Sludge. Is this how your creative approval process feels?

The creative engine behind your brand is likely suffering from a slow buildup of inefficient and confusing processes. The source … email. That wonderfully easy and flexible go-to form of communication. You can message multiple people at once, attach files, and embed funny animated GIFs of goats. What’s not to love?

It can do all those amazing things and everyone’s already using it, so why isn’t it working for the review and approval process? The reason: creative operations teams are growing. Requests are coming in from more teams. Deadlines are tight. The flexibility and ease of use of email creates inefficiencies. So how can we improve this process and become less reliant on email for creative approvals?

When managing and accessing digital content, it’s essential to know what metadata is and how it works. When used intelligently, metadata makes it easier to organize, share, and use libraries of images, videos, documents, and other digital assets. This leads to workflow efficiencies, increased collaboration and productivity, and improved digital experiences on every channel. 

Hundreds of brands — from NFL teams to global e-commerce companies — rely on metadata to make content findable and searchable. Metadata is a foundation of digital asset management (DAM) but its benefits reach far beyond the DAM platform itself.

This metadata guide for DAM outlines the most important things to know about what metadata is, why it matters, and how to use it strategically. Let’s start by defining metadata. 

Although all teams that produce brand and marketing content use content operations, not everyone does it strategically. While it can be intimidating to create and implement a content operations workflow, doing so pays dividends. The right workflow can streamline processes, save significant amounts of time and money, and deliver higher-quality content for a better customer experience. 

If you’re in e-commerce and want to grow a successful digital brand you need to focus on something fundamental — your product information. You need quality product information (product data, marketing content, and digital assets) to build omnichannel customer experiences. When you define a product information management (PIM) workflow you can transform your brand and improve efficiency across your company.

Your product information can either be a messy liability or a strategic asset. To cultivate accurate, robust, up-to-date, and compelling product details you need to create a clearly defined way to work with your product information. The basic components of any PIM workflow can be broken down into four parts — product onboarding, content updates, sales channel syndication, and communication.

Before we dive into the specifics of each component, let’s start with a definition of what a workflow is and then build a picture of what makes an efficient PIM workflow. 

In the world of digital asset management (DAM), embed codes are often an unsung hero. While DAM systems get a lot of praise for storing, organizing, managing, tracking, and analyzing your digital assets; embed codes quietly make publishing content easy.

Embed codes are asset-specific HTML that allow you to publish visual content across multiple platforms with ease. Whenever updates are made to the master file in the DAM system, the new version is automatically updated everywhere it’s embedded. 

If you’re looking for tools to help your teams meet their deadlines, you’re not alone. Marketing departments manage numerous projects and campaigns simultaneously, and keeping them all on schedule is a huge challenge. Teams are so used to being behind on deadlines that it’s often considered normal to miss them. This puts stress on your teams, and the quality of work can suffer.

So what do you do? Here are five things you can do with your project management and digital asset management (DAM) software to help your teams hit their deadlines more often. 

Videos, infographics, brochures, blogs, white papers, and on and on —  there’s no shortage of content floating around the digital stratosphere. And this makes sense. Both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers create content for an average of four different audiences each. Apply that at large, and we’re talking about a heck of a lot of content.

Now depending on the maturity of your brand and your content efforts, you may already be feeling the weight of this within your own organization. Content takes time, money, and resources, which are all lost if you don’t have a plan for creating, maintaining, improving, and storing your valuable content. 

How you interact with your content should be dictated by where it falls in its lifecycle. For instance, you will treat a new case study differently than one that’s been around for years. In some cases, as content reaches the end of its lifecycle, it may be time to retire it altogether. Having a solid understanding of your content lifecycle will help you keep track of your content during each stage of its life and get the most out of your investment.

Keeping pace with today’s demand for marketing content is no small task. This collaborative process involves multiple phases, stakeholders, and approvals, making it continually vulnerable to delays and inconsistency. 

As brands try to increase productivity, many turn to technology to bring order to creative chaos and help prevent projects from going off the rails. Workflow automation software can streamline content creation to keep projects on-target, on schedule, and on budget.

In about 15 years social media has gone from an entirely new concept to an integral part of everyday life. Now, any marketing mix that doesn’t include social media is unusual. With nearly 80% of Americans possessing a profile on a social networking platform, marketing through social media is one of the best ways to reach members of your target audience — no matter who they are. Plus, almost all prominent social platforms have paid advertising options that brands can leverage to increase exposure to relevant audiences. If you want to reach potential customers and key stakeholders, you need to be using social media.

But that doesn’t mean that social media marketing is easy, or even altogether straightforward! You and your team have probably struggled with how to create the right kind of content to engage the right people, and how to best measure success online. Don’t worry, you’re not alone — social media is a difficult and confusing tool for many marketing teams. A great step toward demystifying social media marketing is to streamline your social media workflow.

Your brand’s next big marketing campaign is on the horizon, and your team isn’t prepared at all. You still need to ideate the campaign vision, create all the assets, finalize the designs, and get approval from the necessary parties. The sheer amount of work yet to be done is paralyzing, and your team is really feeling the pressure. And worse, you know that right when you’ve finished this project, it will all start again with the next one.  Does this sound familiar?