Every day, thousands of marketers suffer from the negative side effects of unplanned, inbound work requests…

Hi [Marketer], I’m finalizing a presentation for a late-stage prospect and could use your help refining the message and deck design. Can you support? BTW, my meeting is at 9 am tomorrow morning… thank you!

-[Requester]

On a more serious note, while comparing ad-hoc work intake to a health epidemic may be a bit hyperbolic, the unfortunate reality is that these unplanned efforts become major contributors to marketing waste, forcing marketers to field one-off requests while interrupting time spent on more strategic initiatives. And as companies scale to introduce new teams and more personnel across additional markets, managing this inbound work becomes even more time-consuming and unwieldy — making it difficult to track, prioritize, and respond efficiently.

To counter this, marketers have long resorted to generic project management or homegrown tools to manage these work intake requests. But non-purpose-built solutions have challenged Marketing and Creative services teams with inefficient workflows and an inability to manage planned and unplanned work holistically. Consider the following SiriusDecisions statistic:

“High-Performers” are 73% more likely to have documented SLAs for requests serviced through content production teams.

In short: While most untracked requests mean time spent on unplanned and (typically) non-value-adding work, the best orgs are formalizing processes (and strategy) around ad hoc content production to mitigate this waste.

Introducing Marketing Work Requests

At NewsCred, we’ve done just that — streamlining our end-to-end process for ad hoc work management. Previously, these requests came through a number of channels (e.g. email, chat, meetings, and more) from a number of global stakeholders across Sales, Customer Support, Product and more.

Today, we leverage Marketing Work Requests (MWR) — NewsCred’s intelligent work intake solution— which has transformed how our team collects, manages, and fulfills ad hoc requests received from other functions of the organization. MWR is tightly integrated with our NewsCred CMP, strategically designed to provide an end-to-end solution that unifies the entire creative delivery process: from intelligent intake to content creation and brand approval, through to distribution and digital asset management.

Together, MWR and the NewsCred CMP have revolutionized how our team fields, prioritizes and manages inbound requests, using:

Shareable Intake Forms, to streamline and simplify the process of submitting requests by providing our global stakeholders with a dedicated form for soliciting Marketing work, such as an upcoming campaign or content asset. The best part? Anyone within the organization can access and fill out the form — via an SSO-protected URL — even if they don’t have a CMP account.

Customizable Form Builders, which allow us to meet the needs of every global stakeholder by configuring a variety of templates — such as “Case Study” or “Sales Deck” — along with relevant associated fields. Accessible as a dropdown on the work intake form, these pre-approved templates not only provide structure for the requester, but ensure all of our team members have the relevant information needed to complete the request.

An Intelligent Rules Engine, built on powerful, pre-defined logic, allows us to automatically assign each request to the most appropriate individual or team, ensuring requests are fielded by the appropriate Marketing resources. Upon submission, an alert is triggered, immediately notifying the respective owner(s) and eliminating work delay, with automated notifications that ensure nothing is left overlooked or incomplete.

A Dedicated Request Hub, which centralizes every request in a single dashboard so our team can collectively approve/decline work intake requests, assign priority levels, and monitor collaboration. Once accepted, each request moves through a workflow, where both requesters and assignees can track the progress of all tasks being completed to fulfill the request.

Interested in freeing up your Marketing and Creative service team resources so they can spend more time completing (and less time managing) ad hoc requests? Sign up for our upcoming webinar, or get additional information here.

Read more: 3 Hacks for Successful Inbound Marketing in 2019