What I’ve learned from establishing marketing processes (lessons learned)

Process empowers marketing teams to succeed. It’s not about preventing the team from making mistakes.

Process works best when you know it will generate results. There is room for testing and scrappiness before you understand how to work effectively and efficiently.

The following ideas are anecdotal frameworks:

1. Some of these quips have helped me make process decisions.
2. Some of them I’ve learned through failure.

But either way, I think about these things often enough that I thought someone else may gain something by learning through my experiences.

Here goes nothing.

Process is by the team, for the team.

Managers can’t delegate process. Well, they can. It just won’t work.

Successful teams create processes for themselves. Their ownership is their buy-in because they did it. When they do it, they believe. When they believe, they’ll win.

Managers can facilitate a culture that empowers teams to self-organize by talking through what’s going well, what isn’t going well, and what will ensure a happy future.

Help your team make their own decisions. Give them frameworks to grow and succeed. Answer their questions when they have them. Then get out of their way.

Approve the process. Remove approval from the process.

Approval isn’t the process, nor is the process about approval. Nine times out of 10, stakeholders should approve the plan or process rather than your in-progress project.

Gather stakeholder awareness, opinions, and approval before work begins. Create the game plan. Then, as Seth Godin suggests, “Make sure everyone understands that this is the very last chance they have to make the project better.”

Insert their feedback into the blueprint. Then ask, “If I deliver what you approved, on budget and on time, will you ship it?”

Get your yes and move forward, thrash-free.

When I worked at an enterprise, I was getting tired of running blog posts by the VP Marketing before I could publish them. It was just crazy to think that the highest-level marketer should read five blog posts a week, provide nit-picky edits, and hand it back to me to implement and publish.

So instead, I wrote down the process, ensured the VP I wouldn’t mess up the brand, and got my go-ahead to run the process that he approved. He still checked in, but we were both much happier with the end results.

Don’t skip steps in the process. Trust the process.

Process is like a checklist. You may be aware of the pilots’ pre-flight checklist or have read the book The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande.

Essentially, that pre-flight checklist ensures that pilots never miss an opportunity before takeoff to ensure a safe trip. If a pilot skipped a step and something happened… well, that’s the point of the checklist: You don’t skip steps.

If you skip steps in a marketing process, you’re not following what stakeholders approved.

If you feel the need to skip steps, you feel the need to change the process.

Processes should change over time. Ideally, you’ll need less of it as you execute more and earn more trust.

But I’d suggest empowering the team to develop the process, help stakeholders approve the process, and execute the process until you know where improvements may help the team work more efficiently or increase results. Then suggest the changes; get stakeholder awareness, opinions, and approval; and implement the process changes.

There’s a big difference between “ready” and “in progress”.

If you don’t have a project manager — or you don’t need the full initiate, plan, execute, monitor and control, and closeout phases of traditional project management — you might dig this little productivity hack.

At CoSchedule, our marketing process typically flows this way:

• Strategize
• Write
• Design
• Edit
• Stage
• QA
• Publish

These are work-in-progress stages. While they represent a typical content supply chain, they don’t necessarily facilitate project handoffs that well.

So we add “ready” statuses into our process. When the owner of a specific stage is done with their work, we expect that person to move the project to the next “ready” status, which is our cue that the project is ready for assignment to a specialist for that phase of the process.

Here’s what that looks like:

• Strategize
• Write ready
• Write
• Design ready
• Design
• Edit ready
• Edit
• Stage ready
• Stage
• QA ready
• QA
• Publish ready
• Publish

All stages have clear definitions of what happens within them. For example, after a project is strategized (which is defined by opportunity ideation, options, opinions, awareness, and approval among other expectations), the strategist of that project may move the project into “write ready” status.

The “ready” statuses help us understand the project is ready for assignment, but it is stalled or waiting. It gives us the chance to discuss:

• Alignment with objectives (e.g. “Which quarterly objective does this project impact? Should we focus on this now?”)
• Team member capacity (e.g. “Which writer is available to write and when?”)
• Competing priorities for team resources (e.g. “Which project is more timely or more important to complete first, second, etc.?”)
• Working within constraints (e.g. “How much time should this take to complete? Why? Is that the best use of the writer’s time?”)

This process lends itself well to Kanban board project management.

Due dates begin and end.

It is helpful to know when people are working on projects. Sure, you can “point” or “t-shirt-size” a task based on level of effort.

But the simplest thing we’ve done at CoSchedule is to assign a task to “Begin working on X” on the date when work is to start, and assign a second task to “Finish working on X” on the date when work is to be complete.

We use this simple framework for each stage in the process that you just learned about. For example, in “design ready”, we will review an artist’s workload and assign “Begin designing X” and likely a few days later (depending on level of effort) the task to “Finish designing X”.

In the second task, we use task descriptions to define what done looks like. There is always a definition of done.

In addition, we use sub-tasks within that second task as a simple checklist to make sure nothing gets missed. This ensures everything gets done according to expectations. It’s a little take on the pilots’ pre-flight checklist as applied to a marketing process.

Done is never perfect.

We embrace working within constraints. I always think about designs for this concept: An artist can work on designs forever; there is always more that could be done.

But at some point the work needs to meet the market to have the potential to generate results.

Plus, there’s the opportunity cost of spending too much effort into a single project when moving on to the next, again, gets back to generating even more results.

I’m also not saying ship a project that looks like ass. But providing a team member the constraints up front can help them plan their work to try their best to deliver their highest quality they can — on time.

Work isn’t complete until it’s measured.

If you can’t measure, you haven’t done anything at all.

I believe most of our work in marketing can be measured in some way. There are obvious exceptions to this, of course. Ask McDonald’s to measure the value of those famous golden arches, and I’m pretty sure they’d laugh at you.

But for the rest of us, especially those publishing any form of content digitally to influence results, there is likely some way you can measure the influence of your efforts.

At CoSchedule, we take measurement so seriously, we include this in the project brief — in the strategize phase of our process — to understand the goal we hope to influence. We actually set up the report within an actual measurement tool before we write a word.

There are times when projects sound like a great idea, and it’s fun to be carried away in the energy of the moment, knowing you’re doing exceptional work. But at the end of the day, marketing is all about creating profitable customer action.

And we will — and should — be measured by the results our actions influence.

So as part of our process, we make sure to set up a date and time on which we measure results. A simple calendar reminder works well for this. This ensures we measure and report back to stakeholders.

That’s what I’ve learned (so far) from establishing marketing processes.