By Martyn Perry, Creative Director, Screendragon.
In marketing it’s these differences which tend to separate a great campaign from a forgettable one, they can create the gap between either thanking the wine-waiter or your mother at this years B2B Marketing Awards 2013 and most importantly they can make the distinction on the balance sheet as to whether brackets need to be drawn around the numbers.
Successful marketing is dependent on ideas, and creative by its definition means the imagination of an original idea. Yet, many marketing teams are left to their own devices in the creative process or forced to use a technology system designed for more operational departments.
Today, the rise of digital marketing channels and the short attention span of an over-exposed consumer means marketing teams are under added pressure to create the next ‘big’ campaign, a campaign to propel a brand into the hall of fame. This pressure has meant many company’s now want to structure the creative process, while reducing costs and cutting down the marketing lifecycle. But, the technology which has helped achieve this for many departments doesn’t sit quite right with a creative team.
Look around your marketing and artistic teams; are they all using the same system to collaborate? Should they even try or is freedom the essence of creativity? Research shows even enterprise software is 38% under-used, this increases to almost 100% when rolled out to creative teams. However, no company has come out unscathed from the financial strains of the recession and the boardroom wants return on investment (ROI). Technology can offer this and has done for many other departments such as HR, Finance and IT. We need Lean Marketing.
Under-collaboration slows the marketing lifecycle. It is a constant headache for CMOs and Marketing Directors under boardroom pressure to meet targets while ‘out-creating’ the competition. The consequences of under-collaboration and under-adoption are increased cost, missed deadlines, reduced productivity and brand asset security.
Here are three practical steps to tackle under-adoption and under-collaboration while leveraging technology:
1. Beauty is in the eye of the Stakeholder – If it doesn’t look good your creative team won’t use it. While IT compliant “battleship grey SnoozePoint” delivers well enough for the majority of the business, creative marketeers recognise one common denominator – under-adoption. Providing a technology solution designed by marketing professionals for marketing professionals greatly reduces under-adoption (by up to 91% in our experience).
2. Automation – Of course looks aren’t everything. You may have tackled under-adoption but without adding process your teams are on the same platform but not working together. Look at the way your team is working now and replicate a process we call Lean Marketing. Although not every project is the same many of the milestones within the marketing lifecycle are. Ensure that each team member is working to the same objective whether they are local, global or within an agency. Technology automates the repetitive aspects of the marketing process, allowing your teams more time to concentrate on the creative aspects which differentiate campaigns.
3. One step forward, two steps back – Another problem within the marketing lifecycle is asset replication. Each evolution of new visuals or marketing collateral means a new version. Without a technology solution, many creative teams are working on similar but not the same documents, saving them multiple times. By creating a single workspace for everyone involved in the process, this can be entirely eliminated. Now your creative team can spend more time working on what they want to work on instead of tracking down latest copies or misplaced files in formats they can’t read.
Although the three points above seem obvious many famous brands are unable to achieve them. Instead they use several technology solutions to tackle various aspects of the problems in marketing. This viscous circle has a reverse effect; teams still aren’t collaborating and the frustration creates further under-adoption. By understanding the differences which make your team able to produce award winning marketing you can meet the boardroom pressures to do more with less.
Giving you more time to go sweat the large stuff.
