The stakes have never been higher for marketers and agencies to produce striking content efficiently. There are also more challenges than ever to the content production process because the number of channels have increased dramatically.
“[Content] plays a critical role in attracting new customers as well as fostering existing customer relationships,” said Anthony Welgemoed, founder and CEO of creative work software company Ziflow at The MarTech Conference. “It also sets the brand apart from competitors and visually demonstrates a broader purpose or mission. And when brands and agencies produce great creative, it makes an impact.”
Here are three major challenges to content creation and how to overcome them.
1: Scattered feedback
In order to produce content as a team, all hands have to be on deck. With more people involved, however, feedback can come from anywhere and gunk up the content production if the feedback isn’t orderly.
“A fundamental part of our creative process is getting feedback on all our creative assets,” said Welgemoed. “It’s mission critical for us to get fast, relevant, accurate feedback. Without this, we can’t deliver great work, and we certainly can’t deliver that work quickly.”
He added, “Unfortunately, the process that most teams use to manage all the feedback is broken and often badly broken.”
Solution. Determine a single destination for feedback and establish clear systems of record that welcome feedback.
“The team should be clear and specific when providing feedback, and the feedback should be precise,” Welgemoed said. “Identify the exact location page or frame of the creative asset and what changes are required. Solving these challenges provides richer feedback to the creator and gives them the autonomy to deliver their best work.”
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2: Lack of visibility
Content creators lose valuable time tracking down the feedback mentioned in the previous challenge. This can be due to an overall lack of visibility into the content project and its workflow.
“Increasing visibility and control across asset management may seem overwhelming, but teams can easily improve collaboration with some of these tips,” said Ryan Dunagan, Ziflow’s vice president of marketing.
Solution. Define the project with a summary of what assets the campaign will include.
“Give everyone involved in an overview, including the purpose of the campaign, assets required, the goal [for the campaign], and milestones with the right information,” said Dunagan.
Also, keep the assets organized.
“This one is easier said than done,” Dunagan cautioned. “Don’t let brainstorms and multiple versions get out of control. Organize assets and relevant files while collaborating so the most up-to-date version and historical look [of the assets] are easily accessible. Staying organized will help teams to recall what worked and what didn’t in the future.”
To increase visibility even further, provide version transparency so team members can see the evolution of a project and what decisions were made along the way.
Finally, appoint a person on the team who will make the final decision about an asset to avoid stalemates and project fatigue.
3: Adapting to change
Buyers’ demands have changed. They look for more content across a larger number of digital channels, plus they require a cohesive experience across these channels. These changing demands, in turn, force marketing teams to produce more content at a higher rate, often with the same number of people on the team, or with a reduction in staff.
“And to compound these challenges, a survey of marketing teams indicated that nearly half of their technology goes unused, which makes reaching the true potential of these tools impossible,” said Welgemoed.
Solution. Map out the creative workflow. Make sure the tools that are used to create assets are integrated in a way that mirrors the creative production process.
“These amazing platforms typically come with really great native integration capabilities,” Welgemoed said. “Teams can maximize business investment while adapting to changes by finding vendors that integrate with where they already are. [Creative teams should] look at existing systems and their available integrations.”
He added, “Connected systems have the added benefit of improving adoption across the organization and ultimately speeding up project delivery.”
These improvements to the creative process will help make the team more adaptable as the content landscape continues to grow more complicated and demanding. Meeting these challenges also sets up the marketing team for success in a remote work environment, when team members are looking to collaborate efficiently using remote, digital tools.
Deliver exceptional creative, faster from Third Door Media on Vimeo.
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