How Marketing Teams Use SmartSuite
Part art, part science, Marketing stretches an organization's imagination to grow and thrive. Take care to craft well-designed projects to deliver consistently strong result at every turn.
Marketing teams come in many sizes and structures and with lots of different responsibilities and goals.
- Some are 100 percent in-house.
- Others are a hybrid of on-staff talent and independent contractors.
- Teams may all sit together in a physical office but, more likely today, many are either hybrid are totally remote.
- Some are B-to-B and others are B-to-C. And some might even be both or B-to-B-to-C.
- You might be tiny or huge.
- You might work with one agency or many many agencies.
- Most likely, you are responsible for a wide range of media, both conventional and digital. You might even produce events, which have lots of moving parts.
But they all have a couple of things in common.
- They are ultimately responsible for growth and KPI performance marketing is top-of-mind.
- They all must have a marketing project plan to achieve what they must to hit those goals.
In fact, results and timing are the two main factors your marketing team is usually evaluated on, and without the right marketing project tracker, you might miss the mark on both of them.
What is a Marketing Project Tracker?
Most organizations today have cobbled together solutions to help them do a wide range of critical tasks that lead to project success:
- Online places (sometimes hard to find or “top secret” where financial goals and and forecasts live (and can be updated)
- A scheduling tool, so team members know what they need to do and when
- At least one communications tool for meetings and collaboration
- That elusive library (or multiple libraries) of digital assets that creatives need in order to create -- logos, legal disclaimers, brand colors, etc.
And the list of technology platforms seems to be growing by the day. Marketers may spend as much time clarifying objectives and status and looking for “stuff” as they do on their actual marketing roles. That’s why we created SmartSuite. As its name implies, it’s one “room” (a rather luxurious but affordable one) where marketers can all gather, invite in the people they count on to get their jobs done, and hang out while they produce stellar results. And, they can even store the results in that SmartSuite, so that newbies and next year’s marketing team can find them!
Whereas many project management systems are designed by engineers, with very little input from the end users (marketers), we created SmartSuite by road testing it with marketing teams. It’s intuitive, highly-visual, and dare we say fun to use. We realized that with the workplace changing (and remote teams and independent contractors becoming commonplace), the need for ONE integrated platform was greater than it’s ever been. So, then we put it to the test...
Two Practical Examples: One Small and One Huge
SmartSuite in Action for a Little and Specific (but Important) Marketing Project
Take this blog for example. We as a company engaged a third-party agency to help us develop our brand and messaging. We needed about 15 pieces of content (e-books and blogs). We set a tight timeline (the schedule) and the end goal (the content). Rather than going back-and-forth with versions of copy, all the output was stored in one highly-graphic “Suite.” Our company, the agency, and the freelance writer could all see what was being produced (and when) and we could provide our edits all in one place.
SmartSuite Works on a Large Scale Too
As a company kicks-off its annual growth plan, they may have 100s of marketing projects and campaigns. The annual plan has been approved, but now the real work starts. Those projects need to actually get done -- on time and on budget. The marketing team can agree on HOW they want the SmartSuite to be designed. What project elements need to be tracked, who needs access to information, and even what talent they need to get projects done. We’ve even designed it so that teams and individuals can adjust their views so they’re only seeing those parts of the marketing plans and projects they need to access.
Some of the types of information a team or agency can store in their SmartSuite include:
- Personas and the research behind them
- Competitive analyses
- Brand standards
- Digital assets
- Forecasts
- Creative versions
- Chats
And, like a hotel where each door is clearly labeled, anyone who comes into that “room” can easily find what they’re looking for, saving hours of time. No one wants to wander the halls with their ice bucket. Labels and location are critical in all aspects of life!
Marketing groups can set permissions so that anyone (internally or externally) can find what they’re looking for to complete a task. This is especially important for complex projects like events or multi-channel campaigns, where you have lots of people involved in getting things done.
Relieve Stress on Your Marketing Team!
Marketers’ jobs are challenging enough. Organizations usually look to them to generate growth and revenue and, when that doesn’t happen, fingers often point to that function. Having a unified, multi-functional, simple and intuitive (and, most important, collaborative) system that makes marketers’ lives easier and helps them produce faster, frees up hours for creativity, growth, and (dare we say) relaxation.
