake can lead to major consequences. With so much at stake, make sure you’re developing a work management practice to identify potential risks and strategies to manage them. 

By conducting risk assessments, developing contingency plans, and closely monitoring potential risks, marketing departments can reduce the likelihood of costly delays or other campaign setbacks. This is another area where automation can help, tightening the process and keeping workflows consistent every time. 

Continuous improvement

Work management isn’t a one-and-done process. To achieve the best results possible, marketing departments need to continuously assess campaign performance and make adjustments. Following a structured approach to work management helps you achieve better outcomes over time.

The best way to get the data you need? Automate your workflows. By automating and managing workflows in a centralized system, you can clearly track each step of the process. This makes it simple to see exactly where slowdowns are happening or what areas are causing friction—no guesswork needed. 

The role of marketing work management software

Work management software is a tool that teams use to gain clarity on tasks and processes. It improves the workflow of content marketing and keeps everyone on the same page. 

The best work management software and team collaboration tools will have functionalities to help:

• Optimize resource management
• Meet client needs
• Improve scheduling
• Enhance collaboration
• Reduce downtime
• Enhance performance
• Get better results
• Train teams to be more adaptable
• Plan decision-making
• Measure productivity

Planning and tracking 

The planning and strategizing stage of any marketing project is incredibly important. It’s where you come up with your campaign concept and nail down the broad themes, like tone and voice.

Often, creative teams are juggling several campaigns, projects, and events at the same time. With so many plates in the air, it’s crucial to make sure you can keep everything moving without missing a deadline. Using a marketing work management platform helps everyone stay aligned and on track.

Centralizing work

If your team is distributed across hybrid or remote environments, without the structure of the office, it can be hard to keep up with everyone. A work management tool will help you get a bird’s eye or granular view of milestone status and project progress from anywhere in the world.

Content marketing projects also typically involve many different files and documents. So you’ll need an organized digital asset management system to make sure this information is available to everyone who needs it. A good work management software lets you share files and documents and even create a resource library to store assets.

Providing transparency

There’s nothing worse than having an important task slip through the cracks because nobody knew whose job it was. A work management system helps ensure teams understand exactly who is responsible for what. 

Plus, a top solution will include features like calendars and centralized project management boards that offer visibility into the entire marketing workload, helping everyone stay on top of deadlines. Each employee can track their individual tasks within the context of the larger workflow, so they can prioritize their workdays and never miss a due date.

Automation supercharges marketing work management

Manual work can make your marketing campaign drag, and even small actions like routing tasks or checking on edits add up. They’re time-consuming, error-prone, and hard to scale. 

Automation helps your campaigns move in the right direction, without needing a 24/7 babysitter. When you add automation to your workflows, you’ll enjoy benefits like:

• Automatic triggers for next steps
• Status updates and notifications 
• Consistency throughout the project process
• No bottlenecks related to approvals or hand-offs

That means you’ll actually have time in your schedule to focus on the strategic, high-level, creative work that drew you to marketing in the first place.

How Tenon supports modern marketing work automation and management 

Tenon offers a smarter way to manage marketing work for enterprise teams using ServiceNow. By combining powerful automation with robust work management features, you can streamline your marketing operations with less manual effort.

Tap into the value of connected systems to move smarter and faster. See Tenon’s automation features in action.

Automate repetitive tasks and hand-offs

Tasks that have to be done over and over again, like assigning or approving tasks, can easily become a time-suck. More than that, they open the door to mistakes, delays, or missed steps.

Tenon’s automation solves these problems. Once you set up your workflows, tasks like these will happen automatically to keep your campaigns moving along. There’s no need for micromanaging—just a smooth, accurate process where you can feel confident that nothing will slip through the cracks.

Connect teams and data

When your marketing tools and teams are scattered, you don’t have the visibility you need to maintain momentum and complete a successful campaign. 

Built directly on ServiceNow, Tenon gathers all of your files, feedback, and status updates into one place. Cross-functional teams get real-time access to everything they need, so nothing gets lost or siloed. 

With this centralized visibility, you reduce the risk of missed updates or duplicated work, and everyone from content creators to managers can easily stay aligned. 

Drive measurable results

For marketing leaders, gut instinct isn’t enough. You need specific data if you’re going to track campaign performance, spot issues, and continuously improve.

Tenon’s built-in reporting and dashboards take the guesswork out of digital marketing by providing clear visibility into campaign performance, team productivity, and process bottlenecks. This real-time reporting gives you the insights you need to proactively address issues before they affect the campaign. 

Based on the data you get, you can optimize workflows, efficiently allocate resources, and make decisions that drive a meaningful ROI on every project.

Engage your audience more effectively with Tenon

Create campaigns that get results—without the behind-the-scenes chaos. Tenon provides automated workflows, performance insights, and easy collaboration, all within ServiceNow. 

Take the first step toward smarter marketing: schedule your demo today!