Do you know what marketing workflow you are using? And more importantly, do you know if it’s working for you? How you market can make just as big of an impact as what you market. If you’re feeling like your marketing routine is unsuccessful, underperforming, or difficult to maintain, chances are good that you’re not using the best workflow for your organization’s needs. Let’s talk about 4 main types of marketing workflows: 

Workflow #1: Content Batching

Content batching is preplanning, generating, and scheduling larger amounts of content at a time. It’s a good fit for organizations that:

• Have a marketing strategy that uses multiple platforms
• Generate a large amount of content
• Generate long-form content (blogs, articles, white papers)
• Generate multimedia content (videos, podcasts)
• Have multiple team member coordinating on marketing execution and/or planning
• Need to intensively promote something for a fixed amount of time (event and ticket sales)

Workflow #2: Preplanning + Live Posting

This workflow is for the person or organization whose content strategy relies heavily on live appearances and real-time posting. In order to make this manageable, you’ll want to focus on outlining topics and content ahead of time, so when you’re ready to start posting for the day, or go live, you know exactly what you’re going to be talking about, and which points you need to hit. This is a good workflow for:

• Personal solopreneur brands that have or are building a highly engaged following
• A marketer or marketing team that have the bandwidth to do a high volume of daily posting
• Influencer marketing that relies on significant presence via Lives, Stories, etc.
• Solopreneur/freelancers that enjoy being highly visible on social media

Workflow #3: Follow Your Feelings

We’re going to be honest– this is our least favorite workflow. It’s the kind of workflow we’re most often called into fix. A lot of organizations end up in this workflow because it’s an easy starting point, and can be more fun because you’re posting or talking about what you’re interested in, comfortable with, or excited about at that moment.

The downside to this marketing workflow is that it’s typically unsustainable; doesn’t always take into account what content your audience is interested in from you; and frequently leaves content gaps in your marketing. Those content gaps are valuable missed opportunities to engage with your audience in ways that build their knowledge, engagement, and appreciation of your brand. That said, this workflow can be an approachable, low-stakes way to get your marketing feet wet. This approach can be useful for:

• New side-hustle businesses just getting started with their marketing
• New small businesses in the product ideation/testing phase
• Side-hustle hobby businesses with no revenue goals or requirements

Who this is not good for:

• Marketing staff who have to report on campaign success to their higher-ups
• Established organizations who need to track metrics (product or ticket sales, registrations) in relation to their marketing activities
• Nonprofits who need to report on marketing performance to their boards
• Small or side hustle businesses who have minimum revenue requirements and need to understand which marketing is providing the best ROI for their efforts

Workflow #4: Batch + Live + Feelings Hybrid

In our opinion, this is the marketing workflow that delivers it all. However, it’s also the most complicated workflow, and relies on these elements maintaining a delicate balance. In this workflow:

• Content batching happens for: evergreen content, planned campaigns, content related to known key dates/events
• Live content happens for topics and conversations that have been previously identified, and possibly lightly outlined.
• “Feelings” content happens in reaction to how the poster is feeling (good for solopreneur/influencer accounts) OR in relation to how their community is feeling. Community can, of course, vary wildly here: everything from a small collection of followers, to people within a certain industry, region, or shared interest. This can be an important way to show up for your community, particularly if they are experiencing shared challenges.

Finding the right marketing workflow for your business or organization is one of the first steps in executing a sustainable, successful marketing strategy that generates measurable results. If you need help setting up a marketing workflow that actually works for you, talk to us about our Strategy program.