How to Successfully Implement Project Portfolio Management

 

By Kate Eby 

In order to successfully implement project portfolio management (PPM), you’ll need to take a well-measured approach. In this article, you’ll find the most useful steps, tools, and expert tips to help you get started.

Project Portfolio Management Implementation Process

The project portfolio management (PPM) implementation process is an organizational endeavor. The company establishes an action plan and a framework for governance, then standardizes new practices around those elements. To implement PPM successfully, you must drive change at all levels.

“Operationally, most organizations focus their efforts on project selection, governance, and oversight. Project selection is the process of reviewing project requests or proposals and deciding which projects to pursue based on strategic alignment, return on investment, or other enterprise-specific factors. Governance and oversight are the processes for creating standardized delivery patterns, reporting on project performance, and taking corrective actions when necessary,” says Alan Zucker, Founding Principal of Project Management Essentials.

Project portfolio management is an effective governance tool for the coordination and management of many projects.

How to Implement Project Portfolio Management

Project portfolio management is a philosophy with no single, universal methodology; however, all implementation approaches require buy-in from the entire organization, adherence to the chosen framework, and careful consideration of the company’s goals and values. 

Some managers take a straightforward, single-goal approach to portfolio management, while others prefer the versatility that comes with Agile approaches. Your first goal is to find the right fit for your company. 

“When it comes to project portfolio management, you have a single objective: to identify and improve the returns on a project. Identifying an approach should stem from the questions you have regarding the project under consideration, whether [they are questions of] productivity, quality, or overall cost-effectiveness. When you have your purpose in mind, identifying areas for improvement and amplification becomes apparent,” says Alex Mastin, Founder and CEO of Home Grounds.

To outline your approach to portfolio management, first define your goals: “Get very clear on goals upfront,” suggests Jake Carroll, Founder of Create Kaizen. He continues, “Make sure goals, reporting requirements, etc., are clear from the beginning — making even a small change to these [considerations] could drastically alter how you report portfolio management.” 

In addition, your company’s mission (as well as its size and industry) factors heavily into the way you manage your portfolio. Your company’s willingness to adapt to change is yet another factor that helps determine your approach to PPM. Moreover, you must choose an approach that makes your time frame and other goals reasonable and, therefore, achievable.

Ensure early on that all team members are on board with your approach. The best way to do this is to identify a champion for your process who is a leader in the business. If you have executive support, the rest will soon follow. It is also essential to secure support from other departmental leaders and managers, as portfolio management requires consistent, standardized processes. If one team is doing things differently, your approach will be much more difficult to implement. 

“Every organization configures its portfolio management practices somewhat differently. Small companies may have a single portfolio, whereas large corporations may have many. Typically, a senior manager should lead the portfolio management team. The team may be within the finance, planning, or technology department, but members should always report to a senior leader,” recommends Zucker.

Establish a framework for your project portfolio management approach that emphasizes what your business values most. Set a timeline for prioritization, and understand that you may need to continually revisit prioritization of the same projects as time goes on. The framework should outline the most important goals you have for portfolio management, and you should make all decisions with that framework in mind.

Six Project Portfolio Management Implementation Steps

Project portfolio management requires six steps to implement. First, you must define your approach and secure executive support. Next, bring your plan to the team. Then, gather portfolio data and prioritize it. Finally, monitor and manage your portfolio.

Step 1: Define Your Project Portfolio Management Approach

Define your project portfolio management approach by determining your company’s goals, establishing your framework, and analyzing your company’s willingness and ability to change in order to create a realistic timeline for your work. 

“The first step is to decide what is important to the organization in terms of selecting and overseeing project execution. The second is to design and implement a basic process that meets those minimal needs. Use paper-based or lightweight tools to implement the first iteration of the process because you want to be able to implement updates or changes to the process quickly, as you learn,” says Zucker.

Step 2: Secure Executive Support for Your Project Portfolio Plan

Organizational changes require strong support and examples from leadership. Ensuring that your executives are on board with new practices is the best way to encourage others to join in.

Step 3: Secure Team Support for Your Project Portfolio Plan

Once you have executives on board, reach out to other management and departmental leaders to bring them on. Project portfolio management affects all projects and teams, so you must establish early precedent to ensure you meet new standards across the company.

