The marketing approval process might not sound glamorous, but it’s vital to creative agencies and brands when creating any type of marketing asset. Streamlining your marketing content approval process is essential to ensure your campaigns hit the market on time and with the desired impact.
The process of approving marketing assets can cover almost every aspect of marketing production, but it’s often a bottleneck for many agencies and brands.
Our 2020 Creative Production Benchmark Survey revealed that 42% of marketing leaders encountered project delays because internal stakeholders failed to provide feedback and comments on time.
However, despite the need for a more streamlined approval process, marketing leaders still use inefficient methods:
These figures underline the fact that there is much room for improvement in the marketing approval process.
So, in this guide, we’ll present you with a six step marketing approval process template to help you overcome the common obstacles faced by marketing teams and highlight how you can streamline the process further with the use of technology.
A marketing approval process evaluates all the creative and marketing assets from ideation to campaign launch and facilitates coordination and collaboration between the various stakeholders.
While the methods, activities, and people involved in creating and approving marketing assets are unique to each organization, the marketing approval process involves coordinating content creators (writers, graphic designers, videographers, digital marketers), approvers (marketing managers, creative directors), and external stakeholders (clients, brand partners, suppliers).
Moreover, as marketing assets move through the various review stages, the marketing approval process compiles a complete history of modifications and sign-offs, including all of the feedback, comments, change requests, versions, and actions taken around content creation.
Implementing a marketing approval process not only saves a great deal of back and forth during content creation but also improves collaboration and consistency among stakeholders. By streamlining your marketing approval workflow, everyone from your Design, Copy, Marketing, Client Services, and Compliance teams can easily see the real-time progress of the content creation process and make better-informed decisions and quicker approvals.
A streamlined marketing approval workflow can significantly:
Although these best practices may seem like minor adjustments, when applied to all the marketing projects at your organization, the time and cost savings are substantial.
Change is inevitable during a creative marketing project, whether that’s a new asset request, a revised specification, or a last-minute tweak to a logo. Unfortunately, what seems like a simple change can cause untold problems. Here are some of the common obstacles you’re likely to face in the marketing approval process.
Despite the abundance of marketing technology, 48% of marketers said they still rely on email for the approval process. While email has its place, it’s not the right tool to use for marketing approvals.
Here’s why:
One of the biggest obstacles in the marketing approval process is ensuring everyone has access to the assets and can collaborate effectively. Unfortunately, most approval systems are decentralized, so marketing teams waste precious time manipulating files to get them in the right place for approval.
For instance, while creating your campaign assets, you might have your graphic designers using Adobe Illustrator, your copywriters using Google Docs, and your video team editing in Premiere Pro.
Now, when it comes to approving assets, you have to arrange access to different systems. Even then, the approver can only see one part of the overall campaign, so it’s challenging to evaluate the asset and provide feedback. Maybe the video needs rework, but the copy is okay. How do you join the dots?
When feedback is decentralized, the marketing approval process falls into chaos.
Even if your team uses shared drives and team chat, there’s no transparent status tracking of your marketing assets, which leads to the following issues:
Without version control, you can run into all kinds of trouble.
For starters, people don't know which version is the latest one and often provide feedback on older versions. Or, your colleague starts modifying a file they believe to be the latest version, only to find out hours later that they’re using an old version.
It’s immensely frustrating for everyone involved, wastes countless hours, and delays projects significantly.
You can avoid confusion and save time by keeping every version in one central location and locking the old versions so everyone's working on the latest one - no more multiple file versions!
For instance, Ziflow maintains all comments, replies, and attachments for review or auditing for the original and each new version added to your project. As soon as a new version is created, the old one is locked to ensure everyone's working on the latest one.
If your marketing workflow involves internal and external stakeholders, you’ll likely encounter another obstacle during the approval process.
Often, there is a disconnect between internal and external teams at different stages in the workflow, leading to people reviewing the wrong assets or the wrong stakeholders entering the review process at the wrong time.
The disconnect can occur through lost or broken communication or inadequate file access.
