Overview

In today’s fast-paced digital world, marketing campaigns have become a crucial part in a business’s success. One key aspect of successful marketing campaigns is ensuring that all elements are carefully planned and executed. This process is best executed with cooperation between marketing operations and marketing managers via a content submission document.

Getting Started – What is it?

A content submission document is a comprehensive document that contains all the necessary details a Marketing Operations team needs to build and execute a specific campaign, such as an email send, webinar, gated content, or event. By providing a document for marketing managers to outline all the relevant information in one place, both teams are able to streamline the campaign creation process and ensure the campaign is delivered the way it was envisioned. Overall, a content submission document can help businesses achieve their marketing goals more efficiently and effectively in a centralized process.

A content submission document is set up to collect specific information for a one marketing campaign. For example, an email send submission doc would include everything from the subject line, body copy, and call to action to audience details, send date, and sender information. However, a gated content submission doc could possibly include everything in an email send plus landing page details and a link to the gated content. Each content submission document is unique to the type of campaign being requested.

What’s In It For Us?

A content submission document centralizes and streamlines the build process for marketing campaigns. It allows marketing operation teams to be efficient, and organized, while ensuring every detail is accounted for. It also facilitates collaboration between the different marketing teams involved in the creation and execution of campaigns. Marketing operations may be the ones building the campaign, but marketing managers, demand gen managers, or field marketers are usually the ones who design them. A content submission document minimizes the chance of miscommunication between these teams, providing campaign information in one consolidated document. This consolidated doc is a centralized location for the information reducing the number of back and forth communications needed to launch a marketing campaign.

I’m Sold. Now What?

Now the question is when should you implement a content submissions document and how do you implement it? In an ideal setting, content submission docs should be implemented as soon as a marketing operations team (even if a team of one) begins taking in campaign requests, but they can be implemented at any time and add value.

The first step in creating a content submission document is gathering everything the marketing operations team will need to build each type of request they take in. This includes necessary details – for example with an email send, you will need subject line, body copy, images, audience details, etc, and the nice to have details, which can include whether or not an A/B test is requested and the associated details. Once the components are outlined, the document should be formatted in a structure that is easy to read and fill out. An example nurture email content submission document is below.

The marketing operations team, specifically campaign operations members are typically the ones responsible for developing content submission documents. The MOPs team is best equipped to identify the components necessary to build, execute, and deploy campaigns. However, it is a full marketing team effort to have these documents work efficiently. With process change can come pushback or roadblocks. Having team alignment in the development stage allows the change to be smoother and for everyone to see the greater benefit.

After the structure of the document is finalized, it should be shared with anyone requesting campaigns from the marketing operations team. This typically includes the greater marketing team such as demand generation, field marketing, and content marketing. The marketing operations team should train these teams on the new content submission documents, collect feedback, and answer all questions since the teams they are sharing the docs with are the ones filling them out. The documents work best when the entire team is aligned on the process. This is a great moment to also implement SLAs (service level agreements). An SLA is an agreed-upon amount of time that it will take the team to complete the request as long as all requirements are provided upon submission. To learn more about SLAs, visit this blog.

You Can Do It!

Content submission documents are one very simple way to improve marketing efficiency and marketing initiatives as a whole. It is a valuable tool, which allows the marketing operations team and the larger marketing team to be successful in getting campaigns out the door efficiently and without errors. By capturing all the campaign information in one place, the team is able to streamline the build process, increase efficiency, and minimize the chance of errors. When teams prioritize this document in the campaign process, businesses can increase their chances of creating effective and impactful marketing campaigns.