In today?s digital world, marketing teams are under the pump more than they have ever been before. The average marketer is producing 75% more content than they were this time last year while also trying to juggle an average of 6 social media sites at once. Add marketing campaigns, projects, and people management to the mix and it?s no wonder that marketers are feeling stretched for time when it comes to meeting their deadlines.
Getting marketing campaigns approved and to market as quickly as possible can be crucial to optimising on consumer targeting, behaviour or even a certain time of the year. Too often marketing campaigns are delayed because of a confusion in communication, lack of process, or breakdown of who is meant to be working on what at any given time. That?s where marketing workflow management software can come in.
Marketing management software helps streamline your marketing processes, making them more efficient in a central, online solution that can be used across different teams, departments, and even external clients and organisations. Gone are the days of wasting time passing individual documents to other departments or making sure someone else has passed on the right version. Marketing management software allows marketers, social media experts, designers, management, clients, remote staff, and even lawyers to access marketing assets and projects in the one, centralised hub. Ensuring that deadlines, feedback, messages, approval, and even compliance are managed in a more streamlined and efficient way.
Here are just a few ways an online approval workflow could help you save time on admin and processes, making it more likely for you to meet your deadlines and get your projects to market sooner.
Online briefs prove all the relevant information at once
Starting a project with a brief across text messages, emails, online chats, or even in-person conversations means that when your creative team is ready to start looking at a new brief, the chances are that some of its meaning as already been lost in translation.
Having a proper briefing process can already save you time, by providing your creative team with all the information they need upfront. An efficient project starts with all the relevant information, has a consistent brief across projects, includes necessary assets, and even sets calendar deadlines for different departments and areas to make sure each section of work is completed on time.
Centralised proofing and feedback removes unnecessary steps or repetitive changes
Receiving feedback via the one online channel gives all necessary stakeholders visibility over what people have said, as well as what changes are already being made. This can help remove duplicate changes and reduce the risk of conflicting information.
Adding approval tiers before giving something back to the designer also means that you can collate a downloadable feedback report with changes from every relevant stakeholder. This creates a single source of truth for the design team when it comes to actioning changes.
Integrated workflow software also makes design feedback easy to navigate with visual mark ups. Rather than having to upload your design assets elsewhere for revisions, or everyone needing to have a design program installed to be able to suggest feedback on visual marketing such as graphic design, images, videos and more, these changes can all be made and marked on the design within the same platform. This makes it easier to decipher feedback and reduces errors by knowing what exact changes need to be made.
Version control makes it easy to create content for testing campaigns or different platforms
Too many artwork changes can lead to a high revision count and additional versions of your digital assets floating around, leaving more room for error when it comes to the final product or version. Online approval workflows let you batch feedback together rather than having to make incremental changes to similar documents. This can help keep revision counts down as well as control different versions of the same design when they are intended for different platforms, such a banner ads vs social ads.
You can easily duplicate campaigns once the text is approved to use as templates for similar ad designs, and add variations to test across platforms or audiences. All your digital assets will be stored on the same platform to keep version control and variation easy to manage and archive once your project is complete.
Involving the right stakeholders at the right stage will help save you time
Think about what your workflow looks like: which departments need to be involved, and at what stage they need to be involved.
Having a predetermined workflow that involves different departments and stakeholders at the correct time can reduce the number of revisions or the chance of unnecessary double handling. There?s no point getting legal or marketing compliance approval before the creative, including headlines or imagery, is finalised. If content is sent to the wrong team at the wrong time in the process, there is every chance that they will need to review or approve the content a second or third time, wasting valuable resources and time in meeting your deadlines or getting your campaign to market.
Reminders keep everyone accountable
Chasing up team members, other departments, or even clients for assets or approval can be tedious and time consuming. Most marketing workflow software will have built-in system notifications and reminders. You can set deadlines for different individuals or teams so everyone can be notified of when their specific deliverables are due, removing the need to manually send emails to remind someone of an upcoming deadline.
Reviewing and refining reporting can help you improve your processes for next time
Workflow software should be able to provide a range of reports that allow you to review and analyse the workflow for any project. We know that sometimes not everything goes to plan, and this sort of data gives you the opportunity to analyse what is working or what the bottlenecks or delays were. Admation's revision report provides a summary of the number of revisions for each project, which can help teams understand which content or creative took longer. Meaning that you can improve your processes in the future to produce more campaigns on time and get them to market faster.
Head over to admation's deep dive into Marketing Workflow Management Software to learn more about the benefits of a centralised online approval workflow.