Step 4: Gather Portfolio Data

Create a comprehensive list of the company’s current and potential projects. Make sure you have data on those projects, such as timelines, milestones, potential risks, resource needs, and ROI.

Step 5: Prioritize Your Project Portfolio

Prioritize the projects based on your framework. You might choose to favor projects with higher ROI regardless of risk, or you may prefer a more risk-averse approach. Whatever approach you choose, be objective, keeping company goals in mind.

Step 6: Learn and Evolve from Your Project Portfolio

Situations change over time, and so do portfolios. It is essential to evaluate your portfolio on a recurring basis to ensure that your current framework and approach continue to align with the goals of the company. 

Don’t be afraid to make changes when needed: “After you have gained some experience with the process, evaluate it. Solicit feedback from senior leaders, management, and project teams. Are the ‘right’ projects being selected? Is the process transparent and lightweight? Based on the feedback, adjust where needed,” recommends Zucker.

Read this guide to the project portfolio management process, steps, and flows to learn more about portfolio management after implementation.

Project Portfolio Management Implementation Strategy

Build your implementation strategy to offer the best results in the most reasonable amount of time possible. Allow for some flexibility to accommodate multiple departments with different deliverables, but be sure to retain the same fundamental approach. 

Organize your portfolios using consistent ranking criteria across the board. Make sure you report the same information and hold the same key meetings regarding all potential and ongoing projects.

Project Portfolio Management Implementation Roadmap

An implementation roadmap is a simplified, easy-to-read version of your implementation plan. Define your approach, secure executive support, get the team on board, gather project information, organize and prioritize those projects, and continuously evolve your approach as needed.

Project Portfolio Management Implementation Costs

The ultimate goal of project portfolio management is to make improvements in processes that are more valuable than your costs. 

These costs are not just financial; they might include training, software, and time investment. However, the benefits of successful implementation are increased project success, better ROI, and increased efficiency.

Pat Khumprakob, an independent IT product and innovation consultant, shares his experience concerning the cost of implementing project portfolio management: “The costs are huge, especially for organizations that are heavily regulated or have been operating in a set manner for a long time. While there are costs associated with bringing in new staff, I see bigger costs regarding changing existing staff to fit new models.”

Khumprakob adds, “A lot has changed in technology over the past 20 years, and asking tenured employees to adapt to things like Agile, dev ops, design thinking, and more can make them feel very uncomfortable. They're used to a system where, if they do their work, make it bug-free, and deliver on time, they get their bonuses and raises. Trying something new puts that reward system directly in jeopardy.

“A lot of costs come back to change,” Khumprakob continues. “How do we encourage change in existing employees, processes, systems, and more in order to adapt to new practices and techniques? How do we coach, train, and mentor staff to understand the ecosystem, while still letting them bring their fresh views or years of expertise to the table? It's very tricky.” 

Khumprakob says, “I was with a company that brought me in to build up a digital product organization from the team level. When I started the job, I quickly found out that there was no support at the top levels for this initiative. Business and IT weren't aligned (and this was an IT initiative); there was no leadership direction or mindset in place, and it turned into a nightmare. Skilled employees quickly left because they realized the infrastructure for success wasn't in place.

“When you implement a new management structure, you have to start at the top with someone who has the vision, direction, and influence to bring other leaders on board. From there, you can start looping in or recruiting top talent to drive the vision. Then, you follow that step by including junior talent, who you can coach and mentor.

“When done right, a new management structure can deliver great results. When done poorly, it can cost more than just a couple of key hires,” Khumprakob concludes.

Project Portfolio Management Implementation Plan Template

You can use this template to organize the implementation of your portfolio management plan. Use it to outline your goals and framework, identify your key team members, and easily list and organize your project portfolio.

Project Portfolio Management Implementation Challenges

Project portfolio management implementation can be a difficult and complicated process. Portfolio managers must overcome many challenges, from hiring new staff to training the team on new procedures and organizing and prioritizing existing projects and data.

