Financial Marketing

This mid-west company with over 1300 employees was founded more than 50 years ago to specialize in helping investors reach financial goals. The marketing department of this company has had a focus on creating and managing the deployment of traditional and digital assets. As with many marketing groups, moving beyond the highly manual nature of asset creation and approval became a critical need in their success.

Moving to a consolidated work environment where all tracked items were easily accessible became a requirement. Their enablement of the tracking system became a secret weapon for maintaining business continuity in the marketing department during the COVID-19 rush to work remotely.

CHALLENGE

The marketing department’s core challenge was establishing a common process that could be coordinated from within a simpler set of tools. The main desire was to move away from emails, stickies, spreadsheets, and numerous status meetings. A secondary desire was to centralize the creation and tracking of work products, especially in the remote workforce paradigm.

SOLUTION

Adobe Workfront’s core functionality allowed this group to fulfill its desires. It provided the functions needed to add a request, convert the request to a standard project, manage assignments to work being done, and enable approvals on work products when needed. Implemented simply, Adobe Workfront’s core functions allowed the department to persevere through the two major events: a reduction in force/reorganization and the COVID-19 related surge to work remotely. They have continued to work better with less people and while many remain remote workers.

Standardize request management

The marketing team transitioned into a standard intake process. The request form was converted to an online version with fields showing and hiding depending on the selection of other fields in the process. The request process allowed for input of requests that varied between high-level strategic (like campaigns) to singular assets (like web pages and banners). The request process enabled the requester to see the request’s status by logging into the product and not sending an email that is too often overlooked.

Streamlined assignments management

The primary project manager of this group needed an easier way to keep up with who was doing what within the projects. The Adobe Workfront product allowed for the standard creation of projects with predefined assignments on standard tasks. This lessened the need to manage initial assignments. The product allowed the monitoring of assignments through several project manager dashboards, especially for late and near-term work items.

Centralized communications

The requesters and working team members needed a centralized place for relating team communications to the actual work. The Adobe Workfront functions for collaboration helped greatly. Many email exchanges were transitioned into using the reports, dashboards, and updates functions. The status and updates chasing became a behavior of looking at the data and then asking, reducing the interruptions to others that was otherwise happening with unknown (outside tools) tracking.

BENEFITS

This group achieved success in their simple desires. They were able to move all the work tracking to a centralized and singular tool. They were able to coordinate and manage requests to fulfillment from a common tool. The groups were able to enable the remote workforce during the COVID-19 response in a very timely manner due to their initial implementation being reviewed for improvements just months prior.