Online bookmaker, Sportsbet, operates a thriving internal creative studio that creates marketing materials and creative assets so its marketing team can send out a constant flow of messaging across digital and traditional marketing channels. Sportsbet prides itself on its responsiveness and needed a better way of managing marketing requests and streamlining its marketing workflow.
The studio and design team was also facing a challenge that is becoming increasingly common as companies bring more and more digital, social and content marketing activity in-house: how to manage the ever-increasing volume of marketing requests it was receiving. As many as 400 jobs go through Sportsbet’s internal creative department each month, according to Sportsbet Head of Design Scott Walker.
Standardising requests and streamlining marketing workflow
Sportsbet was looking to standardise, streamline and improve internal marketing requests and workflow management processes, while preserving the agility and speed at which the team was able to operate.
The company was also keen to improve how marketing stakeholders requested marketing through improved briefing, as well as to increase visibility into marketing, and to generate efficiencies in the creative workflow process — particularly when it came to passing jobs between staff.
To address these issues, Sportsbet implemented Jobs in Simple, which was designed to help marketers manage small jobs and always-on marketing activity. (Complex, multi-faceted campaigns can be handled in Projects in Simple).
Improving stakeholder briefing
“We had a challenge with briefing in our old system,” Walker said. “There were no briefing templates or anything we could put in there to say, ‘This is what we require’.
“As a result we’d see variable standards of briefing,” he said. “A lot of back-and-forth was happening on email.”
Simple’s marketing operations platform enables customers to standardise briefing through the use of customised forms.
“Every job will require a brief to be filled out in Simple,” Walker said. “That will include prompts asking requestors to fill out fields they may not have thought about.”
Maximising productivity
Sportsbet will also use Simple to reduce inefficiencies when it comes to managing handovers for work that changes designers mid-project, and for tracking the flow of work from creation to approval via a digital kanban-style board, as well as to help with Marketing Operations Cloud.
“We will use Simple Jobs to share the workload and the Workflow view to track the stage we’re at in a job,” Walker said. “If someone’s workload is too great, they can put a job back on the Jobs board.
“Previously, a designer might have been in one day, and away the next, and whoever picked up that job would spend quite a bit of time trying to find where they were at,” he said.
“A lot of time was wasted looking for creative jobs and where they were at, and tracking feedback,” Walker said. “In Simple, if something’s been started and there’s feedback in there, we can send it to another designer because it’s all captured in the job.”
Marketing process improvement
Sportsbet prides itself on being able to respond quickly to live events, such as a horse being scratched from a race.
“We do 80% of our work in-house,” Walker said. “Working at pace and being agile is one of our strengths. We don’t ever want to lose that.”
He said marketers should regularly examine their processes to make sure they were keeping up with the standard consumers expect.
“Unless you step back and look at your processes, you just keep doing them,” Walker said. “We were looking at how we could make things easier.”
Increasing marketing visibility, transparency and productivity
There were also benefits for the rest of the business, including greater visibility into the creative marketing process, more efficient use of approved assets, greater transparency and better reporting.
“It was giving stakeholders the resources to be better at requesting creative, and giving them visibility as well.
“We can also re-use existing assets, and share our assets better among teams so you’re not spending time trying to get a working file.”
“Transparency itself is a goal,” Walker said, “getting a clearer picture on the volume of work and the time to market so we can set some team KPIs.”
To find out how Simple can help your marketing team manage requests and be more agile, book a demo.
