Most teams automate the wrong things — or automate too early, before the underlying process is clean. This checklist helps you identify genuine automation opportunities in marketing operations before you invest in tooling.
The test for each item: If this happened automatically, would it save time and reduce errors — or would it just hide a process problem?
1. Follow-ups and reminders
- Are there recurring reminders you send manually (approval deadlines, reporting dates, handoff nudges)?
- Do you manually follow up on tasks that haven’t been completed by someone else?
- Do you remind people to fill in templates, submit assets, or review content?
- Are there standing meeting prep tasks someone does manually every week?
Automation potential: High. Time-based reminders and task-state triggers are reliable and low-risk to automate.
2. Status updates and notifications
- Do people ask “what’s the status of X?” more than once a week?
- Are there updates you send manually when something moves to a new stage?
- Do you paste project updates into Slack/email from a project board?
- Do stakeholders get informed of campaign launches or completions reactively, not proactively?
Automation potential: High. Notification triggers on status changes or date proximity are simple and high-value.
3. Asset and file handoffs
- Are you manually forwarding files between people or tools?
- Do you rename and organize files before sending them to another team?
- Is there a step where someone downloads from one tool and uploads to another?
- Are campaign assets distributed to media buyers or social schedulers manually?
Automation potential: Medium. File routing can be automated, but naming conventions and folder structures must be consistent first.
4. Reporting and data pulls
- Do you manually pull data from analytics, ad platforms, or CRM to populate reports?
- Does the same report get built from scratch each month?
- Are there metrics you check manually on a schedule (weekly performance, spend pacing)?
- Do you copy-paste numbers into dashboards or spreadsheets?
Automation potential: High for scheduled data pulls; medium for interpretation tasks that still need human judgment.
5. Campaign setup and configuration
- Are there repeated setup steps in your ad or email platform (UTM parameters, audiences, naming conventions)?
- Do you configure the same fields every time you set up a new campaign?
- Is there a QA step you do manually before every campaign launch?
Automation potential: Medium. Templates and scripts reduce manual work; full automation of setup is platform-dependent.
6. Content scheduling and publishing
- Is content published manually when it could be scheduled?
- Are there publishing checklists done manually before each post?
- Does someone manually move content from draft to review to approved to published?
Automation potential: Medium to high for scheduling; lower for review workflows that require human judgment.
7. Approvals and sign-offs
- Do approvals happen over email or chat, without a tracked record?
- Is there a step where you wait for a reply before moving forward — with no system tracking it?
- Are approvals requested and confirmed manually for each campaign or deliverable?
Automation potential: Medium. Approval routing can be automated; the decision itself cannot.
8. Onboarding and recurring setup
- Is there a set of tasks that happens every time a new campaign, project, or client starts?
- Do you recreate the same project structure or folder setup manually each time?
- Is team onboarding partly manual because there’s no automated task assignment?
Automation potential: High. Template-based project creation and onboarding checklists are good early automation wins.
Prioritization guide
After completing this checklist, rank opportunities by:
- Frequency — How often does this task repeat?
- Time cost — How much time does it take each time?
- Error risk — How often do mistakes happen because it’s manual?
- Dependency — Does this block someone else when it’s slow?
Automate the highest-frequency, highest-error-risk tasks first. Automate low-frequency tasks only if they are genuinely painful.
Before automating anything: document the manual process first. Automation built on an undocumented process will need to be rebuilt when the process changes.