Have you ever felt like you know there’s a way to get more results from your digital marketing efforts, drive more progress with your digital marketing team (Facebook ads specialists, creative specialists and email marketing specialists), and scale?
Or do you feel like you’re always running behind with the number of digital marketing campaigns and experiments that you want to run, but your team just doesn't have the bandwidth?
The solution for you might be outsourcing the implementation of digital marketing tasks to a team of specialists.
These 3 digital marketing management workflows (or leadership frameworks), when implemented and mastered by a team, have led to exponential growth every time for James, who has been a Chief Marketing Officer for 10+ years in several digital businesses. Learn how our digital marketing specialists can help your business grow exponentially.
Watch the video above or read the summary and transcript below to find one or two “gold nuggets” that might be the missing piece you’ve been looking for… so you can scale your organization, your team, and your outcomes as a marketing leader!
Use these tags within a project management software to track the progress of your marketing initiatives:
Tag: Research
Tag all research tasks and projects with a ‘research’ tag. Every good marketing initiative starts with research so you’re making a data-centric decision… even if it’s qualitative and not quantitative, at least you’ll have a central hub of information as the basis for moving a campaign or optimization forward..
Tag: Copywriting
The copywriting tag covers all tasks and projects where crafting compelling and persuasive copy for ads and marketing materials is required.
Tag: Compliance
Tag tasks and projects with ‘compliance’ so you can do your best to comply with legal and regulatory requirements in your industry or within platform service requirements.
Tag: Production
Add the ‘production’ tag to tasks and projects that require developing any assets such as graphics, videos, or landing pages.
Tag: Distribution
The ‘distribution’ tag is used for tasks and projects that involve distributing the assets anywhere… from organic social media posts to Google Search Ads and beyond.
Tag: Optimization
Use the ‘optimization’ tag on any tasks or projects where your team is analyzing campaign performance and making adjustments for improvement.
Start using a column layout in your project management suite so you can visually track tasks and projects at a glance. Here’s a list of the recommended columns and their purpose:
Projects: Brainstorming and outlining projects and offers.
All Tasks: Listing all individual tasks related to projects.
Backlog to be Done: Tasks prioritized for the current week.
In Progress: Tasks actively being worked on.
Blocked: Tasks stalled due to dependencies or roadblocks.
Review: Tasks completed and awaiting review.
Done: Tasks finalized and implemented.
This communication workflow involves daily stand-up meetings with the marketing team. The meetings focus on three key questions:
What did you accomplish yesterday?
What do you plan to accomplish today?
What's blocking your progress?
These meetings ensure transparency, identify roadblocks early, and foster collaboration within the team.
By combining these three workflows, marketing teams can create a streamlined and efficient process for developing and executing campaigns.
Discover the benefits of working with remote specialist digital marketers to implement these workflows effectively. The tags provide a clear overview of the overall workflow, while the project management tool helps track individual tasks and projects. Daily stand-up meetings ensure open communication and collaboration, facilitating the removal of roadblocks and promoting team progress.
These workflows have several benefits, including:
Increased productivity and efficiency
Improved communication and collaboration
Reduced roadblocks and delays
Greater transparency and accountability
Enhanced campaign performance
These 3 digital marketing leadership workflows - Tags, Tracking, and Talking - have proven successful in generating significant revenue every time they were implemented and adopted by a team. By adopting these frameworks and adapting them to your specific needs, you can achieve remarkable results.
Read more on workflow optimization and marketing agency systems and processes here.
James Zolman:
Today we're going to talk about marketing workflows. There's three of them that combined have helped me, as a marketing leader, generate over $250 million in my partnerships and organizations that I've helped.
Who am I? My name is James Zolman, and I'm going to blow right past this because you can find me on LinkedIn and learn all about me there. However, I am the founder of Specialist.PH, where we do HR for marketing teams. And you can pause this screen if you want to learn more about it or go to Specialist.PH. Let's get right to it. Who is this video for? These workflows are for marketing managers and marketing leaders. Anyone from chief marketing officer, all the way to digital marketing managers.
So workflow number one, getting right to it, are Tags. This is the procedural workflow. And I like to use this as tags inside of a project management software, and I'll showcase that to you here in just a moment. But this is the workflow that I like to go through with my marketing teams. We have a Research phase. We have a Copywriting phase. There's Compliance, there's Production, Distribution, and Optimization. Let's go through each one of these just briefly here really quick.
