When you’re ready to go beyond traditional marketing tactics and run complex, multi-channel marketing campaigns, you’ll want to invest in a marketing workflow software solution.

This handy tool simplifies and automates management processes, keeping you on top of your marketing campaigns without surprises like unexpected budget overruns and poor campaign tracking.

So what’s the catch? Too many choices.

You have several options to choose from, each suitable for different use cases. But that’s where we come in. After days of research, chats with industry experts, and company deep dives, we present our top picks for the best marketing workflow software.

But first, the basics.

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It outlines what to do and when based on a set of rules and requirements, to complete marketing tasks and operations without errors. It can be granular or high-level, depending on the company or task—and it can be a checklist, how-to, spreadsheet, visual diagram, or flowchart.

You customize your marketing workflows as you deem fit.

You can use this software to:

• Design an automated system for long-term marketing campaigns
• Build a unified database with streamlined lead generation and data management
• Create forms, requests, tasks, and sub-tasks

Notice how these tasks are generally time-consuming and repetitive. With marketing workflow software, you can automate them to reduce errors, cut unnecessary costs, improve team collaboration, and drive business performance.

Feature diversity and effectiveness are the keys to identifying the best marketing workflow solution for your needs. While the number of features depends on your pricing plan, we recommend choosing a solution that offers these features:

1. Campaign Management

Marketing workflow software with campaign management abilities lets you centralize all your marketing campaigns.

You can create a campaign timeline, set goals and deliverables, finalize budgets, and track progress from a single place. Campaign management is also useful to segment your audience based on specific criteria (for example, behavior, location, and interests) and personalize your campaign’s messaging to better resonate with your target audience.

2. Project Management

As a marketer, you can use project management features to plan projects and outline goals, objectives, timelines, deadlines, and milestones for each. Plus, as everything is centralized and transparent, there’s minimal confusion, with everyone involved working towards a common goal.

Maybe your company is launching a new product and wants to create a comprehensive marketing campaign to promote it.

Using marketing workflow software’s project management features, you can meticulously plan your campaign- social media posts, blog posts, advertising, and newsletters—and include details like task deadlines and assignees.

3. Task Management

Marketing campaigns are getting increasingly complex and multi-faceted. There’s much to do, from researching target audiences to creating content and graphics and analyzing campaign metrics.

Task management lets you organize and complete tasks to manage complex marketing campaigns and achieve better results. Create task lists for different campaign stages, delegate tasks to and collaborate with team members, and set deadlines to track progress. You can also categorize and prioritize tasks by urgency or importance.

4. Task Automation

Task automation streamlines marketing campaigns by automating task movement between team members based on predefined criteria. Think: reaching a specific stage in the marketing process or completion of a task.

Continuing with our previous example, let’s assume your marketing team is creating a social media campaign to promote the new product.

Your team will mainly comprise of designers, copywriters, social media managers, and data analysts who work together to create, schedule, and monitor social media posts. Using task automation, you can create a workflow automating the movement of these tasks from one team member to another based on predefined criteria.

For instance, if the designer completes creating graphics for a social media post, they can mark the task as ‘Completed.‘ The workflow will automatically move the task to the copywriter, who will then write the post’s copy. Once the copywriter marks the task as complete, it’ll go on to the next person as defined by you.

In this case, task automation eliminates the need for manual handoffs, creating accountability and reducing the risk of errors.  This process gives team members more time to focus on relevant tasks and streamlines the workflow.

5. Proofs, Approvals, & Compliance

You’re likely aware of the innumerable approval and compliance blocks that often plague marketing campaigns, leading to bottlenecks and delays. By providing a transparent and centralized platform for collaboration, feedback, and sign-off, marketing workflow software helps boost efficiency and quality control in your campaigns.

Your marketing materials will be accurate, compliant, and on-brand, thanks to automated proofs, approvals, and compliance. These features also streamline the review process, reducing errors, inconsistencies, or legal issues that could damage your organization’s reputation or credibility.

6. Project Views

If you want a visual representation of your data and tasks, you need marketing workflow software that lets you “view“ your tasks in different formats, like Calendar, Kanban, Gantt, Table, and Team Views.

For example, when working on a social media campaign, you can use:

• Calendar View to set important dates like content creation deadlines and social media post schedules.
• Kanban View to manage the content creation process, assign tasks, and track progress.
• Gantt View to visualize the campaign timeline and ensure all tasks are completed promptly.
• Table View for tracking engagement metrics like click-through rates, ROI, and conversion rates.
• Team Views to communicate and share information and feedback with team members.

Views provide unique perspectives on your campaign data, helping you better manage workflows and make informed decisions to achieve your marketing goals.

What do the prospective marketing workflow software’s feature set and functionality look like? Is it easy to use and within budget? Does it integrate with other tools and allow for customization?

These are all crucial considerations when looking for marketing workflow software—but they’re also—for the lack of a better word—basic and obvious. You still might find it difficult to make the right choice.

It’s why we dug deeper and reached out to experts with years of experience in marketing management. Based on their input, we used the following selection process when evaluating marketing workflow tools:

1. Built For Marketers

Is the marketing workflow software designed for marketers?

You’ll find several general-use project management tools with tons of features. But, most of the time, these aren’t tailored to meet a marketer’s unique needs.

