As digital marketing becomes increasingly complex and fast-moving, efficiency is essential. Today's marketing campaigns are often intricate endeavours that involve multiple channels, diverse teams and a variety of different technologies. It's increasingly difficult to track and manage all the different elements and demonstrate ROI. Thankfully, business workflow software has become an invaluable tool for marketers to ease the process, automate certain tasks, improve communication and collaboration among team members, and ultimately optimize campaigns.  

This blog examines how a business process workflow and the associated software enhances marketing campaigns and why businesses should consider incorporating these tools into their marketing mix. 

Understanding Business Workflow Software 

So what is business workflow software? In its most basic terms, workflow software is a tool that allows businesses to automate work, organize tasks, and manage workflow. In other words, the business workflow software can serve as a single hub where a team can create, execute and track their business process workflow that guides the steps needed to complete every project. For example, in a marketing team, these steps may include creating content, scheduling the content, and then measuring the analytics after posting. With business workflow software, all these steps can be done from a single platform. 

These platforms often include capabilities such as task assignment, deadline monitoring, approval processes and integration with other software tools. Business workflow software reduces the likelihood of errors by automating repetitive work, increases efficiency by providing real-time insights, and improves processes by allowing teams to allocate time to more challenging tasks. 

Automation: Reducing Manual Labor and Increasing Efficiency 

Automation is one of the most substantial advantages of marketing when it comes to business process workflow. Marketing campaigns require many repetitive tasks to be done, like sending emails, posting on social media or updating CRM (customer relationship management) systems, and it is costly in terms of time to execute them manually. Automation workflow software enables marketers to do all of this and more, whilst saving time and assuring the tasks are done accurately and on time. 

For example, you can now have your email marketing platform integrated with audiences, send hyper-targeted emails at optimized times, and track engagement metrics all without any humans involved. Or you can schedule social posts to go live on multiple platforms simultaneously, observe performance, and pivot based on outcomes in real-time with the help of a social media management tool. Marketers can be relieved of hours of repetitive data entry per week, and redirect that energy toward strategic, creative thinking and campaign optimization efforts. 

Automation helps to avoid human error, which can prove expensive in marketing circles. A missed deadline or a typo in a promotional email can cause you to miss opportunities and even damage your brand reputation. A well-implemented business process workflow helps to ensure that tasks are completed as desired, with in-built checks and balances to identify problems before they 

Enhancing Collaboration and Communication 

Marketing doesn't tend to be a solo sport. Campaigns require collaboration between a range of people, such as copywriters, designers, analysts and sales reps. This collaboration is important to make sure that the final campaign meets the brief and ultimately helps to achieve the objectives of your business. But how do you coordinate all of these efforts? Sometimes this is easier said than done, especially in larger organizations, or when the team is working remotely. 

It increases collaboration by placing everyone on one centralized platform where everyone can view relevant data, communicate in real-time, and work. All this decreases the chance of miscommunication. 

For instance, when launching a new product, a marketing team may need feedback from design, sales and customer support. Business workflow software can allow this to happen seamlessly by setting up a business process workflow documenting the different teams and their roles, assigning deadlines and granting approvals. Because of the way that a business process workflow is programmed, when a designer finishes their job, they can send the project into the workflow and automatically notify the next team, for instance, a copywriter or social media manager, in line with the pre-configured rules. 

And, because all of this happens within a single platform, many business process workflow apps also integrate with chat platforms such as Slack or Microsoft Teams to enable team members to discuss projects and files, and solve problems, all within the workflow software. That means no more emails about an issue that's only tangentially relevant, and no more endless meeting calls. 

Data-Driven Decision Making 

By leveraging data, today's business workflow software goes well beyond merely logging transactions. Rather, the advanced analytics and reporting capabilities provide a tactical overview of everything from customer behavior to transaction costs. This invaluable data forms the basis for success in today's marketing campaigns. 

Business workflow software can track vital performance indicators such as click-through rates, conversion rates, customer engagement and ROI, which are typically presented in real-time dashboards where marketers can see the exact status of their campaigns at any time. This data allows marketers to spot patterns, diagnose problem areas and make sound decisions regarding where to focus their efforts. A business process workflow can also help to facilitate A/B testing, automating the ability to run two different versions of a campaign, then track which one works better. Let's say that a marketing team wants to run two different versions of an email, but they also want to send the different versions to different subsets of their audience. instead of a human trying to run each version for half of the audience, and then manually tracking the results, a team can simply set up the A/B testing with workflow software. This software will send the different versions to the audience segments, then track the open and conversion rates for each, leaving the humans to figure out which ones worked better. 

With this kind of data, marketing campaigns can be built not on hunches, but on solid evidence for what will resonate with a defined audience. And continuous optimization becomes possible because teams can react immediately when they see how customers are actually reacting to their messaging in real-time. 

Improving Campaign Agility 

Such agility is particularly important in the marketing environment today, where companies must swiftly respond to a competitor's initiative, a changing market trend, or some other kind of disruption, such as a wildly successful or disastrous new product launch, or an unexpected shift in consumer behavior. Marketing teams can rely on business workflow software to provide the tools they need to instantly make changes to a campaign that it can then put into action. 

For example, if a social media campaign isn't driving the desired engagement, a great business process workflow can help teams update the content, shift the cadence or the schedule, or shift budgets to other channels. Because all of the tasks reside in the software, the changes can be made quickly and distributed to the appropriate team members. 

This type of agility is particularly important in crisis management. If a brand has negative news that they need to communicate, workflow software allows a company's marketing team that's distributed remotely to still implement.  

In the world of marketing, with the growing number of marketing tools and the increasing competition between them, the role of business workflow software is more significant than ever. A business process workflow using the right software allows teams to automate repetitive tasks, collaborate more effectively, and utilize best practices to make data-driven decisions. It helps teams to execute campaigns faster and adjust them according to the changes in the market so that their marketing activities can move in one strategically correct direction.