A recent productivity research document from Adobe has claimed that US full-time workers estimate losing 91 business days a year to low-impact tasks, and that marketers spent close to three hours a day on operational busywork.
In large marketing teams, campaigns pass through different tools for different parts of the overall workflow: planning, content, media, legal, analytics, sales, and customer teams. Some tools will cover two or more of these functions, but few tools cover all the bases. Regardless, the bottlenecks to productivity come from unclear priorities, interruptions, context switching, and each platform’s particular idiosyncrasies.
A campaign brief might sit in a document, creative review in a proofing tool, channel planning in a spreadsheet, budget approvals in email and deadlines in a project board. The gaps turn routine coordination into labour.
Why tool choice matters
The market now contains several work management platforms that may suit individual marketing teams, but the correct starting point is process mapping. A team should first identify where time is being lost, with common problems emanating from manual intake, repeated status meetings (a human problem), unclear ownership of responsibility, version control, late approval, and reporting.
