A Guide to Overcoming Common Marketing Challenges

Creating memorable marketing campaigns is one of the top challenges faced by marketers today, but the root of the problem lies in inefficient operational processes. Exhausting workloads, tedious administration, and ineffective tools can drain creativity and hinder the success of marketing campaigns.

Recent studies confirm the magnitude of the problem. In a Gleanster and Kapost paper titled "The $958M Marketing Problem: Quantifying the Cost of Inefficiency in Your Content Production Processes," 67% of the 4,038 surveyed marketers believed that their current approval workflow processes could be improved. The paper also revealed that 25 cents of every dollar invested in marketing is wasted on inefficient content operations.

Marketing managers face additional challenges due to the rise of remoter hybrid workers and stakeholders. According to The Inhouse Creative Industry Report 2017 by The Boss Group and Cella, 30% of creative team members work in more than one location, with 65% citing "miscommunication" as a major challenge when working with external agencies. Surprisingly, 71% of respondents said that they were not using software to streamline their marketing projects and project management.

However, the same report found that "efficiency experts" were seven times more likely to implement tools to streamline their operations and, as a result, doubled their output. Therefore, utilizing tools such as admation can help marketers become efficiency experts and tackle the key challenges of marketing management in today's market.

It is important to note that as of 2023, the COVID-19 pandemic has further accelerated the need for remote work and digital marketing efforts, making efficient operational processes and effective tools even more critical for marketing success.

So let's take a look at some of the key challenges of marketing management affecting marketers today and how admation can help make you an efficiency expert.

 

1. Challenge: Inconsistent Creative Briefs

When it comes to initiating creative projects, there is often a lack of consistency in the briefing process. Projects may be started with a meeting where a few action points are given, a phone conversation, or a casual email, all of which are supposed to account for a project brief. If there is no official briefing process in place, the information received will be too random, and important details will likely be missed. This can result in someone, potentially you, having to waste time chasing stakeholders for more information. Alternatively, the artwork produced may not capture the essence of the campaign, resulting in more artwork versions that eat into your time and budget.

 

Admation Solution: Online Brief Templates

To address this challenge, Admation offers Online Brief templates that can accurately capture the type and level of detail required for each new project. These templates provide a consistent approach to briefing, ensuring that all relevant information is captured upfront. By using Admation's Online Brief templates, you can save time and reduce the number of artwork versions required, which in turn saves your budget. Additionally, the templates provide a centralized location for all project information, making it easy to reference and share with stakeholders.

 

2. Challenge: Lack of Transparency in Marketing Projects

Marketers today handle an overwhelming amount of campaigns across various media channels, along with the upkeep of multiple social media feeds to stay relevant. This can lead to a lack of transparency in creative projects, causing major headaches for marketers. In fact, a report by GetApp on project management software features revealed that up to 95% of project managers are using more than one tool to manage their projects, making it even more challenging for marketers to keep track of everything.

 

Admation Solution: Marketing Calendar

To tackle this issue, Admation's Marketing Calendar provides marketers with greater visibility over their marketing projects. With the help of this tool, marketers can get a clear overview of their ongoing campaigns, their progress, and their deadlines. This enables them to prioritize tasks, allocate resources effectively, and streamline their workflow. In addition, the Marketing Calendar provides a collaborative platform where stakeholders can share feedback and ideas, enabling more efficient communication and improving project outcomes.

 

3. Challenge: Managing Marketing Compliance

In today's marketing landscape, managing compliance is crucial due to the multitude of media channels involved. However, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has still taken several brands to task over misleading messages. Sadly, many marketers still find themselves in a grey area regarding enforcing marketing protocols, maintaining accurate audit trails, and implementing effective approval workflows. One mistake can lead to consumer mistrust or legal action, making it difficult to attract top talent with a tarnished reputation. The bottom line: non-compliance is costing brands significant amounts of money.

 

Admation Solution:  Compliance Management Features

Admation offers a solution to these compliance issues through its audit trail and Reserved button for Legal and Approval teams. By automatically generating an audit trail for all marketing projects and files, Admation provides a detailed record of all approvals and changes made, reducing the risk of errors and oversights. The Reserved button allows any legal team member to reserve an item to avoid double approval or missed approvals, ensuring that all stakeholders are informed and involved in the process. Moreover, Admation's Approval Templates feature enables users to specify unique approval pathways, streamlining the approval process and reducing the risk of non-compliance.

 

4. Challenge: Marketers are struggling to locate and identify marketing assets.

A campaign that was approved six months ago is set to be re-run, but the final assets cannot be located. Losing marketing assets or spending excessive time searching for them is a major issue for marketers. Even when assets are found, there may be multiple versions of the same item, making it difficult to determine which is the correct one. According to recent studies, nearly half of marketers are not using digital asset management (DAM) tools to store their final marketing assets, relying instead on flawed traditional methods.

 

Admation Solution: Integrated DAM Feature.

Admation's Ad Storage feature allows you to finalize a deliverable and save it securely, ensuring that final marketing assets are never lost. Save all your latest branding assets in the Asset Library, where they can be easily accessed for re-running marketing projects.

 

Conclusion

Are you and your marketing team facing common project challenges that are slowing you down? If so, it might be time to step back from the chaos and assess whether adopting marketing project management tools can help you overcome these obstacles.

With the increasing complexity of marketing operations, it's becoming more challenging to manage projects effectively without the proper tools in place. By implementing project management tools like Admation, you can streamline your workflows, centralize communication, and optimize collaboration among team members.

Marketing project management tools also offer features such as task prioritization, approval workflows, real-time updates, and resource allocation, which can help you keep track of your projects, minimize errors, and reduce delays. These tools can help you manage your time more efficiently, freeing you up to focus on creative and strategic tasks.

In conclusion, it's crucial to recognize the importance of adopting marketing project management tools in today's fast-paced marketing landscape. By investing in the right tools, you can optimize your workflows, minimize errors, and stay ahead of the competition. So take a step back, assess your challenges, and explore how marketing project management tools like Admation can help you and your team succeed.