What is a marketing workflow? Steps and software

Marketing teams operate across an ever-growing bevy of channels and tools for social media management, paid ads and syndication, event management, email campaigns, content creation, and more. Each channel has its own goals, deliverables, and timelines, which makes coordination across marketing efforts a challenge. Without a marketing-specific project management system to connect it all, campaigns slow down, details get lost, and teams struggle to stay on the same page.

That’s where marketing workflows come in. A well-structured marketing workflow defines each stage of your process, the people involved, and how work moves forward. It’s the foundation that keeps your campaigns running smoothly and ensures that no task—or opportunity—falls through the cracks.

In this guide, we’ll break down what marketing workflows are, why they matter, the key steps to creating one, and how marketing workflow management tools like Airtable help teams streamline marketing operations from start to finish.

What is a marketing workflow?

A marketing workflow is the repeatable sequence of tasks, approvals, and deliverables that move a marketing project from concept to completion. It’s essentially your team’s roadmap for getting work done—showing what needs to happen, when, and by whom.

For example, a simple content creation workflow might include stages like brief creation, drafting, review, design, approval, and publish. Each stage has clear ownership and dependencies, ensuring smooth handoffs between milestones.

Workflows can be visualized in many ways—spreadsheets, Gantt charts, Kanban boards—but they all share one purpose: helping your team collaborate effectively and consistently.

Marketing workflows can be applied to nearly every aspect of marketing operations, including:

The more your team scales, the more vital clear workflows become. They transform chaos into clarity, helping teams execute efficiently against the marketing strategy.

Why you should implement a marketing workflow

When every team member understands their role and the sequence of tasks, marketing becomes more predictable and efficient. Here are some key reasons to implement a structured workflow:

1. Better collaboration across teams

Marketing often involves multiple stakeholders—designers, copywriters, analysts, and external partners. A defined workflow ensures everyone knows what’s expected and when.

2. Increased visibility and accountability

With a workflow in place, you can see exactly where projects stand and who’s responsible for each task. This reduces bottlenecks and helps spot potential issues early.

3. Improved consistency and quality

Standardized workflows ensure campaigns follow the same process every time, leading to consistent branding and high-quality output.

4. Faster turnaround times

When your team doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel for each project, they can move faster and focus more on creative work.

5. Data-driven improvement

Once you’ve documented and tracked your workflows, you can analyze what’s working and where to optimize. Over time, this leads to better performance and increased efficiency across integrated campaigns.

If you’re already managing assets, campaigns, or team capacity, you might benefit from related frameworks like marketing asset management and marketing management, both of which pair naturally with workflow design.

7 steps to your custom marketing workflow

Every marketing team’s workflow looks a little different. But most follow these seven steps to build a scalable process.

1. Define your goals

Start with your campaign objectives. Are you driving leads, increasing brand awareness, or launching a new product? Your goals will shape the tasks, dependencies, and stakeholders in your workflow.

2. List the tasks required

Break your project into discrete steps—brief creation, design, copy, approvals, distribution, and measurement.

3. Assign ownership

Assign tasks and specify roles and responsibilities within each stage. Task assignment helps avoid confusion and duplication of work.

4. Set deadlines and dependencies

Identify which tasks can run in parallel and which depend on prior steps. Tools that support dependencies make scheduling far easier.

5. Visualize your process

Represent your workflow in a visual tool like Airtable. You can switch between Kanban, calendar, or timeline views to see the entire process at a glance.

6. Automate repetitive steps

Use workflow automation to handle routine tasks like status updates or handoffs. Automation is key to maintaining speed and consistency as your team grows.

7. Review and refine regularly

Once your workflow is in motion, revisit it after each major project. Continuous optimization helps ensure the process stays relevant as your team or goals evolve. Furthermore, it enables teams to make data-driven decisions about future campaigns and initiatives.

Marketing workflow types for different teams

Marketing workflows aren’t one-size-fits-all; different teams work differently. Different functions therefore need processes tailored to their goals and outputs while still supporting productive cross-team collaboration. Below are examples of common workflow types that span marketing disciplines.

Content marketing workflow

A content marketing workflow governs how your team plans, creates, edits, and publishes articles, videos, on-demand webinars, and other assets.

Typical stages include:

1. Brainstorming and idea generation
2. Content brief and keyword research
3. Writing or production
4. Internal stakeholder review and editing
5. Design (if applicable)
6. Final approval
7. Publishing and promotion
8. Content lifecycle—when does content “expire,” and what is the process for auditing, retiring, or refreshing content?

