What if you stripped away everything from your team that was not creative? All the unproductive meetings, the constant messaging trying to figure out what’s going on, digging through loads of email conversations to figure out what you’re supposed to be doing, chasing down projects – all vanished! What if your team had everything it needed at its fingertips? They knew what they were supposed to be doing and when – and was running at capacity, but not over capacity, and could truly focus on doing their best work for each project. This state of utopia is possible today, but not many teams have the right structure in place to accomplish this bliss.
Content has become the secret ingredient for brands with a story to tell, but in most organizations the content lifecycle is still splintered from the ideation to creation process, management, and delivery across channels. Our average enterprise customer, performing B2B marketing, produces 13 different types of content, in over 23 different channels. Each of these variations require content to be adapted for format and context. Because of this, the volume and variety of content being produced is massive and increases the difficulty of managing and creating content. This is clearly taking away from creative teams’ ability to be creative.
In addition, there are a growing number of gaps in workflows, between sources of content and systems, where content is used or distributed. Most of these platforms are “best-of-breed,” meaning they are not integrated with other systems. In many organizations, manual effort is required to kick-off new work, find assets needed to start that work, manage workflows and approvals, and store and distribute the content created.
With limited resources in an increasingly complex landscape, marketers are at risk of falling into the marketing operation gap as they attempt to deliver engaging brand experiences that today’s consumers demand. As customer expectations expand, so do marketing challenges. Creating personalized content that delivers a consistent message and exceptional experience is complicated. It’s impossible to keep up using traditional marketing methods without creating this experience gap. Modern marketers not only need to change how they are marketing but change how they go to market and produce the work they are creating as well. Creatives often experience a sense of tunnel vision as their main priority is creating content but it is important for creatives to think of content in terms of the entire content lifecycle. For some reason, there is still resistance to the idea of activity management, automated workflows and digitized approvals. It is time for creative minds to put resistance aside and embrace the power of streamlined marketing resource management!
It’s time to create without the crazy!
What if you could:
- Collaborate globally on one platform
- Stop the emotionally draining review cycle
- Remove the “who, what, when, where, why and how” questions
- Manage your digital assets and increase findability
- Collaborate globally on a single platform
Communication and collaboration are a challenge for most marketing teams. A siloed organization breeds duplicated efforts, wasted resources and contrasting processes. If marketing activities are not aligned with the strategic goals of the organization, the result is ad-hoc efforts that create internal chaos. To facilitate communication and collaboration in a structured way, it is time to tear down those cubicle walls, figuratively speaking, and expand your office on a global scale by adopting a single source of truth that unifies all marketing activity and becomes a one-stop-shop for communication. By using one unified MRM platform, team members can communicate, collaborate, track responses and stay connected in real-time on any project.
- Stop the emotionally draining review cycle
Nothing zaps a creative team’s talent quite like editing an asset twelve times before it’s
approved. The never-ending review and approval cycle creates confusion, negatively impacts schedules, increases potential for human error and, ultimately, does affect revenue. To shorten cycle times, eliminate errors and maximize revenue potential, implement an automated process that includes intelligent workflows, reminders, enterprise-wide calendars and key reference material. Standardizing the review process allows the organization to identify—and then implement— best practices, so your team knows what works and continues doing it.
- Remove the 5W Questions:
Creative teams are brilliant at creating meaningful content, but if they are consistently chasing after answers to basic questions such as, “Who is writing the copy for this piece?,” “What are the specs for this ad?,” or “When will the creative director submit her feedback?,” their frustrations mount and projects consequently suffer.
Having a flexible and dynamic marketing operations platform eliminates the basic
information-gathering stage and empowers all employees to work and create within predefined
parameters. It begins with a best-practice template that automates workflows, tasks, notifications, dates and assigned individuals. Automating projects and activities intelligently keeps each task on track, increases the ability to collaborate, prevents bottlenecks, assigns and re-assigns resources in real-time and frees marketers to focus on the next big customer engagement experience instead of on deadlines.
- Manage your digital assets and increase findability
Creative teams see a blank page and imagine its limitless possibilities, but in today’s chaotic marketing ecosystem, starting from scratch is not always a viable option. Having the ability to access all versions of brand assets is essential, whether your intention is to re-purpose, reference or prove compliance.
Give your creative team what it needs by storing, sharing and managing assets in an
easily accessible and searchable repository, known as a digital asset management (DAM) solution. Marketers can then act with speed and agility when responding to external factors, such as an audit. Since assets are stored in a central location, a DAM, everyone can access approved, current and compliant versions of all marketing collateral.
A complete MRM platform should include:
- Seamless integration for content, operations and performance
- Modular packages to allow you to build your “just-right” MRM solution
- Concierge services that enable you to start strong and constantly improve
Aprimo offers an intelligently automated marketing resource management platform that is built by marketers for marketers that not only keeps your creative team, and the CEO, happy, but also yields these advantages:
- Faster speed-to-market
- Increased efficiency & productivity
- Enhanced global collaboration
- More campaigns in market
- Higher quality of content
- Brand governance & compliance
- Optimized & automated activity management
In conclusion, building a solid process is essential to your creative teams’ productivity, happiness and success. Having a strong foundation that connects with the right marketing technologies is the key to speeding up and smoothing out workflows, and more importantly, ensuring that your audiences has a consistent experience, no matter where you connect with them.