Guest post by Ovi Negrean, CEO and co-founder of SocialBee. He and his team help startups, small businesses, freelancers, and entrepreneurs reach their marketing goals through customer-informed articles and practical social media content. You can also find Ovi on X.

Every marketing team has a list of ideas it wants to try. A useful content marketing strategy turns that list into shared goals, clear ownership, a realistic publishing rhythm, and enough room to learn from the results. That structure is what gets a team excited: people can see why the work matters, where their contribution fits, and what happens next.

Jaron Soh is Co-founder and COO at Traktion, the platform that makes hiring for growth simpler, agile, and more profitable for businesses.

According to a recent survey by The Digital Project Manager, the two biggest project management challenges of 2020 can be neatly summarised as people problems and project problems.

If that sounds a little vague, let’s get specific. 27% of those surveyed experienced challenges with their project stakeholders (i.e. people), while 24% encountered challenges with budgets and deadlines (you guessed it, project).

Thinking about this within the context of a marketing project, it’s easy to get distracted by those project-related concerns, wondering: “How do I deliver this on time and on budget?”

Well, here’s the thing… In my experience, you’re asking yourself the wrong question.

When it comes to marketing, don’t focus solely on the “how”; make sure you look at the “who”, too.

There’s a people problem to overcome. Ask who you should use to help deliver your marketing project on time and on budget; a solo marketing consultant, or a full-blown marketing agency? To answer that, you need to understand how they differ from one another, and the scenarios in which to use them.

In this Process Street post, we help you do just that. Here we explore:

• Agency vs. consultant: Spot the difference (pros & cons)
• Marketing agency vs. marketing consultant: When to use one or the other?
• Which is better for project managers?

Ready? Let’s dive in.
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“Well-defined values don’t sound like the safe platitudes of a Hallmark card” – Patrick M. Lencioni, Management guru

Lencioni also wrote that “Most values statements are bland, toothless, or just plain dishonest. [They] create cynical and dispirited employees, alienate customers, and undermine managerial credibility.”

For early stage startups, formal value statements are multi-functional; they should help your team understand and act on your internal best practices and empower them to make decisions that will benefit the company as a whole.

These values are the boundaries within which your business will operate in pursuit of its goals, and set the tone for day-to-day operations.

Think of core values as one of the three pillars of principle holding up your business operations; the other two being mission and vision.

In this Process Street article, we’ll explore why core values are important, how they align with mission and vision, and some examples of core values from other companies.

We’ve also got some statements from our own team about how they live and act on our own internal values in their day-to-day work.

• Start with why
• Vision, vale, and mission statements
• Why core values are important
• Examples of core company values
• How the Process Street team lives our core values
• Core values: the backbone of daily business operations

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This is a guest post written by Ashley Ferro, a freelance content writer & copywriter specializing in SEO content marketing.

It’s all too common to find yourself wading through your organization’s shared folders in search of the file you’ve been asked to review:

• PROJECT-PROPOSAL-NEW-v5.doc
• Project_proposal_2020_final+edits.doc
• THIS_is_the_final_proposal_(old-version).PDF

Why does this happen? Why can’t everyone just use proper file naming conventions? The reasons can be lack of proper internal policy or procedure for naming and organizing files, lack of any consideration for folder or information architecture, and just plain carelessness.

With a small amount of effort, you can establish proper file naming conventions and avoid this kind of document spaghetti. The more organized you can be with your internal information, the more efficient and effective you can be in your business goals.

Just imagine – seeing neat, intuitively named folders, knowing which folders contain the documents you’re looking for, and – take a seat – having confidence that the file you’re about to click on will be what you expect it to be.

In this Process Street article, we’ll cover:

Let’s go!

Slack changed the way teams worked by bringing conversations, files, and day-to-day coordination into one shared space. In December 2020, Salesforce agreed to acquire Slack in a transaction with an enterprise value of approximately $27.7 billion, a sign of how central workplace communication had become.

This insider look explains why we built the Process Street Slack App, how CTO Cameron McKay shipped the first version in two weeks, and how teams could bring workflow notifications and approvals into the place where they were already working.

