A Creative Bottleneck is Costing Your Business

(And you may not even realize it!)

In my 20-year marketing career, I’ve seen many changes in how products are promoted and audiences engaged. The explosion of new marketing channels, such as social media, digital video, and content marketing, has created unprecedented demand for a constant flow of high quality, visually-creative content. The strain this new pressure places on creative teams makes it a critical issue for all marketing leaders, and if you don't solve it you could find your team is the limiting factor to your company's success.

Marketing automation has created a content bottleneck

As marketers, we now have more technologies than ever before to help us understand our customer's behaviors and preferences, communicate with them over any channel, and deliver a highly personalized experience, all while measuring ROI down to the penny. These capabilities have been a wonderful gift for marketers. However, the proliferation of marketing automation and analytics capabilities have created a new problem -- generating enough relevant content to fuel the marketing machine.

So marketers and their creative teams face a daily grind of feeding the content beast with new, personalized images, videos and web pages. And it’s not going to get any better. Content Marketing Institute’s 2017 B2C Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends study confirmed that 73% of companies plan on increasing the volume of content they create in the coming year.

While investments in marketing automation and analytics technology has been a boost for marketers, many organizations have under-invested in tools to help them optimize their creative collaboration process. Despite the fact that 75% of marketers say they don’t have an effective process, only 15% have invested in a system to drive collaboration with more effective creative review and approval tools.

The not-so hidden costs of a content bottleneck

The content bottleneck caused by a creative process that hasn’t seen any innovation since…well…email, isn’t just a problem for your marketing and creative teams. It also impacts your business in three significant ways:

1.   You’re wasting money

An inefficient creative collaboration process often leads to missed or unclear feedback and consequently additional work or – worse yet – more creative meetings. A University of Virginia report found that professionals spent 70-85% of their time dealing with feedback and approvals on content. When any member of your team’s time could be worth up to $200 an hour, this time spent fixing problems caused by a poor creative process becomes extremely expensive.

2.   You’re passing up valuable opportunities  

Better audience segmentation is about targeting potential customers with smarter and more relevant messages and content. But when bottlenecks prevent the creative team from delivering enough personalized content, you’re not taking full advantage of your marketing automation investments. A poor process also means unfinished creative has to be launched in order to meet deadlines, meaning expensive media spend doesn’t deliver expected results.

3.   You’re missing out on innovation

Adobe’s State of Create 2016 survey confirmed that 77% of creative professionals feel more pressure to be productive than creative. Inefficient creative review and approval cycles are stressful for the team, wasting their time sapping their energy and eroding their engagement. Which means they’re unlikely to produce the innovative creative ideas and breakthrough marketing campaigns that boost your business.

Creative process technology is the next evolution for Marketing

So why has the creative process not changed much from when I was emailing feedback and new versions back-and-forth in long, confusing threads back in the late 90s? And why do two-thirds of marketers still use email for creative review and approval even though only 30% say it’s up to the task?

Modern marketing and creative teams are often complex. 49% of businesses have small or one-person content marketing teams serving the entire organization. So it’s not surprising that more than half of marketing departments rely heavily on agencies and freelancers and most plan to increase their reliance on them.

For any technology process solution to be effective, it needs to be easy for everyone in these extended creative teams to adopt - from creatives, to marketers, to clients to executive stakeholders who need to review and sign off. It’s important that the tools are intuitive and feel conversational rather than overly structured or require a lot of training to get started.

The benefits of fixing your creative process

Fortunately, purpose-built solutions like Hightail that address this long standing pain of creative collaboration are rapidly gaining traction. And the benefits of adopting this technology are immediate and quantifiable.

While analytics and automation tools are certainly game-changers, without the fuel of great creative, they are powerless to lure new customers and engage existing users. Shattering the bottlenecks that delay the time it takes for content to go from concept to completion will save you money, help you take advantage of more opportunities for value, boost creative innovation and drive more revenue for your business.

Whatever else has changed about marketing since I launched my first campaign, that last part remains the ultimate goal of every marketing organization.