Ziflow makes it easy to track review progress from a single custom dashboard, so everyone always knows who’s doing what next. Internal and external teams can see what stage a review is in and what actions reviewers still need to take.
You can create an efficient marketing approval process by following these six steps:
The first step is to identify both internal and external stakeholders.
Stakeholders are the people responsible for executing specific steps in the marketing approval process. For example, in the content creation workflow, the stakeholders might be a copywriter, a graphic designer, an editor, and a marketer.
Stakeholders can come from different teams and departments. For example, the approval process might involve people from the marketing, product, HR, and legal teams to ensure assets are compliant. Furthermore, some of these people might come from external agencies.
However, it’s essential that each person knows their role and when they are expected to contribute.
The next step is to map out the review stages in your marketing approval process. And to make things crystal clear, you should separate your internal review stages from the external ones. For example, your internal creative team can collaborate efficiently in the early stages before clients or high-level stakeholders get involved in the later stages.
Ask the following questions to determine who you should involve at each review stage:
The goal is to ensure internal and external reviewers receive content at the correct time so that they can add relevant comments and feedback based on what other people have contributed.
Having identified your stakeholders and mapped out your review stages, you’ll need to define your brand guidelines to ensure consistency throughout the whole process.
Brand guidelines cover both brand voice and design. You may have defined them already in your brand brief and only need to make them available to all the stakeholders.
Brand guidelines typically include:
The next step is to ensure you control access at each approval stage. If you involve too many people at each stage, you get conflicting opinions, and the whole approval process becomes cumbersome.
Ask the following questions of each potential reviewer to determine their involvement:
If the answer is no to any of these questions, then they’re most likely not required. Only get review and approval from the people that are needed to avoid feedback creep.
Setting deadlines is an essential but often overlooked step in the marketing approval process. The most significant delays are usually waiting for someone to give a review or chasing down a stakeholder to confirm that they were reviewing it.
Setting deadlines helps you:
In Ziflow, you can set relative deadlines for any of your creative review process steps. For example, when a piece of content needs reviewing, set a specific number of days for review sign-off:
Then you can use automated reminders to enforce deadlines and help identify any potential delays or roadblocks before they happen:
The final step is to ensure you keep an audit trail of the entire marketing approval process. Audit trails are also essential for any regulatory compliance you may need to adhere to.
Ziflow can do the following:
As highlighted earlier, some software, like email, is unsuitable for the marketing approval process. But you can use other technology to streamline your creative projects depending on the size and scope of your marketing team.
You can use file storage systems, such as Google Drive and Amazon S3, to house your creative marketing assets. Whatever software you choose, you need to ensure you have a robust version and naming convention, so everyone uses the latest files.
Project management software, like Asana, helps you track individual and team-wide tasks and work to time-bound deadlines. It also provides an overall status of work in progress or on hold so that you can chase relevant stakeholders.
One potential downside to project management software is that it’s challenging to find and collaborate on the marketing assets stored elsewhere. Ideally, you need a system that links file storage, sharing, and proofing systems with project management activities.
You can use content management systems, such as web hosting sites, video hosting sites, or email and marketing systems to house final approved versions of your marketing assets.
Some companies also use an internal CMS to host brand and marketing content for internal access or client use.
It's also possible to automate the file sharing between systems used in the internal review and approval process and your CMS to only approve content used in marketing campaigns.
You can use content review and approval software, like Ziflow, for the markup, version control, review, and approval of marketing content across all stakeholders and locations without endless email chains.
The upside of online proofing is that you can centralize feedback and approvals across many different content types, including images, videos, audio, websites, and PDFs, so that creative teams can collaborate on everything seamlessly.
Aside from real-time feedback and collaboration, Ziflow also automates tasks and reminders and allows you to track review progress and improve team performance with insights and analytics features.
Having an efficient process and system for reviewing and approving marketing assets is incredibly beneficial for marketing teams. It removes common obstacles and streamlines the marketing approval workflow so that you can:
If you want to improve your marketing approval process with a modern online proofing system, get started with Ziflow for free today.