How to create a knowledge base for marketing work management

Marketing work management tools can benefit your business in many ways, including increasing productivity and efficiency. They also help lead teams working remotely. However, with all of these features, it’s important that team members know how to use them.

Building a knowledge base for your marketing work management system is important to ensure everyone using it is on the same page. Here are some tips on what to add to your marketing work management knowledge base.

“The knowledge base… is for your team and anyone using the tool so they can always look up instructions and guidelines on how best to use the tool,” said Brianna Miller, director of marketing and demand generation at healthcare compliance analytics firm Protenus the MarTech conference.

The marketing work management tool is essential for adding projects, submitting them for approval, and sharing other important updates. In most cases, project-related communication should take place within the work management tool.

If a project request or other project-related update comes in through another channel, there should be guidelines in place as to when to keep those updates where they are and when to add them to the marketing work management tool.

Here is an example of guidelines to follow. Your organization might use email or messaging apps like Slack differently, but at least this is a good start.

Guidelines on how a task or project can be initiated

They should also have concrete guidelines on how to initiate a project. These policies should be broken down by channel.

Provide examples of how requests should be handled when received via:

• E-mail.
• Slack/Teams and other messaging apps.
• A meeting (virtual or in person).
• inquiry forms.

Dig deeper: How to decide if you should buy a marketing performance management platform

Guidelines on who can create a project and change key project information

“Have policies in place about who can create projects and change key project information,” Miller said. “That little thing can make a big difference because then you have an owner and a person who knows when the due dates are and when the project might change.”

Establish naming conventions for projects and tasks

Clear titles help team members understand the type of task they are dealing with in the marketing work management tool. This saves time and helps to avoid mistakes.

“As great as each search feature and tool is, creating clear titles will save your team so much time,” Miller said.

Your organization’s naming convention might consider using a “drill-down” methodology, going from more general terms to more specific words about individual projects.

Here are some other rules to adopt for your team’s naming conventions:

• Use numbers and dates in the title.
• Add context by naming the department and project type.
• Shorter is better.
• Use verbs to denote task-related actions (write, design, design, review, etc.).

Policies on processes in the system

Include process guidelines in your knowledge base so team members know how to proceed when completing tasks and projects.

Also, clearly define the difference between tasks and projects and detail what processes apply to the task level versus the project level.

Here are some examples of process policies:

• All work should be documented in the job description.
• The comments section should be used when something specific to the task needs to be discussed. Comments should only be made at project level if the question relates to the overall project.
• Once the work in the task with uploaded attachments is ready for review, mention the team members that need review and change the status of the task to In Review.
• Once the review process is complete, the task owner changes the status of the task to Completed.
• When a project is complete, the project owner should move the project to the appropriate Archived folder.

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