Here are the main challenges you face when implementing project portfolio management:

• Securing Buy-In: Securing buy-in from both executives and department or project managers can be difficult. You must bring together different management requirements and styles in a way that satisfies the needs of all. “Implementing project portfolio management comes with the growing pains of rollout. Make sure to clearly state what the operational toll will be on key stakeholders and get buy-in before implementing,” warns Carroll.
• Using a One-Size-Fits-All Approach: All projects are different, so removing nuance in the management and prioritization process can produce both positive and negative results. Ensuring that your prioritization framework truly reflects your business values can help to enhance the positive and reduce the potential for the negative.
• Training and Restructuring: Hiring and training is expensive. New project portfolio management strategies may require you to hire new portfolio managers and will definitely require training existing department project managers on all new procedures.
• Knowing Your Limits: Understanding the limits of your resources and your team is critical when implementing project portfolio management. “You need to know where you can stretch your resources and where you need to withhold. Your revenue depends not just on how long a project lasts, but also on the amount of resources you invest in it. Variables are a part of business, and your resources can be variable. Staying adaptable and open to change is very important,” says Mastin.
• Dealing with Complexity: “It is very easy to get in over your head when implementing project portfolio management by creating a complex system that's more work to maintain than it's worth. This problem is twofold: One, you obfuscate your data and findings, which leads to poor decision making; two, you lessen the perceived importance of portfolio management within your company. Project portfolio management is a very powerful tool, but poorly informed decision making can lead to a long, tough road to adoption and recovery,” Carroll admonishes.
• Gathering Data: When starting fresh with project portfolio management, you have a huge amount of data to collect and organize, all likely in different formats with different naming structures on different servers across different departments. “Analyze the data over a period of time before making any decisions. One of the mistakes most project portfolio management initiates make is jumping the gun on the decision making. Patience is rewarded with more calibrated results. You need to identify the long-term benefits to ensure the longevity of the business,” notes Mastin.
• Confronting Changing Project Priorities: Managing projects under a new model is difficult. For example, if you’re currently managing several projects in progress when executives decide to assign a higher priority to other projects, you may find your once high-priority projects postponed or dropped completely.
• Shouldering the Costs in Money and Time: Project portfolio management implementation is expensive in terms of both money and time. Planning and gathering data, hiring and training new staff, paying their ongoing salaries, spending the time to switch processes, and making investments in new software are all examples of the costs associated with implementation.

Project Portfolio Management Implementation

Challenges	Solution
Securing buy-in	Start at the executive level. Early high-level buy-in encourages lower-level and interdepartmental cooperation.
Adopting a one-size-fits-all approach	Ensure that your prioritization framework truly reflects the needs and goals of your company. Doing this allows the best projects to come out on top and, thus, guarantees that you spend resources in the most efficient way.
Training and restructuring	Hiring, training, and restructuring are expensive, but necessary components of project portfolio management implementation. Putting a solid implementation plan in place and ensuring cooperation from all departments can help minimize these ongoing costs.
Knowing your limits	Understanding the limits of your resources and team takes experience and skill. Closely monitor ongoing projects to ensure that you are not pushing your team beyond what it can successfully accomplish
Gathering data	Implement a company-wide naming and storage structure for projects and reports, regardless of department. Doing this helps you keep projects and reports organized and accessible. You should also create a standardized reporting system, so you can compare certain KPIs across projects.
Confronting changing project priorities	Start the implementation process slowly, and if possible, wait until any major projects are finished before launching any large-scale changes. Begin new reporting and prioritization procedures when new projects commence, rather than implementing these procedures when projects are already in progress.
Shouldering the costs in money and time	Project portfolio management implementation is, in itself, a large-scale project. Estimate the costs and resources you need for implementation just like you would any other project, and make sure that your budget allows for all necessary resource use and expenses.

Tips for Implementing Project Portfolio Management

You can use many strategies to ensure the successful implementation of portfolio management, from creating a detailed plan to facilitating visible and open communication. Below, you’ll find a list of expert advice:

• Create a Detailed Plan: Put together a detailed implementation plan with a framework that reflects your business goals. Give your plan a chance to work, but don’t be afraid to change things when needed.
• Facilitate Visibility and Open Communication: From the outset, educate everyone involved regarding the nature of the plan, and during implementation, keep progress visible. 
• Establish an Implementation Team: Choose multiple champions at multiple levels in multiple departments who all report to one executive leader. Check in often and make sure things are on track.
• Use Available Software: Choose a project portfolio management software tool that complements your approach. “There are many stories you can make data tell, and the infrastructure your project portfolio management tooling takes on will reflect the eventual data you get from [that infrastructure]. Do your research and choose the tool that will bend to fit your team and process, not the other way around,” offers Carroll.
• Leverage Existing Company Culture: Take a look at your company’s existing processes and culture, and create a plan that works within that structure. “When implementing a project portfolio management program, it is important to understand the organizational and cultural context. Many new programs fail because they establish practices that are out of context. Successful programs establish clear business goals based on the existing culture. Then, these programs establish processes and practices that begin moving the organization in the new direction,” Zucker observes.
• Keep It Simple: Project portfolio management is a complex process that can quickly become unwieldy. “Solve for the easiest, most flexible ways to serve your use cases. Keep it simple. Tooling and process can quickly get complicated, so to ensure agility over time, remember that simpler is better,” suggests Carroll.
• Organize: Organize all existing project data, and create a naming and organization structure for storing data and referencing projects in the future.
• Automate as Much as Possible: The more you can automate project portfolio management reporting for a product manager or team lead, the higher the quality of your data will be; the better the data, the more you can trust the insights you glean from that data. 
• Make Adjustments Where Necessary: Give things a chance to work, but know when to make changes. “Tool and process rollouts seldom go as planned, so make sure you establish touchpoints early and often. That way, you can get feedback, so you can pivot while things are still flexible,” Carroll points out.
• Support Your Teams: Your team is one of your most valuable resources, and it only grows more experienced and valuable over time. “One of our core principles is ‘fund the teams, rather than the project.’ This means that we fund the project delivery teams and then decide which teams should execute which work or projects. This practice reduces the churn of forming and disbanding our project teams. Lightweight project portfolio management processes allow you to prioritize projects quickly. When the teams complete one project, you assign the next project (that is, the one at the top of their prioritized stack),” explains Zucker.

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Content Marketing Project Management Toolkit: Workflows, Templates, and Checklists

 

By Joe Weller

Content marketing teams use workflows to deliver quality content quickly. This article shows you how to use workflows in content marketing project management. Build your process, schedule, and tools with these templates and expert advice.

Included on this page, you'll find details on what a content workflow is, steps on how to develop a content marketing workflow, best practices and tips from experts, as well as some of the most popular content marketing workflow templates.

What Is a Content Workflow?

A content workflow is a series of steps you take to plan, develop, and manage your team and all the content they create. By creating a pattern and process for your team — via a strong content workflow — you help empower your creatives and marketers to take ownership. Here’s a simple content marketing flowchart that shows the basic workflow for an article.

Content management is different than but an essential part of content marketing. Content marketing takes a strategic approach to creating and distributing relevant content — web pages, white papers, blog posts — to your audience. Content management is the way you organize, publish, store, and review each asset. Think of it like this: Content management is the way to structure your content; content marketing evaluates the performance of that content. 

Get a complete guide to content management systems and the key steps in creating a content management strategy by reading “Content Management 101: Discover the Best Approaches and Techniques.” Develop your content marketing strategy, complete with templates to guide you, by reading “Free Content Strategy Templates and How to Use Them to Create a Successful Plan.”

Why Do You Need to Define Your Content Workflow?

Every content marketing team uses workflows, but not every team has taken the time to clearly identify or update the list of tasks. A defined content workflow tells everyone on the project what the process is, when their turn comes in that process, what they must do to deliver the project needs, and when they have to be delivered. A content workflow can improve your work and your working life in the following ways:

• Organizes your team
• Breaks down silos and streamline collaboration
• Increases productivity, efficiency, and quantity
• Improves results by getting the best quality
• Reduces stress
• Saves time by avoiding duplication and endless revisions
• Budgets the team’s (and each team member’s) time
• Keeps projects on track and on schedule, helping you meet deadlines
• Helps managers identify bottlenecks

It starts with your process. “It’s extremely useful to create templates or standard processes and just duplicate them so you’re not having to reinvent the wheel every time,” says Kayla Pendleton, owner and founder of Make Her Mark, a co-working space and community for women entrepreneurs. 

Content workflows help editors and anyone responsible for planning and managing content, such as social media managers. They also help the people who produce and review content, including writers, designers, and proofreaders. Get a complete guide to the role of workflows in project management by reading “Save Time by Taking the Time: Creating Workflows.”