Our top recommendations are marketing-specific solutions that offer marketing automation, campaign management, lead tracking, and other marketing-specific functionalities essential for various marketing-specific use cases like email marketing, paid search, and content marketing.

2. Robust Task Management Functionality

Does the marketing workflow software have advanced task management capabilities?

Robust task management helps you track all the tasks in your marketing projects, from task assignments to task dependencies to deadline tracking. It’s crucial the tool assigns accountability, streamlines handoff among multiple team members and departments, and sends timely notifications with little to no involvement on your part.

3. Superior Workflow Visibility

What level of insight does the marketing workflow software offer into workflows?

Tools with a user-friendly and intuitive dashboard show the status of all projects and tasks at a glance and display key metrics and KPIs for informed decision-making. Also, find out if you can see a history of all the changes made to a project or task. This will help you track progress, identify potential bottlenecks, and recognize team member contributions.

4. Collaboration Tools

Does the marketing workflow software facilitate easy and convenient collaboration?

Effective collaboration is essential in any marketing workflow, so looking for tools with solid collaboration features is a no-brainer. Besides traditional collaboration tools like file sharing, commenting, and real-time chat, ensure you can also create and add notes or comments to each task and sub-task.

5. Reporting & Analytics

Does the workflow management software have powerful reporting and analytics?

Robust reporting and analytics let you generate custom reports and dashboards to gain valuable insights into key metrics like campaign performance and lead conversion rates. You also get analytics on individual tasks and projects to track employee performance over time and identify improvement areas.

Based on these features, we shortlisted the following tools sure to meet your organization’s unique marketing requirements:

1. CoSchedule Marketing Suite

CoSchedule Marketing Suite is designed to help your team perform to its full potential while saving time and money. With a suite of marketing products at your disposal, you can easily coordinate your teams and processes to deliver projects faster.

The suite includes a Calendar Organizer to visualize every project in real-time and a Content Organizer to eliminate content bottlenecks from idea to promotion. Additionally, a Work Organizer helps implement consistent, defined workflows to increase output, while the Asset Organizer lets you catalog and maintain all campaign files and assets in one place.

2. CoSchedule Marketing Calendar

Another excellent product from CoSchedule, the free Marketing Calendar, provides real-time visibility into your marketing campaigns.

Add all projects, tasks, ideas, and other marketing assets to organize and view everything on the same page. Not only does this give you more clarity into your projects and reconfirm priorities, but it also eliminates the need for back-and-forth emailing and messy spreadsheets.

You can also create, schedule, and publish social campaigns and analyze their results using social reports to track and share progress.

3. Optimizely

Optimizely allows you to create a dedicated workspace to ensure alignment at every marketing campaign stage.

Store all assets and content details, including dedicated briefs, to publish and promote new content on a recurring schedule. You can also grant access user by user, ensuring each contributor focuses on matters relevant to them. Customizable task management and workflows let you adapt your approach to ensure brand compliance and consistency and avoid missed deadlines.

Other features like real-time team collaboration, a content analytics dashboard, and in-task publishing and distribution further drive efficiency.

4. Storyteq

Storyteq’s primary purpose is to help you tell meaningful stories that resonate with your target audience at scale.

It offers a wide range of features to define project objectives, deliverables, budget, and timeline, as well as assign tasks and set deadlines. Turn your master file into an on-brand dynamic template and render multiple creative assets in batches. Note that Storyteq can also auto-optimize your content for a variety of channels, which is another time-saving benefit.

Then track costs, content usage, and performance throughout your marketing campaign to make adjustments as necessary.

5. Workamajig

Built for marketers, Workamajig offers a centralized CRM and database to centralize all campaign-related assets and information, including tasks, calendars, conversations, timelines, and notifications.

This is useful to reduce miscommunication risks and ensure everyone on the team is working towards achieving a common goal. The real-time daily feed provides superior workflow visibility, which with the wide range of reporting options, keeps you on top of campaign progress.

Other desirable features include robust vendor management and customizable templates to create detailed and accurate campaign estimates.

6. Adobe Workfront

With Adobe Workfront, you can approach marketing with strategic insight instead of guesswork.

Get complete visibility into work context and status, along with efficient asset storage and management, that streamlines project planning and execution. You can also define goals and map project requests while effectively planning and prioritizing tasks.

Automated workflows, templates, agile boards, and real-time reports make uncovering and implementing valuable insights to drive team efficiency and collaboration easier.

7. ClickUp

ClickUp is an excellent team and stakeholder collaboration and task visualization tool.

It has features to help you implement marketing campaigns and draw connections between tasks. You can also schedule reminders and track initiatives to ensure efficient workload management.

A ton of relevant templates, including A/B testing, promotional calendar, and campaign tracking, are great for avoiding errors and realizing results faster.

8. Hive

Hive gives you all the tools you need to succeed in marketing in one place.

With Project Navigator, you can easily keep track of project status, deadlines, and team members. Robust project and task management features align your team stays on the same page, while its excellent analytics let you uncover high-level insights and monitor progress.

Hive also offers specialized marketing tools like Hive Automate to send automated reminders and updates, and a Resourcing app to manage team workload.

These marketing workflow tools will help you define and automate the steps to build and execute strong marketing campaigns. From effective task planning and management to streamlining processes for smooth running marketing campaigns, you can rely on them to leverage the power of workflows and achieve your marketing goals faster and with less effort.