The Marketing Ops Automation Guide: What to Automate First (and What to Leave Alone)

Every marketing team has the same 5 broken workflows. Here's how to find yours, score them, and fix the ones worth fixing — using tools you already pay for.

Here's something nobody tells you about marketing automation: the problem isn't that you need better tools. The problem is that nobody's stopped to ask which manual processes shouldn't exist anymore.

I've spent 14 years building digital products at companies like Viking Cruises, Live Nation, and Logitech. And in every single one, I found the same thing: smart, capable teams spending 15-25 hours a week on work that could be automated in a day.

Not because they were lazy. Because nobody had ever mapped it out, scored it, and said: "This one. Automate this one first."

That's what this guide does.

The 5 Workflows Every Marketing Team Has (And Shouldn't)

After auditing marketing and ops teams across industries, the same five workflows show up every time. Yours probably has at least three of them.

1. Manual Reporting and Dashboard Updates

Time wasted: 4–8 hours/week

Someone on your team opens 3-4 platforms every Monday morning, exports CSVs, copies numbers into a spreadsheet, reformats it, and emails it to leadership. The data is stale by the time it hits their inbox. This is the single most common waste of time in marketing operations.

The fix: Automated data pulls → formatted report → delivered to Slack/email before anyone gets to the office. Tools: Power Automate + Office Scripts, or Google Apps Script.

2. Lead Routing and CRM Data Entry

Time wasted: 3–6 hours/week

Leads come in through forms, get forwarded via email, sit in someone's inbox for hours, then get manually entered into the CRM with half the fields missing. By the time sales sees it, the lead has already gone cold and signed up with your competitor.

The fix: Form submission → instant CRM entry → auto-assigned to the right rep based on territory/product/score → notification in Slack. Total human touch required: zero.

3. Campaign Setup and QA

Time wasted: 3–5 hours/week

Setting up email campaigns, ad campaigns, or landing pages involves copy-pasting the same information across multiple platforms. UTM parameters get mangled. Someone forgets to update the subject line in one variant. You catch it after it's live.

The fix: Template-based setup with auto-populated fields from a single source of truth. QA checklist that runs automatically before launch.

4. Content Publishing Pipelines

Time wasted: 2–4 hours/week

Content gets written in Google Docs, then manually formatted and pasted into the CMS, then the metadata gets added by hand, then someone has to remember to schedule the social posts, then someone else has to update the content calendar spreadsheet. It's a relay race where everyone drops the baton.

The fix: Content in structured format → auto-published to CMS with correct metadata → social posts scheduled → content calendar updated. One approval click, everything cascades.

5. Cross-Platform Data Synchronization

Time wasted: 3–5 hours/week

Your marketing stack has 6-12 tools and none of them talk to each other natively. So a human being becomes the integration layer — downloading from one, uploading to another, making sure the IDs match, deduplicating records, and praying nothing breaks.

The fix: Automated sync flows between platforms. When data changes in one system, it updates everywhere else. The human integration layer gets promoted to doing actual human work.

The Supergood Scoring Framework: How to Prioritize What to Automate

You can't automate everything at once. And you shouldn't — some things aren't worth automating. Here's how to figure out what to tackle first.

Example: Scoring a Weekly Reporting Workflow

• Frequency: Weekly = 4
• Repetitiveness: Identical every time = 5
• Time: 3 hours per cycle = 4
• Complexity: Standard APIs (pull from platforms, push to Sheets) = 4

Example: Scoring a Quarterly Brand Strategy Review

• Frequency: Quarterly = 1
• Repetitiveness: Significant judgment required = 2
• Time: 8 hours = 5
• Complexity: No clear automation path = 1

See the difference? The quarterly review takes more total time, but it's infrequent, requires judgment, and has no clean automation path. The weekly report is an easy win with massive compounding returns.

How to Calculate the ROI of Marketing Automation

You need numbers to get budget approval. Here's the formula:

Real example:

• Hours saved: 16/week
• Average team member cost: $45/hour (fully loaded)
• Annual savings: 16 × $45 × 52 = $37,440
• Implementation cost: $10,000
• First-year ROI: $27,440 (274%)
• Payback period: ~14 weeks

After year one, the implementation cost drops to maintenance only. That $37,440 in savings compounds every year. Over three years, a $10,000 project returns over $100,000 in recovered productivity.

What Tools Should You Use?

The best tool is the one your company already pays for. Seriously. Before you evaluate any new software, check what's already in your stack.

Microsoft 365 Environment

• Power Automate — workflow orchestration, connectors to 400+ services, approval flows
• Office Scripts — Excel automation (replaces VBA with modern TypeScript)
• Power Apps — lightweight internal tools and forms
• SharePoint — document workflows, approval chains

Google Workspace Environment

• Apps Script — automate Sheets, Docs, Gmail, Calendar
• Google Sheets formulas + triggers — surprisingly powerful for simple automations
• Looker Studio — automated reporting dashboards

Cross-Platform

• Zapier — simple integrations, fast to set up, scales to ~2,000 tasks/month on free tier
• Make (Integromat) — more complex logic, better for multi-step flows
• n8n — self-hosted, no per-task pricing, great for technical teams

AI-Enhanced

• OpenAI / Claude APIs — content classification, summarization, data extraction
• Microsoft Copilot — embedded AI in M365 tools
• Custom scripts — Python/Node for anything the no-code tools can't handle

What NOT to Automate

This is the part most automation consultants skip — because they want to sell you more automation. But some things should stay manual:

• Anything requiring brand judgment. AI can draft your social posts. It shouldn't decide your brand voice. Keep a human in the loop for creative decisions.
• Low-frequency, high-stakes decisions. Quarterly budget allocation, vendor negotiations, campaign strategy — these happen rarely and the cost of getting them wrong is high.
• Workflows that change constantly. If the process is different every time, automating it creates more maintenance than it saves. Wait until it stabilizes.
• Things your team actually enjoys doing. If someone on your team genuinely likes building the weekly report because it gives them insight into the business — don't take that away. Automate the parts they hate, not the parts they learn from.

A good automation consultant tells you what to automate. A great one tells you what to leave alone.

The Step-by-Step Automation Audit Process

Here's exactly how to audit your own marketing ops. This is the same process I use with clients.

1. Map every recurring workflow. Spend one week documenting every task that happens on a repeating schedule. Daily standup? Write it down. Monday reporting? Write it down. Get granular — you'll find automations hiding inside tasks you thought were "just part of the job."
2. Measure time spent. For each workflow, estimate (or better, track) how many hours it takes per cycle and who's involved. Be honest — people underestimate by 30-40%.
3. Score with FRTC. Run each workflow through the scoring framework above. Sort by score, highest to lowest.
4. Validate the top 5. For your highest-scoring workflows, ask: Is the data accessible via API? Are the rules consistent enough to codify? Does someone own this process who can help you test? If yes to all three, it's a go.
5. Build the business case. Use the ROI formula for your top 3 candidates. Show leadership: "Here's 16 hours/week we can recover for $X investment, paid back in Y months."
6. Start with one. Don't try to automate everything. Pick the #1 highest-scoring, highest-ROI workflow and nail it. Get it running in production, measure the results, and use that win to fund the next one.

Ryan Sandoval is the founder of Supergood Solutions, an AI automation consulting firm for marketing and ops teams. He's spent 14 years building digital products at Viking Cruises, Live Nation, Ticketmaster, and Logitech. He automates the work that shouldn't require humans — so humans can do the work that should.