How to Develop a Content Marketing Workflow

Content marketing workflows may not appeal to your team in the same way that coming up with creative content ideas does, but content marketing can’t succeed without a strong workflow. To define any marketing workflow, identify all the tasks and how long each one takes. Then list all the team member roles and responsibilities. The final step is to put the people and tasks in a logical order. The goal is to develop a sustainable process to create, publish, and distribute new content. 

“It all starts with breaking down everything into projects, checklists, and related tasks,” Pendleton says. “The important thing is to not use something that ends up being a giant to-do list. That is a guaranteed way to get overwhelmed.” One of the biggest mistakes you can make, she warns, is writing down what you need to do without thinking about the big picture and the result you want. 

“I have literally sometimes just started by drawing it out on paper, or thinking about my projects like I had them in a file cabinet. If you’re making to-do lists, it’s like you open up that drawer, and if it's all just a bunch of papers and it's not organized, then you're going to be totally overwhelmed,” she says. “Where if, instead, you have it all organized, by project, date, topic, or client, it’s like you’ve got your contained binder with tabs, notes, indexes, etc.”

For a step-by-step look at marketing workflows, read “The Complete Guide to Marketing Workflows.”

Choose Your Workflow Approach 

Once you’ve gathered all your tasks, timelines, and team members, it’s time to arrange the workflow in a way that works for your organization. There are three approaches:

• Status-based: Organize your workflow based on the status of a piece of content. 
• Task-based: Organize your workflow based on the task needed for a piece of content.
• Swim lane: Organize tasks across roles and over time.

Status-Based Workflow

In this approach, each piece of content is assigned a status, which indicates where the content is and where it goes next in the process. Project managers and editors are heavily involved in the individual steps of the workflow. 

You’ll face some challenges if you don’t design the workflow carefully — it might be difficult to get a complete picture of the overall status of the project. Team members who don’t use the system might get confused because they are not familiar with the system. Avoid this by getting buy-in early from your team. Here are some best practices in using a status-based workflow:

• Clearly define each status for everyone on the team.
• Make it easy for team members to remember what each term means.
• Train team members to update the workflow at each stage with the correct status to avoid excessive manager oversight.
• Create a flexible system that can handle exceptions to the workflow.

Task-Based Workflow

You may find that it makes more sense to define your workflow by function rather than by status or in chronological order. A task-based workflow works like a to-do list. Team members assign tasks to one another as the content moves through the workflow, and editors are aware of who is working on each task, but they can spend less time micromanaging the status of each task in the project. 

One challenge with this approach is that a team member may know they have been assigned to a task, but they may not have access to all the information they need to do the work. Task-based workflows can also fail to provide the strategic goals for the content, leaving writers and designers to create content that meets the deadline, but requires time-consuming revision to meet the campaign’s objectives. Here are some best practices in using a task-based workflow:

• Write the task in clear language.
• Make sure team members know what is expected of them, and provide specifics of the task and a set deadline.
• Provide a clear visual so the team can see the progress of various tasks, including the tasks that remain.
• Create triggers that alert team members when a task has been delegated to them.
• Create a flexible system that can handle changes.

Swim Lane Approach

Swim lanes organize projects that include different departments or roles. The diagrams typically display the roles in the vertical columns and the tasks in the horizontal rows. This helps you see what team members are doing, so you avoid duplicating tasks and can identify bottlenecks quickly. You can also see a team’s capacity for handling additional tasks.

Best Practices and Tips from Experts

The most effective content marketing workflows combine status-based workflows with task-based checklists. As you start to define your workflows, be sure you include every step in the content marketing process. This checklist can help you make sure you’ve covered all the bases.

Armed with all the details of your content marketing workflows, you can now follow these tips and best practices:

• Set Up an End-to-End Process: Shakun Bansal, head of marketing at Mercer | Mettl, uses these steps. First, define the goal or purpose of the content, such as product awareness or thought leadership. Get internal data about your audience to support your content. “Number-backed information would work better than content without it, hands down,” he says. Then define the structure, systems, and processes for the workflow and create your content calendar — complete with deadlines. Communication among departments is critical. “Set up collaboration meetings between marketing and product managers and designers, and have metrics defined that spell success or failure,” he says. This data is critical to guide future efforts.

