As a small or medium-sized business owner, you’re familiar with the chaos of managing a robust marketing strategy. It can feel like an overwhelming task, from juggling content calendars to aligning messaging across campaigns to staying on top of website updates. But it doesn’t have to be.
Enter Hive—a project management platform designed to help businesses like yours take control of marketing efforts, streamline workflows, and hit their growth targets. At Salt Marketing, we’ve seen firsthand how Hive transforms marketing chaos into a well-organized strategy, especially for our health and wellness clients, as part of our Growth Accelerator Program. With Hive, we empower our clients to embrace a clear and strategic marketing roadmap without getting lost in the weeds.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through our top 5 best practices for organizing your marketing strategy using Hive, helping you reclaim your time and focus on what truly matters—growing your business!
Why Hive is a Game Changer for Marketing Project Management
Marketing, by nature, is multifaceted and often involves numerous moving parts—managing content creation, social media schedules, SEO efforts, paid advertising, website updates, and more. Without a reliable system, it’s easy to feel buried in chaos.
This is where Hive shines. As an intuitive project management platform, Hive offers tools that make organizing and executing your marketing strategy easier. Whether you’re a one-person marketing team or manage an entire department, Hive’s customizable workspaces, collaborative tools, and powerful automation features simplify complex tasks. At Salt Marketing, we use Hive to streamline marketing projects for health and wellness practitioners, ensuring they always feel energized by their marketing workload.
So, how can you make the most of Hive? Here are the top 5 best practices to help you organize your marketing strategy effectively.
Best Practice #1: Centralize Your Marketing Strategy With a Content Calendar
If one thing can make or break your marketing efforts, it’s your content calendar. Content is the lifeblood of your marketing strategy—blog posts, social media updates, email campaigns, videos, podcasts, or paid ads. A centralized calendar helps ensure everything runs smoothly, providing a solid foundation for a comprehensive marketing strategy that aligns all your campaigns and initiatives with clear goals and timelines.
Why this matters: With Hive, you can centralize your entire marketing content calendar, making it easy to visualize and manage all content in one place. You can assign tasks, set due dates, track milestones, and view the progress of each content piece without switching between different platforms or tools.
How to implement it:
- Start by creating a dedicated marketing workspace in Hive.
- Use the calendar view to map your month, quarter, or year-long content strategy.
- Assign tasks to your team members (or yourself) and set deadlines to keep everything on track.
The ability to add comments, attachments (like social media images and graphics), and subaction checklists directly within tasks means every detail gets noticed.
At Salt Marketing, we use Hive exclusively to help our health and wellness clients maintain a consistent content flow. By having a clear visual of upcoming campaigns and content, they avoid the panic of last-minute deadlines and keep their audience engaged.
Best Practice #2: Simplify Collaboration, Task Management and Time Tracking
Collaboration is at the heart of any successful marketing strategy. Whether you’re coordinating with writers, designers, or social media managers, keeping everyone aligned can be challenging, especially if you’re working remotely or across departments.
Why this matters: Hive’s collaborative features make it easy to communicate, assign tasks, and track progress—all in one place. This eliminates the need for endless email chains or scattered chats across different platforms.
How to implement it: Use Hive’s Kanban boards, Gantt charts, calendar or list views (all of which you can seamlessly shift between as needed) to break your marketing projects into manageable tasks. Assign those tasks to team members, set priorities, and track deadlines. Hive’s real-time messaging feature allows you to communicate in a way that means issues can be addressed immediately without clogging your inbox.
One of the key advantages we’ve seen with our clients in the health and wellness industry is how Hive’s task management features simplify team collaboration. It allows them to coordinate with external marketing partners like Salt Marketing without confusion or crossed wires. Everyone knows exactly what’s on their plate, ensuring deadlines are met and campaigns roll out smoothly.
At Salt, we also use Hive’s Time Tracking feature to record how long the work takes – in the same place we manage what we have to do. Integrated time tracking means fewer questions and less time spent on billing. While working on an action, every team member can add their time right in the action card, either by running the built-in tracking timer or adding time manually.
Best Practice #3: Streamline Your Approval Process for Consistency and Quality
No matter the size of your business, the approval process is a critical step to ensure that all marketing materials—from campaign assets to social media posts, blog articles, and website updates—are aligned with your brand and strategy. As an agency, Salt Marketing relies on client approvals to guarantee that every piece of content feels authentic, is on message, and effectively reaches the target audience. Internally, you might need approvals to maintain consistency. Either way, Hive’s integrated Proofing & Approvals feature offers a smooth and efficient review process.
Why this matters: A well-defined approval workflow prevents costly mistakes and inconsistencies, ensuring that all your marketing materials meet your brand standards. With Hive, you can attach videos, URLs, PDFs, and even multiple documents directly to an action card, so everything is easily accessible in one place for review. This eliminates the need to track files across email threads or other platforms.
How to implement it: Start by clicking Add Proof within the action card to upload the latest draft or piece of content that needs approval—whether it’s a social media graphic, blog post draft, or a website update plan. From there, you can request approval by clicking Request approval and then Add approver to include the person responsible for sign-off. To keep the process on schedule, you can set a due date for the approval, ensuring everyone involved understands the timeline.
