Campaign planning is essential to meeting goals—but did you know it’s also good for your team’s culture, too? Instituting the right process can break down silos, help teams aligned on shared values, and empower everyone to work together.
Our new ebook explores a variety of best practices for campaign planning. It includes strategies from four marketing leaders (and enterprise customers) who lend their expertise around goal setting, data sharing, managing requests, and more.
Here are a few tips from the marketing leaders—and be sure to download our ebook to read them in full.
Review your current processes–with everyone
To move as one, you should start planning as one. Make time for employees to ask questions, give and take feedback, and honestly examine the “why” behind past challenges and successes.
“There needs to be transparency into what’s really working and what’s not working, with very open, candid sharing of information across the team,” says Natalie Ocegueda, senior manager of integrated campaigns at Airtable.
These conversations are critical for shaping future campaigns, and they should occur during every planning cycle.
Instill a shared language
A lack of shared language often leads to misalignment within organizations. By standardizing processes, taxonomy, and more across marketing, you get one step closer to making sure everyone is on the same page.
At Equinox Media, publishing manager Meagan Nelson does this by ensuring all the metadata associated with fitness classes are consistent across bases.
“We ensure class metadata can only be entered into Airtable at one location,” she says. “If another base needs that specific piece of information, we’ll create a look-up field that syncs from the original source, instead of creating another field that people can write into.”
Create an avenue for requests
As a marketing project manager for Taylor Guitars, Nicole Dahl manages campaign timelines and planned deliverables. But without a clear way to handle requests, Nicole found her team was easily pulled into one-off tasks.
To solve this, Nicole streamlined marketing requests with Airtable forms. Now, if someone wants an asset created for a specific guitar model, they fill out a form and the information automatically populates the marketing team’s Airtable base, where they track work and share information.
“Airtable saves us four to five hours a week that we would otherwise spend tracking down things that lived in different places,” Nicole says. “Now, we get to spend more time on the creative output. We’re putting out better work because we have more time to do it.”
Use templated processes for customer-facing assets
According to Jenny Bodenlos, head of the enterprise program management organization at BlueOcean, customer-facing deliverables are the assets where you need templated (read: repeatable) processes–especially because they’re the most cross-functional. She uses Airtable to keep her team aligned.
“You have to line up activities from every different function to make sure they happen in the right sequence, and that they happen at the right time,” she says. “You’ve also got to clarify what tasks can happen simultaneously, and what tasks are reliant on dependencies.”
By building repeatable processes, your team can spend more time on the customer-facing asset itself, rather than wondering what to do next.
Download Airtable’s ebook today for 8 strategies to help your marketing team plan as one.