• Be Visual: Gantt charts, Kanban cards, or business process model and notation (BPMN) diagrams give your team a visual display of the workflow and your progress. 

• Be Flexible: No workflow should be carved in stone. With each project, be willing to adapt your workflow to accommodate new circumstances. Make sure the tools you use to track your workflow can handle changes during the content marketing process.

• Use the Right Workflow Tools: Allison Hott, a content marketer at Nameboy, stresses the importance of this step. “Marketing workflow tools will help you create detailed marketing workflows and allow you to see all of your team members' tasks and progress in real time. There are also marketing workflow tools for specific areas of marketing, like Hootsuite for social media marketing workflows.”

How to Find Your Best Work Schedule

A workflow doesn’t simply list the order and time for each task — it also includes the handoff among team members and each person’s workload. The sequence of steps should take into account the other projects on people’s plates. Here are some tactics to help you build your workflow timeline:

• Be Realistic about the Time for Each Task: For instance, a writer may say it takes four hours to write the content. Know whether that’s one four-hour block or four hours across several days, or whether other projects keep this one from getting started. Have a good formula for estimating the amount of time for each task in the workflow.

• Start with Your Deadline and Work Backward: If you front-load the schedule with ample research and writing time, you may not have time for reviews and revisions. You’ll either miss deadlines because you have to spend time editing, or you’ll publish substandard work. You know the publishing date, and you know how long each task takes. If you start your schedule with the final due date, you can adjust the time for each task in reverse order and still meet your deadline. This also helps you leave room at the end of the project for any final revisions, rather than publishing content that’s not quite ready.

• Know When Tasks Are Done: Your workflow should make it clear that a task is completed and is ready for the next step in the process. Consider how you will send those alerts so that everyone knows their workload and deadline.

• Keep Everyone in the Loop: Communicate with all the departments involved in your workflow, as you need to know their bandwidth to handle incoming projects. And you need to map out all the dependencies among departments so the whole team can see the interrelated deadlines.

What Are the Steps in Content Marketing Project Management?

Content marketing produces all kinds of content. But the biggest challenge isn’t generating the content — it’s establishing workflows to manage the people and deadlines who create the deliverables. You can rely on a traditional project management approach that’s tailored to content marketing:

• Step One: Idea 
• Step Two: Plan and Assign
• Step Three: Create 
• Step Four: Review and Approve
• Step Five: Publish and Promote
• Step Six: Measure and Archive

Use this content marketing workflow template to manage your own content marketing. It includes the steps in the process, with space for you to define your specific workflow tasks, how long each task will take, who is responsible for each task (by role or name), and who will review and approve each task.

Why You Should Document Your Content Marketing Workflow

You can’t know if your workflow helps you produce content if it’s not documented. Start by creating workflows for each content format and sharing them with all the team members. Then track each step so everyone can see the work you do — you’ll gain transparency and accountability with your team, your organization, and your clients. You’ll also get these benefits from documenting your workflow:

• Standardize Your Workflow: Everyone will work in the same order, with the same guidelines, every time. 
• Improve Your Process: See where you are making or missing deadlines, and identify any roadblocks. You’ll be able to see where to make revisions to streamline your process.
• Create a Knowledge Base: No team member is the sole keeper of knowledge, the person you depend on for telling you how things work. Now you have a standard process that is no longer vulnerable if a team member leaves.
• Make Onboarding Easy: If your onboarding relies on one person telling another person how things work, you create variation in what you do. Standard workflows ensure new team members get all the information they need to meet your deadlines and your standards.

Automate Your Content Marketing Creation Process

As you define and document your content marketing creation process, you will uncover mundane, repetitive tasks that take up your team’s valuable time. Automating those tasks eliminates the chaos of content creation, simplifies your process, cuts down on mistakes, and streamlines hand-offs.

Brian Koenig, senior digital marketing specialist at Smile Marketing, warns against using software that isn’t user-friendly. “This could lead team members to revert to email and other traditional forms of communication. In turn, key components of a project could get lost in the shuffle of other projects and tasks.”