If you need an external party’s input, simply choose Add external approver and enter their email address. They’ll receive a secure link to review the content in Hive’s proofing window. For more complex projects, you can even create a hierarchy of approvals, routing the content through multiple approvers or committees.
At Salt Marketing, we use this structured approval process to work ahead and ensure that every piece of content—whether it’s for marketing campaigns, social media, blog posts, or website updates—is polished, on-brand, and strategically crafted. With Hive, we have peace of mind knowing that each element of our clients’ marketing strategy has been thoughtfully reviewed and approved, resulting in a cohesive and effective approach across all channels.
Best Practice #4: Standardize Repetitive Tasks With Hive’s Action Templates
Your website is the foundation of your digital marketing strategy, but keeping it updated can be daunting. From uploading new blog posts to refreshing product pages, ensuring your website is current and optimized is crucial for driving traffic and conversions.
Why this matters: Hive’s project templates make managing website updates easier by providing a repeatable framework for everyday tasks like content updates, landing page revisions, or technical SEO fixes. You don’t have to start from scratch every time—use a pre-built template and get started.
How to implement it: Create action templates for website updates you do regularly in Hive. For example, if you’re updating your blog every week, set up a Blog Post Update Template that includes writing, editing, SEO optimization, and publishing steps. You can quickly duplicate the template and assign it to the relevant team members whenever you publish a new post.
At Salt Marketing, we’ve found that using Hive’s project templates for website management saves time and ensures consistency. Maintaining a website updated with fresh content for our health and wellness clients is vital to keeping patients engaged and improving SEO performance.
Even better, with Hive Forms, we provide each client with their own unique request form, giving them the ability to drop a needed update right into Hive without having to know the platform. They bookmark their unique and branded online form and feel empowered to request changes quickly and easily.
Best Practice #5: Cohesive Communication To Keep Marketing Campaigns Moving
Instead of wasting time searching through endless email threads, text messages, or scattered Teams conversations, everything you need is right there in the Hive platform. From project briefs and files to task updates and team discussions, Hive centralizes your communication, helping you and your team stay focused and on the same page. This clarity and efficiency translate into smoother workflows and campaigns that stay on track.
Why this matters: Hive’s communication features, combined with its task management tools, ensure that every part of your marketing strategy stays on the same page. Hive’s Instant Messaging feature lets you quickly exchange ideas and updates within the platform. At Salt Marketing, we take it a step further by integrating Hive with Slack. This integration allows us to share individual Hive action cards directly in Slack channels, keeping communication flowing seamlessly. Whether it’s the start of a new project or a crucial update, linking directly to Hive avoids confusion and keeps everyone aligned.
How to implement it: First, add the Hive app in Slack to enable integration. This will allow you to share specific action cards from Hive directly into Slack conversations, ensuring all updates are centralized and easily accessible. Use Hive’s instant messaging for quick in-platform discussions, and rely on Slack integration to escalate important updates, share project details, and keep the whole team informed without having to switch tools constantly.
We also love the Hive Mail feature, which makes it easy to stay on top of communication without ever leaving the platform. You can access your inbox, send new messages, and organize email follow-ups right alongside your projects and tasks.
How to implement it: To enable Hive Mail, simply go to Apps on the left-hand navigation bar, scroll to My Apps, and toggle on Hive Mail. Then, sign in to your email account, authorize the connection, and you’re all set! Having related emails integrated into Hive means you’re always up-to-date and ready to respond, with all the context you need right at your fingertips.
How to Maximize Hive’s Potential for Your Marketing Strategy
Hive isn’t just a tool; it’s a game changer for small—to medium-sized businesses looking to master their marketing strategy. By centralizing tasks, automating time-consuming processes, and improving collaboration, Hive helps you stay on top of your marketing efforts without feeling overwhelmed.
At Salt Marketing, Hive is integral to our Growth Accelerator Program, especially when working with health and wellness practitioners. Hive empowers clients to build and execute a cohesive marketing plan supporting their long-term growth. And it can do the same for your business.
Chaos-Proof Your Marketing Strategy with Hive
Hive isn’t just a project management tool; it’s a platform that creates a natural Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) workflow with action templates that ensure no detail or step is left undone. By building repeatable templates for your key marketing processes—like content creation, website updates, or campaign launches—you can streamline your workflow and maintain consistency across all projects. This not only increases accountability among your team members but also keeps everyone on track to meet deadlines. When tasks and responsibilities are clearly laid out, it’s easier for everyone to stay accountable and aligned with the bigger goals.
Additionally, with Hive’s ability to forecast and plan, you can lay out work well in advance and gain a clear picture of your upcoming workload. This helps you manage resources effectively and anticipate any potential bottlenecks, so your marketing strategy keeps moving forward without hiccups.
You don’t have to accept marketing chaos. Hive is the solution that simplifies project management and streamlines your marketing strategy. By applying these 5 best practices— centralizing your marketing strategy, simplifying collaboration, streamlining approvals, standardizing repetitive tasks and communicating to keep your marketing campaigns moving—you’ll be able to focus on growth and achieving your business goals.
With Hive, you’re not just getting a project management tool; you’re getting a trusted ally that helps you navigate the complexity of marketing. You’re empowering your business to execute marketing strategy with confidence, clarity, and precision.Take control of your strategy, streamline your efforts, and watch your business thrive – with Hive!
