One of our most important jobs as marketers is to build trust and strengthen relationships with our customers through personal and engaging content.

But the emergence of new channels, formats, and technology have changed our customers' expectations and created intense competition for their attention. And all of that puts pressure on marketing organizations to work with greater agility, speed, and productivity when delivering their creative content.

Yet, content operations are plagued with inefficiencies. Teams are preoccupied with managing the minutiae around the process instead of the content itself.

And the pandemic has further exacerbated the operational grind as workloads increase and remote work reconfigures how everything gets done.

Marketers today need to rethink every aspect of their playbook.

Agility creates more productive workflows

Airtable recently surveyed senior-level marketing leaders to better understand their challenges. More than 70% of the survey respondents said the volume of campaigns and content they need to deliver has increased compared with a year ago, and 38% reported that their workload is up 50% or more. Change has not been limited to customer content, however; internal and stakeholder communications have also shifted significantly.

It's easy to relate to such changes when they're so widespread and intense, and driven by something as large-scale as a global pandemic. But with the introduction of every new channel, medium, geography, product, or competitor, marketers have learned that speed, iteration, and adaptive capacity are key to keeping up with customer preferences and employee expectations.

Cross-functional workflows need flexibility

If agility and adaptability are key to staying relevant, then efficient and flexible processes are mandatory for execution. But most marketing workflows aren't linear or they aren't set up to work well in the cross-functional environments of today. Modern workflows are a complex mix of plans and assets used across many teams and managed by a complicated set of tools.

Marketing teams routinely use 23 marketing tools, on average, according to our previously mentioned research. The more tools marketers add to their martech stacks, the more fragmented their work becomes. Data is duplicated in some places and missing in others. Teams struggle to show their true impact on the business, and leaders don't have the visibility they need for fast decision-making.

Marketing teams need a single place to connect their people, processes, and systems, and they need a reliable source of truth for their data. And they need tools that can be tailored to their unique business and working method, instead of rigid, siloed applications that force teams to work around them.

Content and campaign production must work at scale

Because many businesses manage hundreds of campaigns and thousands of assets in a year, even the slightest change can disrupt the overall operations of a team.

That became painfully clear at the onset of the pandemic. Nearly 70% of the 1,700 B2B marketers surveyed by MarketingProfs and the Content Marketing Institute reported they adjusted their content strategies in response to it.

It's no surprise, then, that the no-code movement is being embraced by marketers to bring order to the chaos. Marketers crave simple solutions and need the flexibility to refine processes over time.

Imagine if, with a few clicks, your team could integrate workflows across disparate tools, automate processes, and augment your data. And, in a world of simultaneously scaling up and scaling out, you could safely and seamlessly orchestrate workflows across internal stakeholders and external vendors, sharing controlled portions of your data as needed.

It's time to refocus energy on innovation

Modern marketing teams cannot rely on legacy marketing technology to achieve their goals and drive positive business outcomes. They need flexible solutions that empower marketing teams to streamline work, move quickly, and continue to raise the bar on marketing programs, content, and campaigns.

It's critical those solutions allow teams to create a centralized source for their marketing work, keep up with multiple projects in one place, and stay aligned on plans, even as business needs change and evolve.

By investing in those types of tools, teams will be able to have a holistic view of all the data, people, and assets in a single place so they can better understand the complex relationships between them and have access to real time insights that drive decision-making. Access to that data and the ability to make better business decisions helps marketers quickly adapt to changes and raise the bar on high-quality and high-velocity content.

To be competitive, marketing leaders need agile, flexible platforms that scale and give context for the critical and relevant data their businesses need.