Automated workflows for your content marketing creation give you flexibility without chaos. For example, consider using a template for your content marketing requests. The form will let the person making the request choose from standard themes, topics, and content types. The person who reviews the form can add relevant keyword research so the writer has a starting point. The manager can add key dates for the content calendar, and the digital team that posts the content knows what’s on the way.

Explore more ways to use automation by reading “How Workflow Automation Can Make Your Organization More Efficient.”

Content Marketing Management Tools to Simplify Your Workflow

A range of tools and software can help you produce high-quality content that fits in your workflow and meets your deadlines. 

• Content Management: A content management system (CMS) makes it easy to write, edit, and publish content. You can also consider specialized tools like digital asset management (DAM) systems. Options include WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix.

• Dashboards: Content marketing dashboards give you an at-a-glance summary of how your campaigns are doing. They gather key performance indicators (KPI) and other data from a range of sources and display it in a central location, using visuals and text. Here are some dashboard tools to consider: Cyfe, GoodData, Qlik, Sisense, ClearStory Data, Databox, and Segment. Learn more about defining KPIs and creating dashboards in this guide. 

• Editorial Calendars: Calendars keep everyone on track with your publishing schedule. Many content and project management systems, such as WordPress, DivvyHQ, and Kapost, have a calendar function. Smartsheet has a collection of editorial calendars, including a content marketing calendar. 

• Project and Workflow Management: It takes a lot of organization to coordinate tasks and deadlines. Software helps you streamline and digitize your processes, as well as collaborate and coordinate. 

• Social Media: Strong social media tools help you plan, optimize, and share more content across channels. You can focus on creating content and let the tools handle the technical aspects. 

Stuart Leung, vice president of marketing at Breazy, says, “Hootsuite is a great tool for those who want to increase their social media engagement. It can be managed by several members of your team and allow you to delegate tasks to each one. You can also manage multiple social media platforms at once and schedule posts in advance. When you come up with new strategies, you're able to view your analytics and utilize the reporting features if you want a professional document on your social media progress.” Consider Yoast and Ahrefs for writing SEO-focused content and keyword research. Buffer helps you schedule posts across platforms. In addition to an online software platform, Mailchimp integrates with e-commerce stores and plug-ins.

• Editing and Proofreading: Rahul Khosla, director of Point & Quack Web Design, says it starts with the writing. “A key part of our success is having copywriters on hand for separate industries. Over the past few years, we've carefully built a large array of writers who we know are credible to write for, within the respective industries. We've noticed that really goes a long way, not only for our clients to see, but also their Google rankings — as the information is relevant.” 

One other tip for finding writers: “If you see an article online and love the way it's written, make a connection with that author on either Twitter or LinkedIn. Moreover, that writer is already established, which can go a long way.” While nothing can replace another set of eyes on your content, some tools can help with some of the work. Khosla recommends Grammarly, an automated tool to check and fix most grammar problems, and Copyscape to double-check against plagiarism. Hemingway scores your writing, so you know what grade level your article will reach. Writers can upload their content on Boom Essays, where it can be edited by another writer.

• Visuals: Your content competes with millions of images and videos every day. You need a smart, flexible strategy to reach your audience and tools that help you execute that strategy quickly. Use Microsoft’s Visio, part of the Office suite, for diagrams and vector graphics. Canva and Skitch are easy-to-use tools to create designs for web content and social media images. Animoto uses a drag-and-drop tool to help you make professional-looking videos quickly and easily. 

• Influencer Systems and Software: Influencer marketing, sometimes called advocate marketing, uses people with a big audience of followers to promote products and content. Celebrities, social media gurus, YouTubers, and others have taken the place of traditional word-of-mouth marketing in the digital age. Some platforms and software that deliver content to a variety of sources include GaggleAMP, dlvr.it, and Triberr.

Improve Content Workflows with Smartsheet for Marketing

The best marketing teams know the importance of effective campaign management, consistent creative operations, and powerful event logistics -- and Smartsheet helps you deliver on all three so you can be more effective and achieve more. 

The Smartsheet platform makes it easy to plan, capture, manage, and report on work from anywhere, helping your team be more effective and get more done. Report on key metrics and get real-time visibility into work as it happens with roll-up reports, dashboards, and automated workflows built to keep your team connected and informed.

When teams have clarity into the work getting done, there’s no telling how much more they can accomplish in the same amount of time. Try Smartsheet for free, today.

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