Your marketing team is brimming with creativity and strategic vision, but are you constantly finding your campaigns bogged down, delayed, or compromised by hidden inefficiencies? As a marketing operations lead, you’ve likely experienced firsthand the frustration caused by bottlenecks.
However, the real issue isn’t necessarily what your team creates: It’s how you’re creating it. It might be time to reimagine your creation operating model (COMs) especially in an AI-led creation world. Let’s explore the top pain points hindering your marketing operations and how a modernized approach can solve them and remove bottlenecks in your current workflow.
Understanding creation operating models
A creation operating model is the structured workflow your organization uses to take content from ideation to deployment. Effective COMs are critical for ensuring brand consistency, compliance, and campaign effectiveness—particularly at scale. Traditionally, marketing teams rely on outdated COMs such as Distributed, Design to Code, or Brief to Template models. Each has its limitations—whether it’s excessive dependence on developers, slow time-to-market, or limited creative flexibility.
But the fact of the matter is: Today’s creation operating models are flat out broken. They’re simply not suited to a modern AI-driven world and the need for email and landing page creation at scale.
Introducing the SPEED Framework
To effectively analyze your current workflow, the bottlenecks and where you might start modernizing your COM, we came up with the SPEED framework. Consider this your practical tool designed to diagnose your current operating model and reveal opportunities for improvement:
- S: Scan & Map the Current Process – Document each step from request to deployment, identifying delays and contributors.
- P: Pinpoint Bottlenecks – Clearly visualize your workflow to spot friction points that cause delays.
- E: Evaluate Economic Impact – Calculate the hidden costs of inefficiencies such as lost hours and missed opportunities.
- E: Expose Opportunities for AI – Identify steps that AI-driven solutions can streamline or eliminate.
- D: Democratize Creation – Enable broader teams, even non-technical personnel, to build assets quickly and effectively.
Take a peek at our proven SPEED Framework (download PDF) infographic to get started unblocking your workflow today.
Top 10 pain points in marketing operations
Now that you understand how your workflow and creation operating model might be impacting your team, let’s take a peek at the top 10 most common pain points we hear marketing operations say are causing bottlenecks and hindering performance. See how many resonate with you.
1. Email creation takes too long
Manual email building and complex templates consume valuable hours or even days, drastically reducing your team’s efficiency and agility. A lengthy production cycle also also drastically decreases your speed to market and your ability to focus on key strategic moments.
2. Inconsistency across campaigns
Multiple contributors and fragmented processes lead to inconsistent messaging and visuals, diminishing your brand’s strength and reputation. Over time, these inconsistencies can diminish your brand’s reputation and trust among customers.
3. Poor collaboration between stakeholders
Siloed communication channels and workflows between marketers, designers, and approvers create bottlenecks, delays, and frequent misalignment. Not only does this make it harder to QA work and get it out the door, but it also has your most strategic minds bogged down with review tasks and tracking down comments and feedback.
4. Heavy dependence on developers
Relying heavily on technical teams for routine tasks leads to significant delays, creating operational bottlenecks and limiting campaign agility. In the past, email production meant manually slicing HTML and campaign launches were tied to IT timelines. Today, teams simply don’t have time to be stuck in the coding weeds.
5. Difficulty personalizing at scale
Without streamlined processes, personalizing content across different audience segments becomes cumbersome, limiting campaign effectiveness and scalability. What’s more, personalization and dynamic content is critical to many teams’ strategy for growth today.
6. Fragmented MarTech ecosystem
Managing multiple disconnected tools for design, QA, and deployment creates inefficiencies, increases errors, and drains productivity. Oftentimes, the very tools marketers rely on often make things worse, not better. But it’s not the problem of the tools, necessarily. It’s how the tools work with the team’s designated creation operating model that can prevent campaign creation speed.
7. Delayed campaign launches
Slow approval cycles, excessive handoffs, and inefficient processes result in missed key launch windows, leading to lost market opportunities. If emails take too long to build and send, campaigns can take days if not weeks longer to bring to market. For many teams, this can mean the difference between revenue gained or lost.
8. Limited visibility into performance
Inadequate integration with analytics tools hampers access to actionable insights, making continuous optimization and ROI demonstration challenging.
9. Scaling becomes painful
We already talked about how personalization at scale becomes hard, but scaling your email or campaign program can become challenging overall, if your team faces constant bottlenecks. Growing complexity—multiple brands, regions, or segments—makes maintaining quality and consistency challenging.
10. Risky compliance and security management
Marketers must move quickly to engage customers and capitalize on key moments in the buying journey. If you’re a marketer in a heavily regulated industry, not only must you move quickly to engage customers with timely, personalized content, but you must also do so while adhering to stringent regulatory requirements. The need for agility often clashes with the demand for compliance, resulting in lengthy approval cycles, missed opportunities, and operational inefficiencies.
AI: transforming the marketing landscape
AI is rapidly revolutionizing marketing operations by automating repetitive tasks, providing deep performance insights, and enabling teams to shift focus to strategic, creative activities. However, leveraging AI effectively requires a modern workflow with integrated guardrails and governance. Without this structure, you risk losing control and effectiveness as AI-driven content production scales.
Empower your marketing team
By transforming your workflow, you’ll eliminate hidden bottlenecks and inefficiencies, drastically improve speed and scale, and empower your teams to shift from execution to strategic innovation. We want to help.
- First, understand your creation operating model and the hidden bottlenecks slowing your team down with the SPEED framework.
- Next, sign up for your free workflow audit to assess how your team can remove campaign bottlenecks.
