This is not a discussion specifically about Marketo. But still, majority of the campaign requests will be fulfilled and executed in Marketo instance. So I decided to post it here.
When an organization is growing fast, demand gen team starts getting more and more campaign requests, such as building landing pages, sending out email, creating more nurturing streams, etc. Different people get involved in different tasks, and different tasks require different tools. So I'm facing the challenge to build a process to streamline campaign requests within an integrated platform where we can track progress, document resources, assign tasks, etc. I guess it's a combo of project management tool and issue tracking tool (like Jira).
Does anyone have experience in this area?
We're using Workfront (https://www.workfront.com/marketing/ ), it allows our Marketing team to request different types of Marketing projects including Marketing Automation, then when the project gets assigned depending on project type, it splits up the tasks to what we need to do, here's a sample task list for a Webinar:
Needs lots of work to get it to this stage (as in initial setup), but it works well for us. JIRA is a fantastic tool as well and I think you could do the same with that when you customise it.
+1 for Workfront. Excellent project management tool.
Hi Amanda,
I looked at JIRA too and I didn't think it was flexible enough to handle the number of tasks we had. So we use Podio where I could create automated workflows that assign to team members based on who I assign the project lead on. It includes the tasks coming in with SLAs already in the task and directions on the next steps.
Overall, the team has found this very helpful.
I described more of my process here as well: how do you manage approval flows?
Regards,
Kelley
Hi Amanda,
My quickly-growing marketing team uses Kapost https://kapost.com/). I (marketing ops) love it, and campaign managers and content marketers like it. All campaign owners are required to submit their campaign brief and request through the tool; marketing ops team then builds and launches the campaign. I love it since it is a single point of contact between marketing ops and the marketers. If they want a campaign built and launched, it has to be in Kapost. High points: Marketo calendar/asset integration; Kapost job templates; workflow management. Low points: I believe it is fairly pricey, but it isn't coming out of my budget!
Let me know if you have any other questions. I'd recommend you check this tool out, sounds like it'd be a good fit for your team.
Leaving aside the project management side of this question (which others are answering well) I do think there's another element to consider here in my experience - often requests come in but they are submitted with an assumption that the work will be done without being accompanied by a business case that explains the ROI.
I believe that a lot of companies are therefore just building campaigns that serve no real purpose and we therefore ask those making requests to submit a business case for the campaign - these do not all have to be about dollars but they do all need to be measurable and to demonstrate a return (pipeline, share of voice, media signal etc).
One more note - looks like there is a nice list of project management tools here: Project Management Solutions (List)