Brand management has evolved — it’s no longer a small-scale activity managed by a single person or two. And as brands went digital, digital marketing became the focus. To easily take on the challenges of the quickly-swelling market competition and sky-rocketing customer expectations, we can’t stress enough the importance of evolving the building blocks working behind brand management.
Digital marketing workflows are crucial — they influence the implementation of your brand marketing strategy by controlling the time-to-market for your digital assets and the content you use to take your brand message across — and every brand uses workflows in some way or other to meet its targets. The problem is — the old workflows are not effective anymore, and inefficient workflows can be a burden for the process rather than a solution.
Transforming your digital marketing workflows according to the evolving branding and project management needs is the key to being at the top of your game. It’s no longer enough to simply have digital marketing workflows for your brand. Your workflow has to go above and beyond to ensure everyone can work efficiently and with as few snags as possible.
This is where sophisticated, automated workflows come into the picture, helping to cope with approvals and branches, and considerably reducing the pressure on content design and development teams.
Suggested reading: Brand management itself is something that’s constantly changing — get to grips with the tips you should take up this year with our blog, 7 Brand Management Tips for 2022.
They’re tailored to your needs
If your team members are still sacrificing time and productivity to fit into your workflows, it’s time to wear your decision-makers hat and change things up. Effective brand asset production processes are now dynamic and evolving continuously according to the changing requirements. Trying to fit them into an old, static workflow map isn’t going to help your development or marketing team in any way. If your graphic designer is still waiting days just for the approval of their latest design, your system needs an immediate upgrade that fits into your team’s requirements, not the other way around.
Two essential features offered by modern workflows include,
- Dynamic: Thankfully, the latest technology-driven digital marketing workflows are no longer static — where you have to adapt how you work to fit the software you’ve invested in. Instead, they let you create a workflow that suits your process. The primary objectives of the software are to:
- Improve your process efficiency
- Eliminate waste
- Increase ROI — rather than spending your resources to make the software work, which will indirectly add more to your investment.
- Bespoke: Every business has its unique way of working, and there’s no ‘one size fits all’ solution when it comes to developing or marketing brand assets. You need a workflow that’s customised according to your business process and doesn’t try to mould you into its predetermined structure instead. Modern workflows ought to be bespoke to what you need. It’ll take into account that all businesses work differently and should not have to sacrifice productivity to adapt to a new solution.
So, look for digital marketing workflows that actually listen to what you need and cater to you. A smart solution can be the key to achieving your marketing goals more seamlessly while helping you to gain higher ROI on your brand assets.
You get a bird’s eye view of your workflows
Keeping track of what your team members are doing, as well as the individual performance of every member, is one of the biggest challenges you’ll face as a brand manager. Large teams, multiple people working on the same project, plus hybrid working from different locations — all make the task even more complicated to supervise manually.
To ensure that your teams are working efficiently while helping the brand to achieve its long- and short-term goals, you need the right technology to back you up. There is only so much manual monitoring a brand manager can do, and modern workflows are the solution you need to save time so that you can focus on more important aspects of the process — like implementing your gorgeous new assets in your brand strategy.
- Streamline: A modern workflow that combines the power of AI with a user-friendly interface can streamline the approval process, making it more efficient and productive while reducing unnecessary pressure on your design team. A bird’s-eye view of your workflow — covering everything that’s going on in the process — can make the whole task so much easier while eliminating any need for micro managing.
- Identify bottlenecks: A comprehensive bird’s-eye view of your total work process can be advantageous in more ways than one. On top of helping you to keep track of the process, it will also give you the power to proactively identify any bottlenecks that might be delaying your project. Modern digital marketing workflows enable you to easily pause the less urgent tasks and prioritise the pressing ones easily and more efficiently.
They can cope with endless branches
As marketing moves online, the need for developing more brand assets has grown exponentially. Several social media platforms, many of which ask for unique content formats, have propelled brands to create more brand marketing assets than ever. For truly effective social media management, brands need unique, high-quality content in large numbers. Hence, for a lot of companies, there’s no longer any value in a simple back-and-forth process that takes days to conclude. The solution? Sophisticated approval workflows.
- Branching workflows: To keep up with the increasing demand for brand assets and the need to involve multiple teams, the process often branches off to other directions based on a decision. A modern workflow can efficiently handle endless branches in a process, ensuring there’s no gap. Detailed, branching workflows that can loop back into the original workflow seamlessly will deliver actual value for your brand.
- Encourage creativity: In the world of social media, timing is vital. A delayed social media workflow means missing out on valuable opportunities that your competitors won’t miss. Branching workflows give your team more flexibility than back-and-forth systems and encourage creativity, helping develop more creative assets within less time. This ensures that all your digital marketing projects are backed by the best content and are delivered on time.
They centralise all approvals
Approvals are critical for brand consistency, and cutting corners in the approval process means risking your brand image. At the same time, manually approving everything is not the solution because then it becomes a bottleneck, and nothing gets done. On top of that, when your team has steep deadlines to meet, lengthy approval processes can be a point of stress for your team. Having to email or even print assets for approval results in things getting missed out on and only elongates the process.
- Centralise: If your approval processes are not yet centralised, you are certainly missing out on the latest technology. When you create an approval process that’s totally centralised, you ensure quick and efficient production of your brand assets. It saves time and streamlines the total process, making it much easier for both your designer and your manager to get the work done in a jiffy.
Modern workflows allow you to approve everything in one place with the click of a button. An advanced BMS provides an integrated, centralised platform that:
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- Houses all your brand assets
- Lets you provide feedback and approvals on the same platform
This means you can permanently say bye to the back-and-forth approval process without cutting corners.
- Streamline approvals: Creating great content often involves input from multiple people. Doing this without a centralised approval workflow system invariably leads to a long email thread nightmare. This is not only difficult to follow and implement but also carries the risk of missing out on the most important suggestions.
Centralised workflows mean all the feedback and suggestions are added directly to the content, making it straightforward to follow through and implement. What’s more, they also store and audit all interactions for compliance and keep a clear record of all the updates and edits.
Suggested reading: There are tons of challenges that can come about in brand management, but there are a few key ones to look out for — find out what they are (and how to tackle them) with our blog 4 Brand Management Challenges Not to Underestimate.
Make modern workflows the default
The digital market is super competitive. To grab a place in this quickly growing yet saturated market, all your background processes need to be efficient and ROI-focused. You need the latest technology to make it all work and align with your business goals. Workflows might seem like a small piece of your overall marketing campaigns, but they determine the efficiency of your content production team, thus controlling a seamless implementation of all your marketing campaigns.
Modern digital marketing workflows like Brandworkz are totally centralised and automated. They are customised and monitored by a team of experts to fit into your process and improve efficiency. They provide a concise yet comprehensive, single-point view of your total process and are designed to cope with endless branches. Plus, they centralise all approvals, streamline and reduce stress on your team.
To know more about how Brandworkz digital marketing workflows can improve your process, book a demo today!
