How I establish processes for marketing teams (a step-by-step example)

A few days ago, I was thinking about marketing process and what’s worked for my small team. It inspired me to write this down (if only for myself).

Part 1 is the random-thought-out-but-kinda-unique methodology on how I think of establishing processes. 🤓

Part 2 is an actual example of how I implement a process. 😍

The role of a manager is to lead a happy, productive team that delivers accurate, high-quality work on time and on budget.

1. Standards and expectations direct teams to deliver accurate work as a leading indicator of results.
2. Managers own results and therefore must direct team members to actualize those results.
3. Processes help team members contribute their talents and skillsets in a defined manner that is highly likely to make those results a reality.

Put results first.

Test.

Don’t establish a process before you know the process will generate results.

This may mean working in execution and collaborating with practitioners to ship, measure, learn, and iterate.

When a test (or a series of tests) produces consistent results, then a process is appropriate to document how to execute a similar campaign in the future to achieve similar results again.

Standardize operations.

Establish high-level phases in the content supply chain so you may collaboratively execute tests with some degree of consistency. (These process phases or stages translate nicely into Kanban boards to simplify project management.)

For example, any marketing project must go through phases of strategize, write, design/record, edit, stage, QA, publish, measure, retro, and report.

Get specific.

After you 1) know a type of project generates results — and therefore, to repeat success, you know a process can help your team thrive — and 2) you’ve standardized phases in the content supply chain, you can now 3) get specific with tasks to be completed in each phase, including task ownership, task start and end due dates, and defined requirements of task completion.

Let’s break this down with an example.

We publish lots of email marketing automation campaigns at CoSchedule to complement our lifecycle marketing efforts. This is something we’ve tested quite a bit, so while the goals of some campaigns may vary, there is value for the team to have a process in place to collaborate consistently when we do this kind of work.

This is what the high-level email marketing automation process looks like:

1. Strategize
2. Write
3. Design
4. Edit
5. Stage
6. QA
7. Publish
8. Measure
9. Retro
10. Report

We also employ some sub-phases for when the campaign is “ready” to hand off to the following stage in the content supply chain. Here’s what that looks like in detail:

Step 1: Strategize

Owner: Strategist

We write a creative project brief for every project. This is a standard expectation.

We plan our work. Then we work our plan.

The project brief is a template framework that forces the strategist to ideate and document all critical information for a campaign such as:

• Target audience (with a list of our defined personas to choose from)
• Measurable goal (from which the strategist selects pre-defined goals that align with strategic business objectives)
• Key performance indicators (with a link to the measurement tool or report)
• The date on which the strategist will measure the results (so we may document and report the outcomes)
• The full list of deliverables (so everyone knows expectations for the full list of what they will create, publish, promote, and measure)
• Writing requirements (which provide a list that links to all of our writing standards for brand voice, product marketing copy matrixes, persona documents, and self-editing checklist standards)
• Design requirements (which could link to a brand visual identity guide, image and screenshot standards, file saving guidelines, and more)
• Automation requirements (which includes criteria for when emails will send, who among our audience should be included and excluded, when they should be ejected, and other automation campaigns that should be paused during the duration of this campaign)
• Campaign timeline (that lists the tentative start and end dates for each phase of the campaign as well as the send dates for every email)

From here, we get cross-functional buy-in before moving forward.

The campaign owner, the strategist, is the owner of this phase in the content supply chain.

Step 2: Write ready

Owner: Strategist

After the project brief is done and we have stakeholder buy-in, the campaign is write-ready. The expectation is that the strategist — after fielding opinions, ensuring awareness, and gaining approval from all necessary stakeholders—will move the campaign into write-ready phase.

“Ready” statuses help us see which campaigns are ready for a project manager to assign to a practitioner. These make project handoffs way easier.

The write-ready phase is an agile way to simply empower a project manager to assign the campaign to the next available writer. (In my small team, strategists take on project manager responsibilities, too, but you get the picture of which hat they wear in these “ready” phases.)

Step 3: Write

Owner: Writer

The writer fulfills the expectations the strategist set in the project brief framework.

The writer is expected to use a self-edit checklist. This simple checklist ensures 1) that my expectations are clearly defined and referenceable, 2) the writer is empowered to hold herself accountable to these standards, and 3) the output will be on brand at scale.

Here’s that self-edit checklist:

• I read the entire project brief.
• I referenced the product messaging matrix to write the copy.
• I followed our editorial style guide.
• I wrote copy that matches our brand voice standards.
• I understand the audience whom I’m targeting.
• I’ve defined “what’s in it for me?” (WIIFM) for this audience.
• I researched what I’m writing.
• I knew what I wanted to write before I wrote it.
• I didn’t bury the lede.
• Sentences are no more than 20 words long.
• Paragraphs are no more than 2 sentences long.
• The copy is active voice, not passive.
• I didn’t use first-person pronouns.
• I have edited the piece for grammar, spelling, punctuation, and readability.
• I wrote at least 10 subject lines for each email.
• My piece does not contain fluff. Every word, every sentence, and every paragraph has a purpose.
• My piece addresses the goal of the project.

