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.

As your business grows, so will your library of assets. Assets include everything from videos to photos to graphics and more. And, as you know, creating assets takes time, money, and resources which are all lost if you don’t have a plan for creating, maintaining, and storing them.

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

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?

We’re all faced with a challenge, how can we do more with the resources available? The reliance on content to communicate, build an audience, and sell has turned up the pressure on marketing and creative teams. Fortunately, there are many tools available to help do more with the same. Workflow management software not only seeks to improve productivity but to do so while removing friction to managing and reviewing work before it’s published.

The Widen Collective product vision builds on DAM to connect marketing content across the entire content lifecycle, from ideas to analytics. Most importantly, to connect the people and teams to create, manage, and use your content.

We’re really excited about these version 12.0 updates and we think you will be too — since these are heavily influenced by your feedback.

We hear from a lot of organizations that meeting deadlines is a big challenge. Teams are so used to being behind on deadlines that it’s often considered to be exceeding expectations if they simply finish their work on time. This puts stress on your teams, and the of quality of work usually suffers.

So what do you do? If your teams are left with the following questions unanswered, it’s probably time to evaluate your process and eliminate the confusion with project management and digital asset management (DAM) software.

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. 

Widen’s latest DAM-centric application, Workflow, is now available for subscription to anyone who uses the Collective. This application is a robust online proofing and work management application that can significantly raise the efficiency of creative project management.

Before starting up with Workflow, it’s beneficial for organizations to assess their current processes. New Workflow customers will benefit from working with Leah Ujda, our on-site Workflow consultant. Leah works with organizations to, “develop a deep understanding of how you currently do your creative work — and how you would like to do this work in an ideal future. By identifying and understanding your current processes, we can ensure the technology you’re bringing into the organization will provide a valuable, efficient, and engaging experience.”

We believe in Workflow, and the understanding Leah brings to the table, so much that we decided to have her help the Widen team!

The following is an internal case study that gives an overview of how Leah helped us transform our creative project management with Workflow. Here’s a little bit more about Leah …

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.