We have the Research phase. This is where all of the good stuff happens, all of the research. News articles are read, research is done, surveys are sent out. Ads may even be run at this point to gather more data. We are trying to understand the audience as much as possible and trying to develop their pain profiles, as well as their pleasure profiles, to see how we can match things up to our product or service. And then copywriters go into copywriting, and this is where the magic happens of making the offer, making the ads and more.
So this whole process, just to take a break here, really showcases what an offer goes through or what an entire creative process goes through inside of marketing. We'll move back into this and go to Compliance. If you are in just about any niche, there's compliance. There's compliance with ad networks, there's compliance with federal and state or local laws. There's a lot of compliance that needs to be done in a lot of industries. I've usually had a couple of attorneys training a marketer or two on compliance so that they can be our compliance team.
On the Production side, this is where everything gets made. This is from technology development side, to producing graphics or videos. Everything happens in production to help a campaign be successful as far as assets go. And Distribution is one of my favorite pieces, this is where we start to run ads. So everything that you've produced, all of those graphics, those videos, those landing pages, those funnels, everything that you've produced to this point for this campaign, starts to get distributed. Goes into blog posts, goes into ads, goes into YouTube, social media and more. That's all Distribution.
And then the ongoing piece to this is Optimization. And Optimization can dip and dive and weave and sort of navigate, and go through any one of these pieces or processes here to learn and to develop optimization strategies. You don't have to start over at research every single time. Once you have a system in place and you're starting to test it, you can navigate deep into each one of those sections to truly optimize it.
All right, so we're moving into workflow number two, which is the Tracking side. So we have to track that workflow and understand where everything is at. And the way that we do that is we use a project management tool, and I like the column visual of a project, so that's what I've adopted and used here. We have Projects, we have All Tasks, we have a Backlog to be Done, we have In Progress, we have a Blocked column, a Review column, and a Done column.
In the Projects column, this is where we brainstorm. We brainstorm all of the projects that we want to do, all of the offers we want to make and more as a marketing team. And we detail the tasks inside of it. So anybody can create projects, anybody can go in and add tasks to those projects. Those tasks we usually drag over into the All Tasks column so that we can see which ones that we want to prioritize and which ones we want to tackle first.
The Backlog to be Done is something that we look at every single week and we say, "Okay, for this week we want to tackle all of these tasks that are related to this particular project." So we move those into the Backlog to be Done. And every single week we have what are called sprints. Now in the developer world, a sprint is basically building a piece out and then auditing it and reviewing it. You'll see that I've taken some of this from the developer mindset because the marketing mindset is very much the same. We're trying to develop customers here, we're trying to develop paying clients. So the Backlog to be Done helps us focus on what needs to be done within that week.
And any marketer on a team can drag and drop an item to be done, a task to be done, into the In Progress column. Now In Progress, I like to follow the Kanban project management style with the In Progress. I don't want any marketer or a specialist to be tackling more than two items in progress at a time. So if they're tackling one item, they need to put it back into the Backlog if they're not working on it. And drag another task into the In Progress column so that as a manager, I can at a glance know what each person is working on at that very moment. And if they're off shift, if they're not working at the moment, those items should be back at the top of the Backlog so they can at least read their notes to see what was done that day. All right.
If somebody gets blocked, let's say somebody's in the distribution phase, going back to this workflow here, the procedural workflow. If they're in the distribution phase and they realize that they need a graphic that everybody seemed to forget about, they'll put this into Blocked, create a new task to go into the backlog for a graphic, and say, "Hey, I'm blocked by this task in the backlog because I need a graphic for this particular ad or this particular video."
So we have daily meetings, which I'll get to next, that's the workflow number three, that will help cover this Blocked column. And as a manager, this really helps me because my role as a manager in helping people grow is to help remove all of these roadblocks or to help facilitate and get people working together to remove these roadblocks. Once it's unblocked it can go back to In Progress and then over to Review.
Once the In Progress task is done, you move it over to Review so that somebody independent can review it and make sure that it's edited correctly, that it looks good, that it's ready to go. Usually this is a manager, so I like to call myself the strategist/analyst. I'm going to review everything in the Review column every single day so that I can move it over to Done and make sure that it's completely live and good to go.
All right, workflow number three. We lay over the top of everything. This really keeps the wheels turning and this, I think, is the key to progress in a marketing team, and that's straight up communications. We've got to be talking to each other in real life, whether that means on a Zoom call, in video, or in person, we've got to be communicating. This is not something to do over Chat. While it can be done over Chat, I find that communicating and getting voice inflections and people talking to each other really, really boosts productivity significantly.