Before they hand it back to the strategist and call it done, we have a simple expectation:

You could send this as a plain text email and it would generate the results we need right now.

If the writer doesn’t have a URL, or the grammar is sloppy, or any other combination of things — that’s when the writer knows the project isn’t ready for the next phase of the process.

Simple expectations like these limit edit loops and unnecessary stress on the strategist to basically tell practitioners to read and follow the project brief.

When the writer is done, and they’ve made sure the strategist is cool with their work, the writer moves the project to design-ready phase.

Step 4: Design ready

Owner: Strategist

Designer capacity is a premium. Every project needs design.

Well-written content is poor content when it’s missing great design.

This “ready” status gives our strategists the opportunity to communicate together in a roadmap sync. We look at designer workloads for the upcoming sprint, talk through work we could assign, discuss designing within limitations, and assign work to a designer.

Step 5: Design

Owner: Artist

At the beginning of each project phase (excluding the “ready” phases), we have an expectation that the strategist hosts a kickoff with the owner of that phase.

So for example, in the design phase, the strategist would host a kickoff sync with the artist responsible for bringing the piece to life.

Following that, the artist is responsible for designing, discussing progress with the strategist, and following through on all expectations as set forth in the creative brief.

To keep things simple for our artists (and the same would be true for writers, email specialists, etc.), we assign a couple simple tasks:

• Start design (with a specific calendar date)
• Finish design (again, on a specific calendar date)

This sets expectations to complete all of their work within these limitations—within the timeline between the start and end dates as defined by the task assignments.

Design is never done. Perfection is unattainable. But design can be complete enough to be effective.

Step 6: Edit ready

Owner: Strategist

Like other “ready” statuses, this one basically throws the project back to the strategist to bring the “finalized” project back to stakeholders to provide awareness, get opinions, and finalize their approval.

These “ready” steps typically don’t really require work, but exist to kickstart conversations around priorities, deadlines, and capacity. So while I label these as “steps” in the marketing automation process, they’re really more of a cue to trigger a conversation meant to keep projects moving forward as efficiently as possible, leaving as few projects in progress as possible—mitigating miscommunication around handoff assumptions to streamline the content supply chain.

Step 7: Edit

Owner: Strategist

Because the strategist should already have gotten stakeholders’ opinions before kicking off the project, we try to keep this conversation centered around awareness (“as we discussed before…”) and approval (“as we agreed before…”).

Stakeholders shouldn’t have authority over art (whether writing or design) unless their feedback:

• Could increase results (e.g. “Remember when we discovered that this copy worked well for a button CTA?”)
• Could help the brand (e.g. “Have you considered this visual texture from our visual identity guide?”

Ideally, though, stakeholders should trust the specialists in their craft. If you don’t have that trust, I’d advocate for you to help your stakeholders approve the process so you may remove approval from the process.

Step 8: Stage ready

Owner: Strategist

Another “ready” status here — the project strategist is ready to assign work to the email specialist. Again, this status kicks off discussion in the roadmap sync about priorities, capacity, and workload.

Step 9: Stage

Owner: Email specialist

As with design, the strategist assigns the email specialist some simple tasks:

• Begin staging (on a defined calendar date)
• Finish staging (on a defined calendar date)

We leverage sub-tasks to set further expectations around what these things mean.

For example, “Finish staging” is defined by sub-tasks to build the trigger, build the goal, set ejection criteria, build each email, and build the canvas.

The sub-tasks act as a checklist that defines done or completion for the entire task. It ensures nothing gets missed by clearly communicating expectations.

Step 10: QA ready

Owner: Strategist

When the email specialist is done, the project is ready to be quality checked. Will the right emails send to the right person at the right time?

Step 11: QA

Owner: QA specialist

We have a simple checklist against which we review our work before we publish it:

Canvas/journey

• Entry trigger
• Exit criteria
• Conversion goal
• # emails
• Wait shapes/if then statements

Holistic

• Marketing automation flowchart
• Journey entry/exit criteria framework

Emails

• Subject lines
• Preview text
• Graphics/visuals
• Links

Step 12: Publish ready

Owner: Strategist

After QA is complete, the strategist makes the call of when to publish.

Step 13: Publish

Owner: Email specialist

Ship it.

Step 14: Measure, retro, report

Owner: Strategist

After we publish, the strategist follows the plan set forth in the project brief. The brief notes the dates on which the strategist will measure success, host a retro, and report the findings.

Again, in the “strategize” phase of the process, we set up measurement reports and analytics. This ensures we can measure what we ship.

The retro is a simple meeting with the practitioners. The itinerary is simple:

1. What went well?
2. What didn’t go so well?
3. What would we do differently next time around?

The answers to these questions, along with what we measure, get compiled into a very simple slide deck that reports the information. We then use swarm meetings that include key stakeholders (as well as practitioners) to report the results and suggest iterative improvements if we choose to do a similar project in the future.

That’s how I establish processes for marketing teams with a step-by-step example.