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Unplanned Work is Part of Modern Marketing

No marketing team is safe, no matter what industry you’re in. We can’t control when work will get thrown our way, but we can reduce the disruptions it causes. It’s time to focus on what we can control: improving marketing’s internal workflows.

Unplanned Work Creates Collaboration Drag

 84% of marketing leaders and employees report experiencing “high collaboration drag.” This demand for excessive levels of interactions often happens when seemingly perfect plans get derailed by new input. Better plans won’t prevent these disruptions; marketers need better tools within their own ways of working to deal with the inevitability of the unplanned.   


Dealing with the Drag of the Unplanned

Modern marketing is dynamic and unpredictable. Even the best-laid plans can be disrupted by unforeseen events, causing significant collaboration challenges and workflow interruptions. While it’s impossible to eliminate unplanned work entirely, there are effective strategies that marketing teams can implement to manage and mitigate its impact. Here are three actionable steps to help your team better handle the drag of the unplanned.

Annual plans are outdated almost instantly, and they’re the most prone to being derailed. With quarterly planning cycles focused on minimally viable, metric-focused deliverables, disruptions become far less disruptive. 

Stakeholders are rarely aligned in their needs or goals, but marketing is expected to cater to them all. Through more rigorous stakeholder management, there are fewer priorities to juggle and less opportunities for conflicting demands.  

Marketing’s work doesn’t get the visibility or attention it deserves. By systematically surfacing goals, activities, and success metrics, we can protect our teams from well-meaning external inputs. 

Created by Marketers Just Like You

If you work in marketing and are tired of doing only what’s urgent – and neglecting what’s really important – this system is for you. 

It’s designed and taught by professional marketers who know what it’s like to spend weeks building out a campaign plan, only to have it blown up as soon as sales has a new idea. 

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