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. 

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?

Latrisha Eilers would print and staple a stack of 15 sheets of paper together, walk to a marketer’s desk, and then leave it there for review. It was now that person’s responsibility to review and mark up that piece of artwork. So when Latrisha, a production design supervisor at Spectrum Brands, says her creative department’s review and approval process was manual, she means it literally.

Sludge. The creative engine behind your brand is likely suffering from a slow buildup of inefficient and confusing processes. The source is email. That wonderfully easy and flexible form of communication. You can message multiple people at once, attach files, and embed funny animated GIFs of goats. 

At the 2016 Widen Summit, we announced that we were planning a consulting service to aid in making our Workflow product more successful for your organization.

That plan is now reality. And heading up our on-site Workflow consulting is one of our fellow team members, Leah Ujda. In this brief article, we’ll give you an overview on how this consulting service works, and how it can help you.