How work management tools are connecting marketing teams and processes

Vendors are now creating marketer-centric work management systems.

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Work management tools have become an efficient way for marketers to complete tasks and collaborate with other people. Customizable work management systems give businesses of all sizes the ability to build out the right workflows to match their organization’s needs. And a robust ecosystem of app integrations enables marketers to make sure that work management includes important marketing functions and customer data.

As a result, marketers expect more from these systems and get rid of them if they don’t deliver. Work and project management tools were the fifth most replaced tool in the latest MarTech Replacement Survey. Roughly 17% of businesses in the survey replaced them this year, up from 15% in 2021. And this number climbed to 22% for midsized companies.

From project management to marketer-centric work management

Because marketers execute a wide range of projects that need to cover an increasing number of marketing channels, vendors are creating market-centric systems. Project management and work management tools geared to marketers include Acquia, Smartsheet, Aprimo and Wrike. Adobe’s 2020 acquisition of Workfront also addressed this growing need.

Monday.com joined this group when it launched Monday Marketer earlier this year.

“We noticed that a lot of our users were using Monday.com for marketing purposes such as project planning, strategic planning, SEO, rebranding campaigns and product launches,” said Galit Avior, a product manager for the company. “Much of the work came down to marketing-related efforts, so why not take that a step further and create an end-to-end system with a nice bow on it?”

Frequently, marketers will first adopt a project management tool for a specific function, a product launch, for instance, or to help manage the creation of content for social media campaigns.

But as soon as that task is completed, it leads to another step, like distributing content on social media and executing the campaign. After that, the team wants to measure and analyze the results. And the campaign metrics and customer data resulting from the campaign are then used to inform the next campaign, and so on.

Therefore, the cyclical nature of marketing work lends itself to an end-to-end work management tool that includes all these functions, and that can adapt and grow to include new tools as an organization’s stack expands.

Integrating DAM, CRM, events and other tools into work management

The company understood that a marketer-focused product would help their customers meet a lot of challenges. “The whole goal is to bridge silos between marketing and creative people throughout the entire company,” said Avior.

Dig deeper: How marketers are leveraging digital channels during the Super Bowl

Monday Marketer allows creatives to post and track new content assets, while also streamlining requests and approvals. These are typical project management capabilities. However, it can also connect to a DAM containing previously used assets. This makes it easier to find and use content for ads and messaging through campaign tools, including email campaigns.

The company found marketers were also using the general Monday.com OS for events planning. So, the new product lets marketers use assets for promoting events and managing registrations. It also adds registrants to the system’s CRM function.

The campaign tracking tool allows executives and managers to have a high-level view of performance. Having all the workflow in a single place also allows team leaders to identity bottlenecks.

Integrating apps and CDPs into marketing work management

When Monday.com interviewed customers, they discovered that businesses were using five to eight tools to manage marketing functions, in addition to external ad campaign platforms.

Digital experience company Acquia recently launched an integration between their CDP and workflow automation platform Workato. 

“The CDP informs how experiences are executed over time,” said Alex Dal Canto, senior director of product marketing at Acquia. “Marketers can work quickly to create customer experiences and test the new experience.”

There are over 300 tools connected to the Acquia CDP integration with Workato ranging from platform-specific social media campaign tools, marketing automation platforms like Adobe and Salesforce, email service providers and lookalike modeling tools, according to Dal Canto.

The expanding capabilities of work management tools is a big help for marketers. They help increase communication and efficiency for organizations of all sizes.

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About the author

Chris Wood
Staff
Chris Wood draws on over 15 years of reporting experience as a B2B editor and journalist. At DMN, he served as associate editor, offering original analysis on the evolving marketing tech landscape. He has interviewed leaders in tech and policy, from Canva CEO Melanie Perkins, to former Cisco CEO John Chambers, and Vivek Kundra, appointed by Barack Obama as the country's first federal CIO. He is especially interested in how new technologies, including voice and blockchain, are disrupting the marketing world as we know it. In 2019, he moderated a panel on "innovation theater" at Fintech Inn, in Vilnius. In addition to his marketing-focused reporting in industry trades like Robotics Trends, Modern Brewery Age and AdNation News, Wood has also written for KIRKUS, and contributes fiction, criticism and poetry to several leading book blogs. He studied English at Fairfield University, and was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He lives in New York.

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