3 great reasons to introduce a marketing approval workflow solution!

Jodie Byass — Monday the 6th of April, 2015

You've probably noticed there is a lot of banter around the industry about marketing technology, approval software and workflow solutions.   Has all this talk got you thinking about your own processes, and wondering if it is time to consider a solution for your organisation?

Well, here are 3 great reasons to introduce a marketing approval workflow solution.

1. Increase the speed and reduce the effort.

Faster internet speeds and proficient management platforms mean it’s never been easier to replace old marketing processes that rely on clunky email workflows. A marketing workflow solution will: 

• Provide a management framework for your marketing process immediately
• Guide your marketing team and agency through the briefing, creative and approval process, and offer flexibility to accommodate your unique process
• Automate your agency WIP report and provide high-level reports that snapshots the entirety of your marketing activity underway
• Allow you to ascertain individual workloads and progress at the click of a button taking the guess work out of managing resources. The capacity planning is done discreetly with a focus on the overall workload and skill sets so that you can organise your marketing campaigns to align with your team, or vice versa. 

2. Streamline your marketing approval process.

Marketing workflow solutions address workflow inefficiencies so that you can keep your approval process on track and on deadline: 

• Using email for marketing approvals means that team members need to repeatedly scan their inboxes to ascertain the correct information. A marketing solution, on the other hand, provides you with a sortable list that you can review by deadline or campaign to see exactly where you’re at in an instance.
• When reviewing a new revision, how much time have you wasted looking for your previous email to cross check changes? An effective solution would allow you to simply compare revisions side-by-side with comments and markups.
• Describing changes using text is timely and leaves room for ambiguity. Online markups makes it easier to communicate changes visually and, therefore, less information gets lost in translation.
• Getting internal feedback from other stakeholders (Product, Legal) can be difficult. With a marketing workflow solution, circulating marketing assets inside your organisation is managed and the collation of feedback is automated. You simply need to select the internal feedback you want to include, add your input and respond to your agency (or internal production).

3. Reduce risk and improve marketing compliance.

Getting compliance approval can be difficult but it’s a necessity. Gaining compliance without a marketing workflow solution, though, can be like grinding gears with cogs out of sync. An approval workflow can solve compliance issues: 

• In the absence of deadline management, it’s difficult to avoid last minute stress, which impacts on the quality of the review and introduces risk. By managing deadlines with an effective approval workflow, you will reduce compliance risks. 
• In a rush to go to market, sometimes marketing *slips through* without compliance approval. Fixed approval paths ensure that the required stakeholders always approve the content prior to it going to market giving you and your team peace of mind.
• Legal departments feel like it’s ground hog day when they continually have to remind the marketers about the same issues. Checklists can be inserted into your approval workflow prior to sending anything to Legal to make sure the basics have been covered off. Approval checklists can also be part of the final approval as a safeguard.

Creative agencies go to great lengths to give their creatives the time and space to be creative, largely by separating them from the day-to-day chaos. As the seeds for their creativity come from your brief, it’s also important that you have the headspace to initiate the ideas that separate you from your competitors. Automate the basics to provide your marketing team with more time and Zen to be creative.

Next Steps: Assign a team member or business analyst to research workflow solutions.  A good place to start would be to read the following article -  Understanding-marketing-approval-workflow 

Or download our whitepaper - Selecting the Right Marketing Approval and Workflow Software.