Marketing agility in the digital age: treat different types of work differently

By Eric Rotkow, Managing Director, Zee Jay Digital
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To be truly agile in our digital age, marketers must treat different types of work differently. Does the work require big idea thinking? Is it an update of an existing campaign? Or does it simply need a content change? Managing marketing projects based on the type of effort involved is important to achieving the benefits of agility.

From planning to creation to delivery, each type of project requires a different approach. Decoupling New/Custom (N/C) activities, which have a workflow involving planning and ideation, and Fixed/Repeatable (F/R) activities and Updates (U), which have workflows involving content modification and reviews, is an efficient way to keep people working on what they do best.

The table below outlines the different requirements, as well as operating model and technology implications, of the three unique project types:

Treat different types of work differently to achieve efficiency and scale.

The right operating model and the right technology solution help marketers achieve operational agility.

To be agile and effective, marketers need the right operating model and the right technology solution.

Zee Jay Digital helps marketing leaders—and creative, operational, and technology teams—better operate, structure, and compete in a digital world. As a partner, our consulting teams have first-hand experience with the Workfront solution, which supports all types of work—and accommodates a variety of approaches to getting that work done. For simple to complex tasks, and to manage both Agile and Waterfall processes, Workfront lets everyone “play in the same sandbox” and use different tools depending on the project. The solution enables all types of work while providing a single source to monitor marketing’s progress and drive results.

Five marketing work best practices.

Workfront and Zee Jay Digital work closely with customers to instill best practices that help marketing teams get the right work done—and achieve the right strategic outcomes:

1. Organize people around the nature of work, not the function. Keep strategists focused on strategy, creatives focused on creative, and operations focused on operations.
2. Allow lines to blur between planning and execution. Open lines of communication to assure close calibration—and allow for adjustments before anyone’s gone too far down a path.
3. Think of internal and external teams as an ecosystem, not as outsourcing. Eliminate silos and boost accountability by considering each team member an important part of the whole.
4. Centralize resource management, prioritization and standards across teams. Provide the easy access and context the organization needs to assure consistency.
5. Treat different types of work differently to achieve efficiency and scale. Organize teams by what sort of projects they are best suited to do—and develop processes accordingly.

It takes a modern, hands-on, and collaborative approach—and a work management solution that powers the entire marketing lifecycle—to be competitive in the digital age. To learn how Zee Jay Digital and Workfront helped a leading health care provider enable seamless workflow, provide visibility into all types of asset development, and stay compliant, read the Fresenius case study.

A version of this blog originally appeared on Workfront’s blog on April 8, 2021