A stakeholder submits a form.
Marketing still has to send four follow-up emails.
The objective is vague. The audience is “everyone.” The deadline is Friday. No approver is named. No one knows whether the request outranks the campaign already in production.
Technically, the team has a form.
Operationally, it does not have a marketing intake process.
A useful marketing intake process does four things:
Captures enough context to evaluate the work.
Converts the request into a priority decision.
Establishes ownership and expectations.
Moves approved work into a visible execution system.
If any of those steps are missing, the chaos simply moves from the inbox into the form.
What is a marketing intake process?
A marketing intake process is the defined way new work enters, gets evaluated by, and moves through a marketing team.
It answers:
Where should a request be submitted?
What information is required?
Who reviews it?
How is it prioritized?
Who approves it?
When does it become active work?
How will the requester know what is happening?
The form is one component. The process is the governance around it.
Step 1: Define what belongs in the process
Begin by mapping the work your team actually receives.
Common request types include:
Employee communications
HR and change campaigns
Employer-brand and recruiting content
Social media
Events
Executive messages
Creative assets
Web or intranet updates
Sales or business-development support
News and storytelling
Do not create a separate intake form for every deliverable. That forces stakeholders to diagnose the solution before marketing understands the problem.
Use one primary form with conditional questions based on request type. Keep specialized paths only where the work has meaningfully different legal, risk, technical, or approval requirements.
Step 2: Ask questions that improve the decision
Most marketing request forms over-collect production details and under-collect strategic context.
The form asks for dimensions, file types, and channels. It does not ask what business outcome the work is meant to influence.
Build the form in three layers.
Layer 1: The business need
Ask:
What is happening?
Why does this need marketing or communications support?
Which business or organizational priority does it support?
What decision, behavior, or perception should change?
Layer 2: The audience and timing
Ask:
Who specifically needs to receive this?
What does the audience already know or believe?
What do they need to do next?
What is the required date?
What makes that date fixed?
“ASAP” is not a date, and a requested date is not automatically a required date.
Layer 3: Execution readiness
Ask:
Who owns the source content?
Who approves the final work?
What supporting material already exists?
Are there legal, HR, brand, customer, or security reviews?
How will success be measured?
These questions expose whether the request is ready for production.
Step 3: Design the triage decision
Someone must own the queue.
That owner does not need to complete every request. They need the authority and judgment to route it.
At each triage review, determine:
Decision | Meaning | Next action |
Accept | Aligned, ready, and supported by capacity | Assign owner and timeline |
Clarify | Important information is missing | Return with specific questions |
Reframe | The need is valid, but the requested solution is weak | Recommend a better approach |
Schedule | Valid work that cannot begin now | Place in the planned queue |
Redirect | Another team or resource owns the need | Route with context |
Decline | The request does not justify the investment | Explain the decision |
Avoid a permanent “pending” category. Pending work is where unclear decisions go to hide.
Step 4: Build a prioritization model
Not every team needs a sophisticated scoring formula. Every team needs shared criteria.
Use five:
Strategic alignment: Which documented priority does it support?
Business consequence: What opportunity, risk, revenue, reputation, engagement, or retention outcome is affected?
Audience impact: How important is the audience, and how significant is the requested change?
Time sensitivity: What real event or dependency makes the date matter?
Capacity requirement: What people, time, approvals, and budget will it consume?
Score each factor from one to five if that helps your team compare demand. More important, document the reason behind the score.
The goal is not mathematical perfection. The goal is to stop prioritizing by volume, title, or panic.
Step 5: Connect intake to the editorial calendar
Once approved, a request should not disappear into another private system.
Move it into the same operating view that holds planned campaigns, executive communications, recruiting activity, employee moments, and external content.
At minimum, carry forward:
Business objective
Audience
Owner
Campaign or initiative
Channel
Key milestone dates
Approval status
Measurement plan
This is where intake becomes planning. The team can see what is coming, where messages collide, and which audiences are receiving too much or too little.
If your calendar is only a list of dates, read: How to Build a Strategic Editorial Calendar Connected to the Business.
Step 6: Set service levels without turning marketing into a vending machine
Service expectations are useful. Transactional thinking is not.
Publish typical lead times by level of complexity, not just by deliverable.
For example:
Work level | Example | Typical planning window |
Quick-turn support | Copy edit, approved asset resize | 2 to 4 business days |
Standard request | Single email, organic social post, simple intranet update | 5 to 10 business days |
Coordinated communication | Multiple channels or employee groups | 2 to 4 weeks |
Campaign | Strategy, creative, approvals, distribution, measurement | 4 to 8 weeks |
Enterprise initiative | Multiple functions, populations, or leaders | 8+ weeks |
These are starting points, not universal standards. Set windows that reflect your actual capacity and approval environment.
Step 7: Automate the handoffs
Automation should remove administrative friction, not make priority decisions no one has defined.
Useful automations include:
Confirmation to the requester
Notification to the intake owner
Reminder when required fields are missing
Creation of an approved project in the work-management tool
Status updates at key stages
Approval reminders
Transfer of completed campaign data into reporting
Do not automate a broken process. If “approved” means something different to every person, automation will scale the confusion.
Step 8: Measure the intake process itself
Review the process monthly or quarterly.
Track:
Request volume by stakeholder group
Percentage of planned versus unplanned work
Percentage returned for missing information
Average time from submission to decision
Average lead time by work level
Volume accepted, reframed, redirected, and declined
Recurring requests that could become templates or campaigns
Work displaced by escalations
These measures reveal whether the problem is education, capacity, governance, or recurring demand that should be designed out of the system.
They also give leadership a more credible view of marketing's workload than a last-minute list of completed deliverables.
What a strong intake process sounds like
It sounds like this:
We review new requests every Tuesday and Thursday. Submit the business need, audience, required date, approver, and source material through the intake form. We will confirm whether the work is accepted, needs clarification, should be reframed, or must be scheduled. If the request requires an escalation, the business owner will identify which existing priority should move.
Clear. Collaborative. Governed.
Frequently asked questions
What should be included in a marketing intake form?
Include the business objective, audience, desired outcome, requested timing and its reason, request owner, final approver, source material, dependencies, and measurement expectation. Use conditional questions for specific request types.
Who should manage the marketing intake process?
Assign an intake owner with enough visibility and authority to evaluate, route, and escalate work. Depending on team size, this may be a marketing operations lead, project manager, chief of staff, team lead, or rotating senior marketer.
How often should marketing review new requests?
Many teams benefit from a set cadence, such as twice weekly. The right frequency depends on request volume and business pace. Define a separate escalation rule for genuine urgent needs.
What is the difference between intake and project management?
Intake determines whether and how work should enter the system. Project management coordinates approved work through execution. A project should not begin before the intake decision is complete.
Final thought
A marketing intake process is not a digital suggestion box.
It is the point where marketing decides whether a request becomes work, what problem the work must solve, and what the organization is willing to trade for it.
That is not administration.
That is ownership.
Intake governance is one of the clearest signals of marketing maturity. Take The Strat Desk Architecture™ Diagnostic to see where your system stands and what to build next.