By Mark Engelberg, TimeLinx Software
For a marketing agency to have true marketing agility, a PSM tool is essential. But what is true marketing agility in today’s workplace? With the global pandemic forever changing what we knew as the “normal” workplace, the answer is not as straightforward as two short years ago. Agility is a business’s ability to work seamlessly, cohesively, and swiftly throughout all its departments to increase productivity and keep everyone in sync. When it comes to marketing agility, using a good PSM solution can help manage the various projects across the board from conception to completion.
So, how does this translate to digital environments? For proper marketing agility to be achieved, and with it improved performance, companies need to implement the right tools and best-fit technologies.
Aligning marketing best practices with PSM Software
Effective collaboration is attained through the right PSM software for marketing best practices and can be achieved from a distance. Marketing agility is the same as agility in other spheres of business: you need to be able to manage various projects and stages simultaneously while also changing tack at any given time. Does a project or campaign need a direction change or simply a content update? Does your sales team know how far along they are in a marketing project or campaign and the next step?
These five marketing best practices can be applied to most projects, and effective PSM software will enhance them all.
1. Prioritize people’s positions, not the project. Making sure that all of your people stay on track within their spheres of expertise is essential. You don’t want Bob from QA writing content for a campaign or Betty from traffic trying to manage the project. Use your PSM software to keep track of individuals and what they are busy with. The project will fall into place much faster when everyone stays in their own lane.
2. Open Communication. Communication may seem obvious but ensuring that everyone communicates clearly on all aspects of a marketing campaign will go a long way towards dodging potential issues. Planning and execution are not mutually exclusive, and both need to be continuously addressed. Allow for adjustments in how the campaign is progressing by encouraging close collaboration. Strong cooperation will help you to pick up problems before anyone goes too far off track.
3. Keep remote and internal teams on the same page. Your entire marketing team should be an ecosystem, not separate entities. Often in a marketing campaign, you will have creatives such as copywriters off-site, while project managers and creative directors will be centralized. Eliminate silos between team members and boost individual accountability by ensuring that each team member feels a part of a whole, not isolated. PSM software will keep all members in harmony and up to date on project timelines.
4. Keep all your resources in one place. Centralizing your digital resources to provide easy access to all team members will significantly help a project’s timeline. Nothing is more frustrating than wasting time looking for a brief or information on a client to complete a marketing campaign. Providing context and easy access ensures consistency across all phases of the campaign.
5. Treat different sorts of work differently. Organizing your teams according to the project types that they are best suited to enhance efficiency. Developing processes by type will be made much easier with the correct PSM software backing you up.
Using the right technology to keep you agile
To achieve agility and sustain it, we need to rely heavily on our teams and leaders to ensure that business processes flow correctly. The right technology will enable employees to access the right tools, information, and systems to perform their work. The right technology allows individuals to be as productive and creative no matter the location of their work experiences; to stay connected to others within the team and with customers, and connect the teams to information they may need.
True agility means being able to work anywhere, on anything. It also means changing your business outlook or processes for a project on the fly as necessary. Through the right software, agile workflows offer quick and secure access to vital information needed to perform a particular task, action, or role, no matter where the work is done. Through making work visible, resources such as skills, time, and money are seamlessly brought forward with the right tools.
PSM software, your answer to seamless marketing
For small to medium-sized businesses, the right PSM software truly makes marketing seamless. Campaigns can flow from phase to phase, and issues can be dealt with before they become big problems. Positively contributing to organizational agility and helping with the quick adaptation and recovery of new challenges, PSM software is the key to business survival and sustainability, especially in the “new normal” work environments. After all, it takes a modern, hands-on approach to be agile in today’s digital world. To do that, you need robust PSM software as your company’s backbone.
