Blog posts filtered by: Marketing Best Practices

Online proofing has come a long way in the 12 years since Mat and I launched ProofHQ back in 2008 and now Ziflow in 2017. 

Initially, ProofHQ only supported a handful of static file types. Ziflow now supports the review and approval of over 1,200 media and files types, including static designs/documents (PDF, images, Word, etc.), audio, video, websites, and rich media packages like banners and animated GIFs.

Despite the diversification of campaign media types, one file type still reigns supreme in marketing review and approval to this day: PDFs.

Based on our experience of over 12 years of building and running multiple remote-first businesses, we wanted to share our tips for working and managing teams remotely.

In our experience, it takes a person approximately two months to get used to working remotely By following some of these tips, you can shorten and ease this adjustment period drastically.

“How do we keep working efficiently when we can’t go to the office?”

That’s on the mind of almost every manager and executive this week. Even though remote work has become a rising option for many teams in the past few years, the global crisis around COVID-19 has shockingly and very quickly upended the traditional workforce model across industries.

So many organizations are now scrambling to figure out work-from-home scenarios and implement remote collaboration policies that will minimize the ongoing disruption to the business and employees’ lives.

At Ziflow, we’re part of a growing population of companies that is 100% remote, and because our team has worked this way since the day we launched Ziflow, we’ve refined a company-wide remote work strategy that ensures our global marketing, product development, sales, and customer service teams operate as one productive unit every day to reach our goals. If this sounds like the situation you and your team has just been thrust into, keep reading for some helpful guidance on how creative teams can make the jump to remote collaboration.

To run an effective marketing compliance program within your creative processes requires a constant, team-wide effort. When content is produced within, or across, department boundaries, the diligence required to prove controls for compliance lives both in and around everyone’s daily activities.

One of the most challenging parts about managing marketing, design, and creative content projects is the internal-external collaboration flow between clients, partners, and freelancers.

One of the biggest hurdles that brands and agencies face is the most efficient way to incorporate external collaborators into their creative production and marketing workflows.

What is marketing compliance, exactly? For creative content producers, marketing compliance means more than just enforcing rules and regulations. A well-defined marketing compliance strategy involves protecting brand integrity and consumer trust using traceable oversight of actions, decisions, and changes throughout the entire creative content production process.

For many marketers, having a marketing compliance strategy is a mere afterthought, though. In fact, some may even see it as a nuisance better ignored.

However, marketing compliance is not defined as a strategy just for highly regulated industries like healthcare or financial services. To disregard it could be the worst mistake your business will ever make. 

It’s the law - it’s for everyone.

Review and approval: it’s the final frontier of project completion. There’s no better feeling than checking off a review step or updating the status of a project to “Approved.” 

Rush jobs are a fact of life in creative production. Whether they are driven by the need for new campaigns on a short fuse, or last-minute feedback arriving which changes the scope of a creative project dramatically, these requests disrupt the best-laid project plans.  

Depending on your industry and type of creative content you produce, there is a wide range of marketing compliance issues that must be accounted for during the production process including disclosures, copyright and trademark considerations, regulatory compliance, and stakeholder involvement.

As creative marketing teams launch more and more integrated omnichannel campaigns, the internal tools used to produce, review, and launch these campaigns can vary significantly.

Feedback for creative marketing projects often come from (and touch) many different parts of the business, so much so, that it can be tough to know who truly “owns” the entire process - and who’s responsible for making it more efficient. Depending on the type of organization you work within, review and approval processes can vary, as can the roles responsible for them.

Once you’ve decided it’s time to invest in an online proofing solution for your creative marketing team, you’ll then need to evaluate and compare the different available solutions. To help you through this process, we’ve put together this checklist which you can use to compare different proofing solutions and decide which one is right for you.

Given the multitude of marketing channels that creative content is being produced for today, the impact of inefficient review and approval processes are not hard to identify.

For those working in the creative production universe (agencies, internal agencies and marketing teams), facilitating the review and approval can end up like chasing a shadow: Feedback and files are shared across  many disconnected email chains, Slack channels, phone calls, and intranet sites - or worse, physical printouts.

Today’s modern marketing organization relies on a wide range of technology (MarTech) to create a multi-channel approach of relevant, personalized experiences for their customers and prospects.

Given the immense competitive pressures in the agency world, differentiation is key in growing a business. It used to be that track record, customer roster and deep industry expertise were “enough” to create distance between you and others competing for the business. 

If you and your team are managing multiple creative projects per week ( and many of you are managing more than six per week, in fact), having an effective review and approval process no longer qualifies as a “nice to have” - it’s a requirement.