Now, more than ever – Marketing departments are being pushed for better results, more quality leads in a shorter space of time. They are under immense pressure to be constantly innovative in everything they do.
No wonder marketers and CMO’s are struggling to sleep at night!
Yet, marketing content is harder to find and reiterate due to these high demands. There are versions for everything! That A4 poster with 4 different company logos and font types. That brochure with old content or wrong colour schemes. Oh – and did we mention we don’t even know where the most up to date version of “Sales Brochure.doc” is stored? The list goes on. And who’s responsible for all these things? Marketing.
Avoid the 7 Deadly Sins of Marketing Content to gain effectiveness over your documents.
- Lack of Time
Marketers and Time – they don’t get on. The marketer is always chasing after time, and time is always running away from the marketer. The demand from every department is increasing on a marketer’s time. “I need a poster”, “I need this brochure personalised to my client”, “I need this date and price changed on this advert”, “Can you just…” I’ll stop before your head starts to hurt! Increase efficiency by automating the daily requested documents onto a system that allows anybody to make their own simple amends without disrupting the design.
- Small Budgets
Little amends on a daily basis rack up in cost. They usually need to pass through the hands of not only marketing, but design, and potentially an external agency. And nobody said agencies were cheap. Maximise your budget by working out a process around the daily document requests to make them more financially viable.
- Marketing without Metrics
Many marketing departments don’t have a process to measure the content that goes out. They are either creating too many one off bespoke items, or they are forgetting to measure if something has really moved the needle. Oops! It’s actually pretty important. Find a solution that measures usage and efficacy in one central place.
- Marketing Wastage
70% of all marketing content is never used. Unbelievable right? But many documents are designed once, for one reason and are then never used again. Imagine how quickly you could get to market if you already had one piece of content, fit for many purposes, ready for whenever you need it.
- Lack of clarity on Brand Guidelines
I’m not sure about you, but, CMYK, HEX, RGB and PMS can sometimes feel like a long list of letters and numbers rather than the key to your brand guideline colours. Your company logo has been tweaked and pulled around so much, that it’s impossible to decipher which one is the current version. Find a solution that can house your brand guidelines across all your documents.
- No Localisation
Storage. Eugh! That’s a headache in itself. Dropbox, Sharepoint, The Box, Google Drive – the list continues. Does anyone actually know where the recent pieces of content or branding are? Do you even know yourself? Implement a system that not only secures your brand guidelines down but contains the most up to date versions of your documents which everybody can access.
- Recycling incorrect content
Because no one knows where anything is, the desire to DIY increases. I can hear the long resounding “Nooooooo” in the background. DIY. The death of any marketing content. Stop the unapproved make shifting and put the right tools into the hands of the different users of marketing content so they can customise in a safe environment.
For a solution that could destroy these deadly sins – why not read our Guide to Branded Document Automation?
Enjoyed what you read? Why not subscribe to our blog!
Thanks for reading!