It’s a simple fact, marketing has always been important for any business to drive sales, improve brand awareness and achieve success. Today, it’s more important than ever in times where a competitive market expects more innovation, more creativity, and better engagement.
But here’s the problem, it isn’t getting any easier. Marketers have to deal with countless meetings, tighter deadlines, and increasing demands, all while they have to manage their workflow and monitor campaigns to deliver the results clients, or their business demand.
Because of this, it’s increasingly important that teams have an efficient marketing approval process to better manage their campaigns and streamline the workflow.
But what exactly is a marketing approval workflow and why do you need one? Here, we’ll look at these questions in more detail and some of the benefits it offers.
In simple terms, a marketing approval workflow is a simple series of steps you follow to develop a marketing campaign or project. In other words, it’s the road map that leads you from the moment you receive a brief until final approval of the campaign and it includes all the steps in between like gathering feedback, comparing old and new versions updated by design teams, and making sure all the right stakeholders sign off before the deadline.
So, when you design your marketing approval workflow you determine all the steps and identify all the dependencies, rules, and requirements that will take your project from its inception to its completion.
A marketing approval process or marketing workflow is a systematic series of steps designed to review and authorise marketing strategies, budgets, and creative materials before execution. This process ensures that all marketing efforts align with brand guidelines, comply with regulatory standards, and maintain a high level of quality. It involves a coordinated effort between content creators, executive staff, and internal and external stakeholders, ensuring that every piece of marketing material is thoroughly vetted and approved before it goes live. By implementing a robust marketing approval process, teams can avoid costly mistakes, maintain brand integrity, and deliver consistent, high-quality marketing campaigns.
Marketing teams face unique challenges from communication breakdowns to endless meetings, missed deadlines, demands from clients and other departments, project calendars, and much more. Add to that the fact that marketing is moving at a furious pace and that a good idea for a campaign today, might be out of date tomorrow and it gets even more complicated.
Effective collaboration between internal and external teams is crucial to streamline the marketing processes, project management and ensure timely approvals.
To solve this, it’s necessary to have a approval process in place that can streamline marketing project management. Here, a strong marketing approval process and workflow can help and can contribute in the following ways:
It keeps your team on the same page. Workflows help your team to know what they need to do when they need to do it, and what or who their work depends on. They’re able to see the status of every project and every team member knows what is required of them. It also helps to make collaboration between team members easier when everyone is on the same page (or screen).
Navigating the marketing approval process can be fraught with challenges. Delayed responses from key stakeholders can stall progress, while unclear roles and responsibilities often lead to confusion and inefficiencies. Inconsistent or conflicting feedback can derail a project, making it difficult to achieve a cohesive final product. Loose version control can result in outdated or incorrect materials being used, and fragmented communication channels can cause important information to be missed. These obstacles not only slow down the approval process but can also compromise the quality and timeliness of marketing campaigns. Addressing these issues is crucial for maintaining an efficient and effective marketing approval process and workflow.
Creating an efficient approval process is essential for marketing teams to operate smoothly and effectively. Here are some key steps to achieve this:
Using approval workflow software can significantly streamline this process, enhancing collaboration and ensuring compliance. By following these steps, marketing, legal and compliance teams can create a more efficient approval process that minimizes delays and maximizes productivity.
Your marketing workflow will typically start with a brief. Once the brief is received, you’ll start by listing all the tasks required for the project and arranging them in a logical order. Here, you include all the tasks for all the types of content that you’ll use in the marketing campaign from blog posts to email newsletters and website copy.
Ensuring that all marketing materials are accurate and truthful is crucial for maintaining compliance and consumer trust.
Next, you’ll need to list who is responsible for each task and identify any new roles in the process. This will help identify which team members you need, define their responsibilities, and eliminate confusion. You’ll for example consider all types of roles, like:
Once you’ve identified the people who’ll do the work, you’ll have to identify the time it will take for the tasks to be completed. These times are vital and if you need a realistic workflow, you’ll need realistic timeframes. If you don’t have them, you’ll set unrealistic deadlines that people can’t meet. A realistic timeline also helps you to schedule projects and gives you an idea of your team’s availability to work on the project.
When you’ve completed this step, you need someone to make sure the workflow runs smoothly, so you could ask a manager to manage and monitor the workflow for you. For your workflow to be effective and organize your team, and to make sure the process runs efficiently every team member needs to understand the process and be on board with it. This makes sure that bottlenecks in the process are eliminated, and conflicts between schedules are a thing of the past, which, in turn, means that the project is completed on time the first time.
A streamlined marketing approval workflow can make a world of difference in the efficiency and effectiveness of your marketing projects. Here’s a simple four-step process to follow:
By following this four-step workflow, you can ensure that your marketing approval process is efficient and that your final product meets all necessary standards and expectations.
As an example of an approval workflow, we’ll use a simple social media workflow example. Once you receive the brief, your social strategist can do some research to find internal blogs, videos, or other content to promote.
A well-structured marketing content approval process is essential for ensuring that all marketing content that meets the necessary standards and is approved in a timely manner.
When this piece of content has been identified, your marketing team will need to build a social sharing schedule around the content during which you share the content more than one time over a couple of weeks.
When the content creation schedule is set, the social strategist or a writer can write the copy that will accompany the content that you?ll share. After the content is written, you’ll have to decide what images you’ll insert in the posts. Here, a designer may be necessary to develop the graphics.
Once everything is done, either you or the client will need to approve the content before the social campaign is launched. After launch, an analyst and your social media strategist will have to spend some time monitoring and engaging with the posts on social media. Because these analytics can help you improve the strategy, the analyst and marketing managers will have to do a report on the effectiveness of the campaign.
In just this simple workflow, you need a social media strategist, a designer, a writer, a marketing manager, and an analyst. Now, for larger campaigns, you can appreciate that they’ll need much more skilled experts and that the process can become more involved to manage. This is where marketing approval workflow software comes in.
Marketing approval workflow software takes the tedious administration out of managing your marketing approval processes and workflow process. It offers you a central location or tool to save and track all your project briefs, documents and feedback, creating a clear and accurate audit trail along the way.
Also, it lets you use unique approval pathways and allow users to run daily and weekly revision reports as well as a built-in resource management feature that makes allocating tasks to your team easier. So, in simple terms, it centralizes all your marketing projects, documents, assets, designs, feedback, messaging, and processes in one hub. This frees up both your and your team's time and frees up time for the team to do what they do best, being more creative. This means your workflow is more streamlined, more efficient, and saves you time and money.
Speeding up your marketing projects without compromising quality is crucial. Here are some tips to help you achieve this:
By implementing these tips and using approval workflow software, marketing teams can streamline their marketing asset approval process, enhance collaboration, and ensure compliance, ultimately leading to faster and more efficient marketing projects.
Considering this, it’s easy to see why marketing approval workflow software is so beneficial. When the marketing approval process falls into decentralization, it can lead to inefficiencies and communication gaps, making it difficult to manage marketing approvals more effectively. Some of the most common benefits you’ll get by using this software are:
In order to deliver the highest quality campaigns that stay relevant and give the best results your marketing approval process should be on point. This can be tough to manage but the perfect way to streamline your workflow is by using marketing approval workflow software. Its benefits are numerous and the value it adds to your marketing approval process is profound.
So, if you'd like to learn more about the benefits of our marketing and marketing content approval process and workflow software book a free discovery session today!