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.

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.

You probably want your MarTech programs to all work together, but commissioning custom integrations that link all of your software together to form a cohesive solution may sound like an intimidating or overwhelming endeavor. And for many organizations, it’s not the difficulty of kicking off a custom integration project that may be intimidating, it’s the unknowns. Unless you have a strong IT team with experience in integrations, it’s daunting to make the jump without knowing exactly where you’ll land. That’s why finding a great partner can be a game changer; you can get exactly what you want without investing in new hires and technology or assigning additional work to your existing team members, who may not have the skill set necessary to create a custom integration that meets all of your needs.