Your marketing team hub can be as expansive, detailed, and cross-functional as you need. But to get started, focus on two essentials:

• A starting foundation of centralized context
  
• An end-to-end pilot project that runs from planning all the way through launch
  

1. Choose your pilot team

While you can opt to roll out your marketing hub department-wide, starting with a single team allows you to launch small, refine processes, and build the buy-in needed for broader adoption.

When selecting your pilot team, consider these factors:

• Can their use cases be replicated across other teams and the wider marketing org?
  
• Do they meaningfully contribute to multiple stages of the marketing lifecycle—planning, creation, launch, and measurement?
  
• Does their work require cross-functional alignment, approvals, and workflows? (You don’t want to start too complex, but your pilot team should represent the real-world complexity of marketing work.)
  

Recommendation: Start with content marketing. Content marketing teams are well positioned to be pilot teams as they often work cross-functionally, connect insights from across the organization, and work within the workflows and timelines of campaigns.

2. Create your team’s home for context

Your hub’s ultimate output will be predictable campaign launches and consistently on-brand content. To make that possible, you’ll need to centralize and standardize the information teams reference during planning, reviews, and collaboration.

Much of this information likely already exists—but it’s often scattered across tools, documents, and systems. Start with the essentials, then layer on more over time. You don’t need to import everything at once. Organize by category, and make it easy to search and navigate.

Example (for content marketing):
Common context-setting information might include:

Team member roles and responsibilities

Using context cards, highlight the members of your team and what they do. This creates at-a-glance insight for cross-functional partners and allows you to easily select task and workstream owners in creation and launch phases.  

Corporate narrative, messaging and positioning, persona playbooks, etc.

Using docs, create a library of the top-line documentation team members should be referencing regularly across their work.

Brand standards

Using docs, centralize your brand style guide, tone guidance, and design standards in one place. 
Best practice: Import your style guide and brand tones into Grammarly to deploy these standards proactively wherever your team writes.

3. Create your pilot project brief

Every project should tie back to the foundational strategy and resources in your team’s home. The best way to do this is by creating a standardized project brief that pulls in key components from your shared context above. For instance, if corporate narrative pillars or persona-based messaging are core parts of your strategy, they should be documented in your team's home and referenced appropriately in every brief. 

This approach ensures no project starts from scratch and that every campaign builds as an extension of a single, unified strategy. Once created, you can leverage your hub’s AI assistant to draft briefs faster and then turn them into living documents that stakeholders can easily comment on, update, and reference throughout the project lifecycle.

4. Set up your first tracker

Once you’ve identified your pilot team and project, the next step is to determine which elements of the project are most important to track to provide the necessary visibility for meeting launch deadlines but also, just as important, driving real-time alignment. Your hub should make it easy for the team to stay focused on the work that truly drives outcomes.

In this pilot phase, the key is to start simple and actionable. Focus only on the metrics and deliverables that define success—too much detail creates noise and slows adoption. Start lean, then expand tracking as the team gets comfortable and as you learn what drives the most value.

5. Integrate priority tools

Your hub becomes even more powerful when it connects with the tools your team already relies on. Start by integrating one or two priority platforms—ideally ones that the largest number of team members will reference the most. These priority integrations will make the biggest impact to unify your workflow, eliminate context switching for your team, and further position your hub as your team’s central source of truth.

Consider these categories when determining which tools to integrate first:

• Project management tools (Asana, Monday.com, ClickUp) to sync tasks, deadlines, and ownership
  
• Content creation tools (Figma, Google Docs, Miro) to keep creative assets and copy aligned with strategy
  
• Analytics platforms (Mixpanel, Looker, Salesforce) to bring performance data directly into planning and reviews
  

6. Run productive team meetings

Your hub isn’t just for projects—it should also power your team’s meetings. By grounding your team calls in the same place you manage work, action items can flow directly into ongoing projects, closing the gap between discussion and execution. Using pre-made but customizable meeting templates, you can create agendas in advance, capture notes in real time, and assign action items directly in the hub. This turns meeting notes into searchable references that anyone can revisit with clear documentation that anyone can revisit, reducing the need to rehash old conversations.