Wrike's flexible folder structure allows any team to quickly set up a workflow to operate more efficiently. We've seen marketing teams become particularly successful by setting up their Wrike folders to mirror the structure of their department.
Our customer success team speaks with dozens of companies per week, sharing best practices and setting up workflows. New marketing teams set up shop in our enterprise project management solution every week in an effort to drive efficiency and stay organized. After chatting with so many of these customers, we know that marketing teams are notoriously understaffed and overworked. Additionally, they're inherently cross-functional, working with departments from sales and engineering to manufacturing and operations. A central work hub to manage all of the moving parts is essential to hitting deadlines.
We've compiled some of the best practices and quick wins that marketing teams of all shapes and sizes have leveraged to boost productivity. Additionally, we've created a template folder structure for high-performing marketing teams that you can download and import into Wrike in order to get started ASAP. Edit our template freely to make it match your team!
Here are the best practices of how to measure marketing performance from teams we've talked to:
1. Match your folder structure to the organization of your marketing team
Most teams have various marketing team "buckets" which often include Lead Gen, Content Marketing, Product Marketing, and Email Marketing, just to name a few. Create a folder to capture all of these categories and create subfolders to match the various teams in your marketing org.
If one of your 'buckets' has a multitude of responsibilities, add a layer of subfolders to capture these. Content teams are a perfect example. At Wrike, our content marketing team is working on blog posts, webinar scripts, infographics, and case studies, so they create subfolders to house the tasks related to each of these responsibilities.
2. Organize by week to keep the team on track
Marketing teams generate a never ending stream of deliverables. Using multiple tags per task, top performing teams also organize their work by week in order to stay focused and ensure deliverables are generated by the time they're needed. If you haven't explored task tagging yet, pause your reading and take a look at this Help Center article.
Wrike gives you the ability to put a task in multiple locations. This is essential for organizing your tasks by team bucket and by week. After creating the perfect folder system, all you need to do is drag the folder name and drop it on the task to add the additional tag. A quick overview can be found in this video about task and folder tagging.
3. Run weekly meetings out of Wrike
(Click the header to read my blog post dedicated solely to this topic.)
With the weekly folders you created to organize deliverables and tasks, you are now equipped to run weekly meetings straight out of Wrike. Instead of harassing everyone to submit slides for the weekly meeting, simply have teams go on Wrike and show the list of tasks they completed last week, then look at what will be done this week.
For tracking purposes, you can either push tasks from week to week as they're rescheduled and pushed out, or leave the original week tags in order to see the history of where a task has been. This is a great way to identify bottlenecks and better understand which work is being prioritized.
For better organization, consider including a Meeting Agenda and Action Items task in each week's folder. This will be the task where people can jot down notes, high level thoughts, action items, and other initiatives to ensure there is a place to capture feedback and follow up. During the meeting, make sure you designate a recorder to keep track of actions items on this task and ensure they are converted into tasks with assignees.
Weekly folders can also help you understand bandwidth constraints on your team. When used in conjunction with Wrike's Workload view, weekly folders are the perfect place to jump to when a last minute request comes to the marketing team and you need to find someone to get it done.
4. Create MGMT team folder to tag top priorities
Most marketing teams have a director who needs updates from her managers. In an effort to ensure managers are only relaying top priority and relevant information, build a "MGMT" team folder with a subfolder for each of the managers. Managers then tag their high priority tasks and projects in order to give their director and peers easy visibility into their most important work.
5. Add annual and quarterly goals in Wrike
As you get set up in Wrike, make sure your team has clear goals and direction. Google has a great approach to planning quarterly and annual goals which centers on Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).
In Wrike, create high level goals (Objectives) and then specific big picture actions you want to take to achieve them (Key Results). Turn these Objectives and Key Results into folders and encourage team members to tag relevant tasks that will achieve these results into the corresponding folder. It gives clear visibility into how every task is helping complete a goal. This can be particularly powerful early in the quarter when you're planning all of the work that needs to get done.
6. Ensure commitment and ownership
The key to making this work is to ensure that whole team has buy-in and is committed to the process. Compliance is not enough; 100% commitment is necessary. One way to ease the transition into Wrike and maintain your status as a high performance marketing team is to appointment a high-ranking team member as owner of the team's Wrike experience. The owner maintains folder structure, establishes team norms, and facilitates new processes introduced to Wrike.
Your 3 Actions for Today
Now, are you finished reading my tips, but don't know where to start? Here are the top 3 actions you should take today to get your marketing team performing at a higher level in Wrike:
1. Create weekly and categorical folders and tag all tasks by week and bucket.
2. Run your weekly meetings out of the weekly tracking folders.
3. Identify a team owner to manage the folder structure and hold the team accountable.
Good luck, and let us know how your team improves with Wrike!
If you want to see these 6 tips in action, check out our video on creating high-performance marketing teams with Wrike.
|
Author Bio:
Tim Chingos is a Customer Success Manager at Wrike. He likes to bring his dog to work and claims that she increases everyone's productivity. |
