Why Your Marketing Workflows Are Costing You More Than You Think
Every marketing function has processes. The question is whether those processes were designed or accumulated accidentally — built up over years of individual habits, inherited procedures, and workarounds that solved an immediate problem and then became permanent fixtures nobody has questioned since.
The answer, in most organisations, is the latter. And the cost is never ratified and is usually high.
The Invisible Tax on Every Campaign
Poorly designed workflows impose a tax on every piece of work that moves through them. A campaign that should take three weeks takes six because nobody documented who approves what at which stage.
A piece of content goes to market with an error because the review process had four people, and each assumed the other had checked the detail. A brief arrives at the agency incomplete because the internal process for writing briefs was never standardised, and each account manager does it differently.
None of these failures makes headlines. They accumulate instead — in missed deadlines, in rework costs, in the creative energy spent navigating process friction rather than producing work. As a result, the marketing function looks busy. The output does not reflect the effort.
Lighthouse PR encounters this pattern consistently when working with clients on integrated communications programmes. The strategy is sound. The talent is capable. The workflow is the problem — and nobody has named it as such because the symptoms have been misdiagnosed as execution failures rather than process failures.
Mapping What Actually Happens
"When I ask a new client to walk me through their campaign approval process, the answer is almost always 'it depends.' That answer is the diagnosis. Everything that follows is the treatment." Steve Gardiner
The starting point for any workflow improvement is documentation — not of how the process is supposed to work, but of how it actually works. These are rarely the same thing.
Map the exact lifecycle of a campaign from initial brief to final publication. Who originates the brief? Who reviews it and in what sequence? Where creative development begins and what triggers the first review. How many approval stages exist, who owns each one, and what happens when a stakeholder is unavailable. Where the process most commonly stalls and why.
This mapping exercise is uncomfortable for most organisations because it makes visible what everyone already knows informally — that the process is more chaotic than the official version suggests, that certain bottlenecks are owned by specific individuals who have become inadvertent gatekeepers, and that several steps exist not because they add value but because removing them would require a conversation nobody has wanted to have.
Eliminating What Doesn't Earn Its Place
Once the process is visible, the question for each step is simple. Does this add value to the final output, or does it add time to the delivery timeline? These are not the same thing and should not be treated as such.
Approval stages that duplicate earlier reviews should be collapsed. Manual tasks that exist because automation was never implemented should be automated. Formatting, reporting, data entry, and scheduling — none of these requires creative talent, and all of them consume it when left unaddressed.
Agile marketing offers a structural alternative to the slow, rigid annual planning cycles that make most marketing functions less responsive than the markets they are trying to influence. Running shorter planning sprints — with defined objectives, real-time performance data, and the authority to iterate based on data— produces organisations that can adjust before the opportunity closes rather than after the campaign has run its course.
The Standard Worth Holding
A marketing workflow that works is invisible. It moves work from brief to market at the speed the opportunity requires, with the quality the brand demands, without the friction that exhausts the team producing it.
Building that workflow is not creative work. It is operational discipline — and it is the foundation on which every other marketing improvement rests.
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About the Author
Steve Gardiner (exec MBA) is a senior marketing and commercial leader at Lighthouse PR, bringing global experience from Accenture, Electronic Arts, Virgin Media, Telekom, and Etisalat. Latterly, as VP Business at Etisalat, he was responsible for $1.8B in revenue.
Today, Steve applies his strategic, marketing, and growth expertise to support Lighthouse PR clients as part of the agency’s service offering.
About Lighthouse PR
Lighthouse PR is a leading PR agency in Romania that works with a select number of organisations across Central and Southeastern Europe, delivering media relations, reputation management, crisis communications, social media and an extensive range of business growth and business continuity services — always led by senior practitioners.
We hold exclusive membership for Romania and the Republic of Moldova in both the Eurocom worldwide PR network and the CCNE, Europe's leading crisis communications network.
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