Learn how to strengthen this process with our complete guide on marketing campaign management.

Marketing campaign workflow

Campaign workflows connect multiple content types, channels, and stakeholders. A single campaign may include paid ads, social posts, landing pages, and email sequences—all moving parts that need to be coordinated with each other.

Your workflow should account for:

With a clear campaign workflow, your team can stay aligned on both creative execution and strategic goals.

Email marketing workflow

An email marketing workflow organizes each stage of creating and sending email marketing campaigns, from segmentation to post-send analytics.

Steps typically include:

1. Audience segmentation
2. Copywriting and design
3. Internal testing and approval
4. Scheduling and automation setup
5. Send and performance tracking

Many midsize to enterprise companies have hundreds to thousands of emails in their databases, with target audiences segmented by geography, customer status (such as existing customers vs. prospects), products used, and more. Automating the email process saves time and helps ensure messages go out to the right audience segments at the right moment in the customer journey. Despite email being a tried-and-true marketing channel for decades, inboxes remain sacred spaces when it comes to marketing. With the spam folder as punishment, businesses don’t have much runway to get it wrong by sending too many emails or irrelevant ones.

SEO marketing workflow

An SEO marketing workflow helps teams optimize and publish SEO content efficiently, ensuring consistency in technical and on-page practices.

Core stages include:

When paired with your content workflows, SEO processes can significantly boost long-term discoverability and ROI. Since SEO also requires a certain volume of content to be effective, this marketing workflow is especially important to streamline and regularly reevaluate.

Digital marketing agency workflow

Agencies managing multiple clients often juggle several workflows simultaneously. A digital marketing agency workflow typically includes client onboarding, project scoping, deliverable tracking, time tracking, and reporting.

An organized workflow helps ensure no client deliverables slip through the cracks and helps teams in-house and externally manage capacity effectively. For more on balancing workloads and timelines, check out our resource on resource allocation.

Marketing workflow management software

Managing marketing workflows manually can work for a small team—but as your company grows, the complexity of marketing activities increases exponentially. That’s where marketing workflow management software comes in. It taps the power of project management tools specially designed to support multiple marketing functions executing initiatives simultaneously.

A centralized platform helps teams collaborate seamlessly across planning, execution, and reporting phases. It should also include a robust suite of marketing automation features to help ensure that more repetitive tasks aren’t bogging down human marketers. In addition to comparing pricing and compatibility with your use case, consider the following when evaluating the right software for your business. The right software offers:

With Airtable, for example, marketing teams can create flexible workflows tailored to their unique needs. You can plan campaigns, track approvals, and view due dates and timelines all in one connected workspace.

Marketing workflow examples

Here are a few practical examples of how marketing workflows function in real life:

1. Content production
A team uses Airtable to track blog posts from pitch to publication. Status fields update automatically when a draft moves through the approval process to review or design, and automations manage and send approval requests.

2. Campaign management
Teams can connect campaign briefs, assets, and performance data to a shared campaign calendar, ensuring everyone works from the same playbook.

3. Event planning
A workflow maps every stage of the process, from venue selection to promotion and post-event reporting. Creating rules around certain dependencies helps prevent promotions or other public-facing communications from going out too soon.

4. Paid media management
A centralized system tracks ad variations, budgets, and ROI metrics across platforms, helping optimize spend and performance in real time.

These examples show how workflows help marketing teams achieve precision and clarity—both of which are essential for scaling marketing operations.

How to create a marketing workflow process

Creating a marketing workflow involves more than listing out marketing tasks—it’s about designing a process that fits your team’s goals and preferred ways of working. Here’s how to do it effectively:

1. Audit existing processes: Identify what’s working and where handoffs break down.

2. Map stages visually: Diagram the path from idea to completion.

3. Define roles: Make sure every step has an owner.

4. Incorporate tools and automation: Use software to handle repetitive updates and approvals.

5. Document the process: Keep a central record your team can reference anytime.

6. Train and iterate: Introduce your new workflow, gather feedback, and refine as you go.

A centralized, well-documented workflow reduces confusion and empowers your team to move faster with fewer errors.

Best practices for better marketing workflows

Once you have a workflow in place, use these best practices to keep it running smoothly:

Streamline your marketing workflows with Airtable

Airtable is a marketing workflow tool that gives marketing teams the flexibility and structure they need to tackle inefficiencies head-on.

With Airtable, you can:

Explore Airtable’s marketing solutions and workflow templates to see how you can streamline your workflows and connect every part of your marketing operation.