How many platforms does your marketing team use daily? From instant messaging to task management, the average business process runs across five or more systems. While adding more platforms over the last decade has undoubtedly brought more granular functionality to businesses (such as financial reporting, e-commerce, and CRM), if these platforms do not communicate, they can become major productivity blockers.
Perhaps your marketing team uses Wrike to plan projects and assign tasks, but do they use a different platform to report on progress? Do they have to access the content relevant to these tasks on a different platform?
If your answer to both of these questions is ‘Yes’, your business might greatly benefit from workflow integration (a.k.a. systems integration) to bring together all these platforms and processes. What are the benefits of such a solution?
Streamlined processes through automation
Many marketing teams today struggle with managing data, briefs and content when building marketing strategies and campaigns. Tasks in a workflow established on one platform will need relevant information and content linked on another. Manually completing this becomes tedious, leads to reduced efficiency, and eventually even burnout among marketing teams. (Let’s not even talk about the human error factor).
Without workflow integration, someone might receive a task in a work management platform, but the task lacks the brief needed to complete it. That person then has to navigate another system for the relevant information and content.
Workflow integration minimises this challenge by enabling information from your content management system to flow into your work management platform. After integrating these platforms, people can easily access and action the brief without changing applications, eliminating the delays and potential miscommunications inherent in disjointed systems.
Increased functionality and speed to market
Without workflow integration, it becomes difficult to action changes to marketing content and send information across your teams. For example, when coordinating an event, your marketing team needs to organise promotions across various channels, all managed by various people. In a scenario where each of these platforms operates in isolation, the team would need to manually update event details, registration links, and promotional materials on each platform as they change – a process that's both time-consuming and prone to mistakes.
With integrated workflows, you unlock new capabilities that were not possible with disconnected systems. If there's a change in the event schedule or venue, updating it in your primary system would ensure that the associated other channels/platforms reflect each change in sync with the latest details. Not only does this make the process easier to manage, but it also allows for fewer people to do more promotions and events simultaneously, with less effort and faster results.
Increased data accuracy and transparency
Collaboration is the cornerstone of any successful team project, but without integration, the modern landscape of fragmented platforms has made it difficult to achieve. The lack of seamless information sharing means that not all systems are up to date when needed, which can create misunderstandings and redundant tasks. In a traditional setup, marketers might manually gather analytics from various sources like social media, websites, and email campaigns. This time-consuming task often delays real-time analysis and changes.
With workflow integration, we can resolve this fragmentation by introducing real-time collaboration, which takes away the hassle of switching between platforms or manually transferring data. Integration brings data together, ensuring its consistency and reliability. Teams will not struggle with differing data because they have a single, trusted data source. Essentially, workflow integration supports data accuracy and transparency by providing a single pane of glass that aligns everyone involved with the project.
Workflow integration also becomes particularly useful in campaign tracking and optimisation. For example, with automated workflows and integrated systems, real-time data from these sources flows into a centralised dashboard. Extracting insights becomes much easier with a single view of all your data because teams can easily spot patterns, assess project outcomes, and adjust their approach.
Scalability to meet demand
Growth is often a double-edged sword. While expansion brings new opportunities, it also introduces challenges. As operations scale, the volume of data multiplies, and so do the number of tasks and the people involved. Without systems integration, the workload becomes difficult to scale due to the amount of manual coordination required across platforms and people.
Integrated workflows can scale as your operations increase, ensuring the infrastructure can adapt to increased data volume and more demanding tasks.
For marketing teams, this scalability ensures uninterrupted operations, even in the face of rapid growth. Team members can execute campaigns, analyse data, and engage with audiences without worrying about the limitations of a non-integrated environment (i.e. when people are doing all the things that should’ve been automated). This confidence in the backend infrastructure allows teams to focus on what truly matters: crafting effective strategies and connecting with their audience.
Remove data duplication and silos
Data silos (i.e. business systems that don’t talk to each other) lead to fragmented and often redundant information. It’s common for marketing teams to become stuck manually copying data from one platform and adding it to another. This repetitive task is time-consuming and increases the risk of errors and inconsistencies. Moreover, switching between multiple applications to retrieve information can disrupt workflow and reduce efficiency.
Workflow integration makes data accessible across platforms, reducing duplicate entries and ensuring that teams always have the most updated and accurate version. The benefits of eliminating silos go beyond just accuracy. Consolidated data makes it easier for marketing teams to understand all the touchpoints of a campaign. This is commonly known as a 360-degree perspective, and it equips them with the insights to devise effective and consistent strategies across all channels.
Conclusion
As your company evolves, so must your marketing functions and the tools to support your business. If these applications do not work in sync, it leads to application switching and manually sharing information, which becomes wasteful when repeated daily across your business.
Workflow integration ensures that your platforms and your marketing team stay in sync. With it, you can streamline processes, access new functionality, gain data transparency, scale marketing and remove data silos. A marketing team that solves these factors can remain agile and effective in running campaigns and connecting with customers.
Why choose SiPHON Connect from Creative Folks?
Many creative teams have increased the number of applications they use daily. The consequence: keeping information flowing between teams and applications requires many manual steps to continue delivering content and services.
To address challenges like these, we’ve created a pre-built integration that connects workflow collaboration tools, such as monday.com and Wrike, with the leader in content production systems, WoodWing. We are also building new connectors every day. If you have an application or system that you need integrated, we can make it talk – that’s our thing. Connecting these systems to share data and automate functions allows you to provide status updates, collaborate on content, empower your operations with more functionality, and remove administration headaches and waste.
Please visit our SiPHON Connect page for more information on what you can achieve with our pre-built integrations.
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