Introducing Workfront Planning — building and activating your marketing system of record

Modern marketers are faced with a mountain of challenges every day — there is a constant and growing demand to build and deliver seamless campaigns that are tailored to each audience. But as marketers work to meet increasing demand, they find themselves struggling to understand the scale of work in their organizations.

The orchestration that goes into building campaigns, websites, app experiences, and more is challenging, and marketers work in silos without any visibility into the status of work. As a result, teams waste time, squander budgets, miss deadlines, and ultimately can’t keep up with customer expectations.

As one might expect, the problem isn’t a lack of data or tools. The actual problem is consolidating fragmented data and systems to make them usable.

To solve this, marketers need to think strategically about their operations — how they standardize their marketing operations framework, and how they define and deliver a marketing system of record.

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What is a marketing system of record?

Most people immediately jump to defining a single tool as the solution. But the reality is, you can’t buy a marketing system of record. You can purchase the tools to create one, but you also need to consider the strategy, assets, and workflows that power your marketing lifecycle, their associated costs, and the structure of your operations.

Marketing has an unparalleled influence on a brand’s reputation, customer experience, and bottom line — and as such, is just as worthy of a system of record as finance, IT, HR, or sales.

A marketing system of record needs to knit together data from across your organization, provide visibility into your day-to-day operations, be flexible, and do this in a way that makes it easy for users to adopt and understand.

Bringing value to your organization

What marketers need is data, both at a high level and granular level, that’s readily accessible for their teams as well as leadership in order to make strategic decisions and show the value and ROI of marketing.

With Workfront’s Planning module, marketing organizations gain a central solution to plan campaigns, create and deliver briefs, and orchestrate work. Once fragmented data is consolidated into a single source of truth, marketers gain the ability to transform this data to make it useful and derive meaningful insights.

With consolidated data, marketers can build views leveraging their records and all their associated fields.

They can answer questions like:

• How many campaigns are we running this year?
• Do we have sufficient coverage in all regions?
• What is the purpose of this campaign?
• Which tactics are most frequently used in our campaigns?
• Are we delivering against our campaign goals?

These questions are answered though curated visualizations — like dynamic briefs and marketing campaign calendars — that are built using custom filters based on the unique needs of your organization, teams, and leaders. These views can also be saved and shared with internal and external stakeholders.

These include a spreadsheet-style view that displays campaigns and their associated data in a table format. This view provides end-to-end visibility of your marketing operations across all the milestones of your planned work.

Alternatively, a timeline view displays campaigns in a chronological format, creating highly interactive marketing calendars customizable to you, your teams, and stakeholders. These curated views enable your teams to launch and optimize campaigns faster than ever. The result? Insight into the purpose of each campaign, project, or initiative to accelerate alignment and delivery.

You can’t have a marketing system of record without records

Custom visualizations and curated insights are the outcome of a highly functioning system of record – but what are the steps we need to take to deliver them?

You need to first think about how you define and model your marketing operations. From global retailers to healthcare providers to boutique agencies, no two organizations operate in the same way, and they need flexibility to define what is most important to their business. Workfront’s Planning module allows you to define your marketing operations through custom records such as campaign, activity, audience, region, business unit, and more.

Once your record types have been defined, you can append myriad fields to further define and connect your records. For example, a campaign record may include fields such as campaign name, description, start and end dates, target audience, or budget. Think of this as the metadata of work.

Organizations also have the flexibility to define custom record sets for disparate functions. Just as no two businesses are alike, there can be a lot of variability across teams — including everything from goals to deliverables. Workspaces give organizations the ability to partition work and teams the opportunity to use their own language when defining their operations.

Records are highly valuable when creating a marketing system of record, but the true value comes when you start to connect those records to create relationships between your operational activities. In Adobe Workfront you can link records and record fields allowing you to create complex and meaningful interactions, from your organizational goals all the way to your customer touchpoints.

With this ability, you begin to unify marketing strategy and activities into a marketing graph.

With countless data points collected during the planning and execution of campaigns, it’s no wonder that marketers don’t have a grasp on the scale of work in their organizations. Unlike container-based work information that is inflexible and static, a marketing graph allows you to visualize your work in context.

Defining your marketing operations for delivering results

Defining and connecting records gives marketers the ability to create connections between disparate teams, technologies, and workflows to simplify all aspects of ideation and campaign planning. The result? Insight into the purpose of each campaign, project, or initiative to accelerate alignment and delivery.

Adobe Workfront provides capabilities from planning and workflow to automation and integration. This supports a system of record for marketing, a single source of truth that connects the full marketing lifecycle across campaigns, marketing operations, creative, and content, so cross-functional teams can execute the right work, from anywhere.

Workfront gives you the power to:

• Plan dynamically. Create and deliver campaign briefs to ensure plans are documented, executed, and tracked.
• Enhance visibility. Visualize end-to-end plans in the marketing calendar.
• Customize views. Filter by any record type or combination of records and choose the visual output – spreadsheet-style or timeline.
• Collaborate in real-time. Share customized views with key stakeholders, ensuring pertinent information is surfaced for them.
• Support agility. Ensure smooth and efficient operations across teams and business functions.
• Operate flexibly. Define a marketing operations model that fits the needs of your organization through custom record creation and modeling.

Want to learn more about Workfront’s Planning module? Join the waitlist for our beta.