I ask three questions every standup call. Every single morning, we talk for about 10 to 15 minutes at most. And the idea is that this is a standup meeting, so it should be done and short, to the point where you can stand for the entire meeting, if capable of course. We get a chance to review what happened yesterday, what's going to happen today, and we get a chance, as a manager, to understand and develop a plan for any roadblocks early in the day so that we can tackle those throughout the day.
All right, so let's go take a look at how this works when you combine all three workflows. You've combined the Process workflow, the Project Management workflow, and the Daily Standup. You combine those all in one. And let's go take a look.
Inside of ClickUp, this is our project manager of choice, you can see that I created a Workflows video project. That's this video that you're watching right now, strictly for this demo. We have another workspace for our company here, but I just wanted to show you how this works. I'll show you right now that you can see these columns. I'm going into workflow number two here, kind of skipping ahead, to show you we have Projects, All Tasks, Backlog, In Progress, Blocked, Review, and Done. And I've created a project here where I've outlined subtasks and I've broken those subtasks out into All Tasks. So now I can move them into the Backlog for what I think will be done this week.
But you can see these tags here. This is workflow number one. We have research, we have copywriting, we have production items, copywriting, copywriting, production. So you can see at a glance with these colorful tags what's happening, I guess, in a specific project. All right, so we have distribution. Let's see, we have production here. We have optimization and production. Awesome.
If I were in this team and we were in the research phase, and we'll say for the week, for me, my workflow was I need to come up with a big idea and then I need to write a newsletter ad. If this is going to take me all week, which I hope it doesn't take all week unless it's a really, really, really big robust, extremely well-resourced newsletter ad that's multi-paged that might take somebody 15 to 20 minutes to read and digest, this might not take the whole week, but we're just doing this as an example.
So I would do all of my research, I would create a Google Doc, I would put it into this task and move it along. So I would say when I'm working on it, for my manager, they would be able to glance at this and see, "Oh, he's working on a big idea right now." When I clock out for the day or log out for the day, I move it back to the Backlog first and then I drop my notes in here to say, "Hey, I did some research. Here's what I found. Here are my updates inside of this Google Doc. We'll continue this tomorrow."
And then in the standup call I would say, "I got my research started. Here's my document. And I won't go over the document because this is a fast meeting, but today I plan to continue this document and finish it." After that call, I hop off, I dive right into it. And if I don't have any blocks, I'll just move it over to Review to say, "Hey, here's my research. Here's the big idea. What do you think?" And if the manager says, "Hey, this looks great, roll with it. Move it over to Done," then I go to my next task. So I start writing my newsletter ad and I put all of my comments and all of my work inside of this task.
And of course I move it to In Progress as I'm working on it, move it to in Review for anybody that ... Usually, whoever takes it next, is the one that I want to review it. I might tag somebody or reassign this to the person in production that will produce this newsletter ad for me and come up with the images and more. So I'll tag them and say, "Hey, the copywriting is done here. This is yours to take forward. Please review this and make sure it all makes sense. Ask me questions. Or if it looks good to you, let's roll with it."
If it looks good to them and they roll with it, they move it to Done, and we just move forward. And this process is a beautiful fast-paced process. I've loved working with this process, it's simple. So just to do a recap really quick. You have Tags, a very simple process. Research, Copywriting, Compliance, Production, Distribution, Optimization. You go into Project Management, which is your basics. You have Projects, you have All Tasks, Backlog to be Done, In Progress, Blocked, Review, and Done. You have a daily stand-up with everybody on your marketing team, and you talk in detail, this is actually what you accomplished, not what you planned to accomplish yesterday. This is what you actually did.
Question two is, what do you plan to accomplish today? This is where you plan, because that can get derailed based on priorities. And what's blocking your progress, talk about those roadblocks. That's the biggest key to moving projects forward in my opinion. You can mind all of those and you're all set.
I hope this video has helped you. Let me know if you have any questions, if we can help. Email me at james.zolman@specialist.ph, connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm here to help. My goal is to help you become a more productive and happier and high-producing, high-performance marketer. And this is one of my frameworks that has truly helped me develop and generate 250 million plus dollars for small businesses. So this is a really, really good framework to get to seven to eight figures, and I have seen this and helped other companies implement this in nine figures and billion-dollar companies.
So I know this workflow works. It's a great system. This is a very simplified introduction to it. If you have any questions or if you're running into any roadblocks, let me help. I'm here to help you. Thank you so much. Have a great day and we'll see you later. Bye.
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