When you're supporting a large community of local marketers, approval workflow processes can be a critical brand management tool. They can also be the bane of the creative team’s existence. In this blog post we’ll talk about the key criteria for turning approvals on and off. We’ll cover three proven techniques for organizing your processes to reduce turnaround times for your local marketers—and distribute workload effectively for you regional and headquarters teams.
To Approve or Not to Approve: That is the Question
When you’re setting up a template for use in your local marketing platform, one of the first questions to decide is whether you want final, customized documents to be available immediately to your local marketers, without the delay of a manual review. Here are factors to consider when deciding if approval workflows are necessary in your distributed marketing strategy.
- What degree of freedom will local marketers have to customize content? A good digital asset management (DAM) system or local marketing platform will allow you to implement a wide variety of editing capabilities in your templates, from very minor text edits, to substantial manipulation of text and images, to complete, drag-and-drop freedom. As a rule of thumb, the more flexibility you provide, the more likely it is that you’ll want to turn on some level of approval. However, there can be many exceptions to this general rule, so make sure to run through this checklist quickly, even when you’re pretty confident you know what your deployment strategy is going to be.
- How broadly will you make your template available among local marketers? Your local marketing platform should give you the ability to deploy templates to the community at large, or to any subsegment of marketers that you choose to define. For instance, many customers in distributed marketing networks will have regionally based teams of franchise or dealer-support professionals, who tend to have greater marketing experience and a broader marketing skillset than a typical franchisee or sales professional. If you are deploying a template to these “concierge-like” players in your local marketing network, you may elect to leave approvals turned off for templates that are designed specifically for them. With templates that you make broadly available to all users, you may elect to turn the approval process on to ensure brand consistency across different locations.
- How broadly will local marketers distribute their customized document? Some templates are meant for on-premises use, and likely won’t reach consumers in numbers above a few dozen or a few hundred. Other documents might reach thousands or tens of thousands of consumers. Clearly, there’s a meaningful difference in risk — both for the local marketer and for the brand — in the latter scenario.
- What sort of cash outlay will local marketers be making as they deploy the document? Generally speaking, templates designed for paid-media advertising (online or traditional), deserve some extra attention to ensure that local marketers get the best results for their ad-spend investment. This is particularly so when co-op funds are involved. Moreover, a pre-placement approval loop can help prevent disappointment for local marketers who might otherwise be surprised to find their reimbursements denied because of an inadvertent violation of co-op guidelines.
- How heavy will usage of the template be? Over what time frame? Some templates will be of an evergreen variety, used on a relatively consistent basis over the course of months or years. Others will be associated with a time sensitive promotion, creating spikes in usage that can be measured in days, or even hours. Try to gauge the bandwidth of your approval team or teams and adjust your use of marketing asset management approval loops to avoid sudden bottlenecks in your workflow. As you do this, keep local marketer expectations in mind; try to provide advance notice when approval is required, so that they can plan their schedules accordingly.
Read More: Brand Templating Platforms: Unlocking Brand Compliance and Marketing Efficiency
Approval Tips and Tricks
Delegate approval as close to the local marketer’s physical location as practical. Your local marketing platform should allow you to target approval responsibilities by location or at a minimum by region, so that you spread the approval workload effectively across your brand-management team.
Aim for consistent turnaround times in your approval processes. As you do this, keep in mind vacation/PTO schedules, and be sure to manage approval workflows as these occasions arise. This will help to minimize last-minute approval “emergencies”which can pose serious distractions for creative teams that are focused on higher-priority tasks.
Use your platform’s approval commenting and collaboration functions as much as practical. This will help transfer knowledge and lighten approval workloads over time. In particular, make sure your platform allows approvers to modify submitted documents on the fly, so they can eliminate back-and-forth rounds of approval and minimize total turnaround time.
Start with tighter approval processes when you first launch your platform, and loosen up gradually over time. Once your local marketers have developed their own understanding of brand-voice, you can lighten up on supervision. But remember: once a marketer has gotten accustomed to working without approval, they often chafe when those controls are reintroduced. So, make sure that you talk about approval processes and requirements regularly, to avoid surprises.
Don’t over-complicate the approval process. While your headquarters team is likely comfortable with the latest generation of project management tools, like Monday.com, or Asana, your local marketers are probably not. Remember that they have many other priorities, moving at different paces than a typical marketing production workflow. So, keep your approval processes as simple as you can by leveraging brand management platforms that streamline workflows and improve brand consistency. If possible, give them the opportunity to complete the workflow in a single sitting, so they don’t have to remember to come back to your local marketing platform, or watch out for a specific email to get their job done.