When you’re doing any kind of content marketing, you want to be able to understand how well you’re doing. You want to be able to look at the performance of the content you’re creating and feel assurance that you’re:

1. Driving forward key goals and objectives tied to your content strategy;
2. Continuously optimizing and improving the quality of your content in order to hit those goals.

Especially when you’re creating this kind of content that involves a degree of creative input (writing!) it can be difficult to measure quality.

This is where maturity models come in. Maturity models can be a great way to build and assess how successful an organization or system is at achieving continuous improvement.

Ultimately, it’s the idea that you’re constantly seeking to test and improve the way in which your organization runs. You’re not standing still.

We’ve written before about more generally applicable Capability Maturity Models, but this post takes a look at our internal Blog Asset Maturity Model (BAMM) process that we use to audit and continuously improve the quality of our blog content.

In this Process Street article, we’ll cover:

• How to assess content quality
• Content marketing metrics to measure success
• What exactly is a maturity model?
• Our internal process for quality control: The BAMM review
• Using processes to systematize content creation – more reliable and higher quality

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Process Street is a simple, free and powerful way to manage your team’s recurring checklists and procedures.

Process Street helps you automate tasks, track progress, and manage documents — plus it integrates with over a thousand of your favorite apps.

Thousands of businesses in every industry use Process Street to make their recurring work fun, fast and faultless. We’ve been listening closely to our customers, and Process Street 3.0 proves it. Sign up for a free trial and take Process Street for a spin.

Processes are a part of daily life for every person in every role in every business. We designed Process Street to power any kind of process: employee onboarding, rental property inspections, new client onboarding, firewall security audits, monthly sales forecasts, and many more.

We’ve built strong lines of communication with businesses who use Process Street every day; with the launch of Process Street 3.0, their feedback has helped us make our platform:

• More powerful, with greater control to orchestrate and automate complex multi-departmental workflows.
• More intuitive, with a redesigned user experience to help you implement and manage all your processes even faster.
• More accessible, with new time-savers like application speed improvements, single sign-on, and a slick iOS app.

Before we dive into all of our 3.0 features, you have to check out our new explainer video! As you watch, consider what it can mean for your business if every person on your team knows what to do, and when.

Satisfying, right?

The feeling of working together to get processes done right, and right on time.

Ok let’s jump into it.
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Major setbacks. Lengthy delays. Unnecessary bottlenecks. When important items aren’t rejected or approved in time, progress is halted.

Take the United States’ government shutdown in 2019.

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Way back in 2014, we first tried our hand at launching on Product Hunt with an early version of Process Street. It got featured, but that was a different time; when Product Hunt’s staff manually selected each product feature (these days Product Hunt claims that an automated algorithm decides).

It was hunted (Product Hunt lingo for “promoted”) by Audrey Melnik of Funnel Ventures, didn’t even have a maker (another Product Hunt termin for the creators of a product), yet still found its way to the front page of Product Hunt.

Six years, a couple of relaunches, and a $12 million Series A on from that humble effort, Process Street has changed a fair bit. We’ve shipped over 30 products on Product Hunt; from podcasts, new Process Street feature launches, to whole product launches, to eBooks.

Some of them were great successes, with multiple top 4 spots and a whole bunch of front-page features. Others weren’t so great; some garnered next to no traction and were essentially dead-on-arrival.

The point of this article is to impart some of the lessons we’ve learned, from common myths and misconceptions, to what worked well for us (and what didn’t work so well).

Here’s a breakdown of what I’ll be covering:

• Why you should care about Product Hunt
• Common misconceptions about Product Hunt launches
• How to prepare for a Product Hunt launch (free checklist)
• Key takeaways: How to have a successful Product Hunt launch

Let’s start with the basics, which often get taken for granted when it comes to deciding whether or not to launch on Product Hunt.
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I have a riddle for you:

What has four sides, often goes missing, comes from trees, and can be expensive to reproduce?

I’ll give you a hint.

It wastes up to 40% of on-the-job time, and about $120 billion per year in the US alone.

Need another?

Around 7.5% of them will be lost or misplaced each year (about one lost every 12 seconds), and for each that gets lost you’re looking at a loss of between $350 to $700 in employee time.

Did you get it yet?

Condescending sarcasm aside, I am of course talking about paper forms. But this article isn’t about paper forms, per se; it’s about how you can get rid of paper forms in your business with form automation software.

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