Marketing work management tools can benefit your organization in a number of ways, including adding productivity and efficiency. They also help manage teams that work remotely. But with all of these capabilities, it’s important that team members know how to use them.
Building a knowledge base for your marketing work management system is essential to making sure everybody using it is on the same page. Here are some tips on what to include in your marketing work management knowledge base.
Guidelines for when to use the marketing work management tool vs. another tool
“The knowledge base…is for your team and any collaborators in the tool so that they can reference at any time instructions and guidelines on how to use the tool best,” said Brianna Miller, director of marketing and demand generation at healthcare compliance analytics company Protenus, at The MarTech Conference.
The marketing work management tool is important for adding projects, submitting them for approval and sharing other important updates. Communications related to projects should be done, in most cases, within the work management tool.
If a project request or another project-related update comes in through another channel, there should be guidelines in place on when to leave these updates where they are and when to add them to the marketing work management tool.
Here is an example of guidelines to follow. Your organization might use email or messaging apps like Slack differently, but this is at least a good place to start.
Guidelines on how a task or project can be initiated
You should also have specific guidelines on how a project can be initiated. These guidelines should be broken down by channel.
Provide examples on how requests should be handled when they come in via:
- Email.
- Slack/Teams and other messaging apps.
- A meeting (virtual or in-person).
- Request forms.
Dig deeper: How to decide if you should get a marketing performance management platform
Guidelines on who can create a project and change key project information
“Have guidelines on who can create projects and change key project information,” said Miller. “This small thing can make a big difference because then there’s one ownership and there is one person who knows when the due dates are and when the project might be changing.”
Set up naming conventions for projects and tasks
Clear titles help team members understand the kind of task they are looking at in the marketing work management tool. This saves time and helps avoid errors.
“As great as any search functionality is, and any tool, creating clear titles will save your team so much time,” said Miller.
Your organization’s naming convention might consider using a “drill down” method, which proceeds from more general terms to more specific words about individual projects.
Here are some other rules to consider adopting for your team’s naming conventions:
- Use numbers and dates in the title.
- Add context by naming the department and project type.
- Shorter is better.
- Use verbs to designate task-related actions (write, design, draft, review, etc.).
Guidelines on processes in the system
Include guidelines on processes in your knowledge base so team members know how to go about completing tasks and projects.
Also, clearly define the difference between tasks and projects, and be specific about what processes apply to the task level versus the project level.
Here are some examples of guidelines on processes:
- All work should be documented in the task description.
- The comments section should be used if something specific to the task needs to be discussed. Only if the question is related to the project as a whole should comments be made on the project level.
- Once work is ready for review in the task with attachments uploaded, mention team members who are required for review and change the status of the task to “In Review.”
- Once the review process has been completed, the task owner will change the status on the task to “Complete.”
- When a project is completed, the Project Owner should move the project to the appropriate “Archived” folder.
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