Creative Operations, Marketing Workflow, Marketing Project Managment

With 2023 on the horizon, you’ve probably got plans about what you want to do with next year’s marketing budget.

Automation is the way of the future, but in the ever-evolving landscape of creative operations, best practices surrounding automation can easily shift. According to a recent industry survey titled “The State of Marketing Automation” by Ascend2, only 17% of respondents said that their marketing automation efforts were very successful at achieving their top priorities, and 67% said they were somewhat successful. This lack of confidence might be coming from understanding that there is always room for improvement, but it might also be from underperforming on marketing targets that automation was set up to assist.

Because cloud migration can be a turbulent time for organizations, we often see teams invest most of their resources into the immediate launch and fewer resources in a long-term plan. As such, there’s often room for organizations to develop a strategy for ongoing success and to get the greatest return on their IT investment.

For creative businesses, workflows are a crucial part of day-to-day operations. As teams become increasingly remote, digital systems for taking a project from inception to client-ready are becoming increasingly crucial for success.

Any modern marketing agency, retailer, or creative team worth their salt runs on a tech stack, that being software solutions that power an application, project, or projects. Search for an agency or check a company’s website, and you’re likely to find a banner of icons displaying the software they use. But what a banner of icons doesn’t capture is whether an agency’s software are working together, receiving, processing, generating, and – most of all – sharing data as one, integrated whole. Because even the most sophisticated software only function at a fraction of its potential when siloed off from other solutions.

There is no one-size-fits-all answer to marketing resource management. What works for one company may not work for another, and what works today may not work tomorrow.