--- title: Marketing Process Improvement | Gudu description: Campaigns launching late? Reports nobody reads? We map how work moves through your marketing team, find where it stalls, and fix it in the tools you have. canonical: https://gudu.com.au/services/client-services/process-improvement/ --- # Marketing process improvement The campaign that launched a week late. The monthly report nobody opens. We trace how work actually moves through your marketing team, find where it stalls, and rebuild the workflow in the tools you already use. **Proof** - [Southern Phone](https://gudu.com.au/southernphone/) — full-service partner since January 2021, running on workflows we built together - [NOVUS Glass](https://gudu.com.au/novus-glass/) — advertising and client-services partner - 98% client retention - $13m+ in managed ad spend moving through these processes ## What you get - **A map of how work moves today.** One page tracing a real campaign or publish from brief to report: every handoff, every approval, every wait. Most teams have never seen theirs drawn. - **A ranked list of what's breaking.** The three or four points where work stalls or gets redone, ordered by what each one costs you in days and rework. You won't get a maturity-model score; scores don't fix workflows. - **The redesigned workflow.** Fewer handoffs, one named owner per step, built in the tools your team already runs. We are not here to sell you software. - **Runbooks for the repeated work.** Each recurring job (campaign launch, monthly report, website publish) gets a one-page checklist anyone on the team can follow. - **Reporting that runs itself.** Where the bottleneck is a copy-paste monthly deck, we replace it with a live Looker Studio dashboard fed by GA4 and the ad platforms. - **Naming conventions and templates.** Briefs, UTMs and file names that make results traceable later, so the next report takes an hour instead of a day. - **A run-in period.** We work the new process alongside your team for its first cycles, because a workflow that only exists in a PDF isn't a workflow. ## How we do it 1. **Follow one piece of work end to end.** Tony Ellis, our Customer Success Manager, sits with the people who actually do the work and traces a recent campaign or publish from brief to final report, with real dates pulled from calendars and inboxes rather than the version on the org chart. 2. **Find the expensive parts.** Waits, double-handling, approval loops, work done twice because nobody could find the first version. Each problem gets a cost in days or rework, which is how we rank what to fix first. 3. **Redesign small.** The fewest changes that remove the most friction. Every step gets an owner by name, and the new workflow lives in the tools you already have: your project tracker, your drive, your channels. New software is a last resort, and we'll say so plainly if we think you need it. 4. **Write it down.** Each recurring job becomes a one-page runbook or checklist. If it can't fit on a page, we haven't finished simplifying it. 5. **Run it together, then measure.** We work the first cycles of the new process with your team, and our specialists join where it touches their patch: Joseph Arboleda on ad-account workflows, Mark Hebblewhite on creative pipelines. Then we compare cycle times before and after, keep what moved the numbers, and cut what didn't. ## Case study: Southern Phone Southern Phone has been a full-service partner since January 2021, with advertising, creative, technology and client services under one roof. A partnership that long runs on process: campaign launches, creative rounds, reporting and approvals all move on a cadence both teams can predict. > "Their expert planning, creative thinking coupled with their excellent communication skills and on time execution with every results-driven campaign make it a pleasure to work with this team." — Jacqueline Jansse, Southern Phone [Read the Southern Phone case study](https://gudu.com.au/southernphone/) ## FAQ **What does marketing process improvement cost?** It's scoped by the number of workflows, not by time on site. A single-workflow review (map, diagnosis, redesign and runbook) is a fixed-fee project. For retainer clients we usually fold it into the existing engagement, because fixing the workflow makes everything else we do for you cheaper. **How long does it take?** Mapping one workflow takes two to three weeks, most of it sitting with your team while they work. Redesign and runbooks take another two to three. The run-in lasts one full cycle of the process itself, so a monthly reporting workflow needs a month to prove out. Faster than that and you're buying a slide deck, not a working process. **Do we need to buy new software?** Almost never. Most marketing workflows break at handoffs and approvals, not in the tools, and a new platform adds a migration on top of the original problem. We build in whatever your team already runs. If we genuinely think a tool change is warranted, we'll tell you directly, and we don't resell software, so the advice has nothing riding on it. **Is this business process consulting?** Only for marketing. A business process improvement consultant will map your whole operation, finance to fulfilment. We stay inside marketing (publishing, campaigns, reporting, approvals) because that's the work we run every day for our own clients. You get people who have operated these exact workflows, rather than a framework applied from the outside. **How do we know it worked?** The same way we found the problems: measurement. We baseline cycle times, rework counts and on-time launches before changing anything, then compare after the run-in. If a change hasn't moved those numbers, it goes. You should be able to point at a report and say the monthly close went from six days to two, rather than just feeling tidier. **Do we have to be an existing Gudu client?** No. Process improvement works as a standalone engagement, and it's a low-risk way to see how we operate before committing to anything larger. That said, most of this work starts inside our retainers, where we're close enough to the day-to-day to see the friction firsthand. Either way, the deliverables are yours to keep and run without us. ## Related services - [Client Services](https://gudu.com.au/services/client-services/) — up a level, client services at Gudu, the whole discipline - [Project Management](https://gudu.com.au/services/client-services/project-management/) — how we run your projects day to day - [Documentation](https://gudu.com.au/services/client-services/documentation/) — runbooks, SOPs and technical documentation, written properly - [Content Management](https://gudu.com.au/services/client-services/content-management/) — ongoing website and content management after launch - [Analytics](https://gudu.com.au/services/technology/analytics/) — analytics and reporting that feed the workflow [Let's talk](https://gudu.com.au/contact/)