Blog

From marketing operations best practices to industry insights, the Simple blog delves into all things relating to managing marketing projects, brand assets and technology.

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Make Adoption of a New Approval Workflow Process Easier

Getting approvals across the line isn't always a simple feat. In fact, approval delays remain a key challenge for marketing teams when it comes to producing content. We recently talked about how to improve and refining your approval workflow to ensure that you're maximising your marketing time and resources. The next step is implementing the new marketing process and achieving uptake. Given that people are typically creatures of habit and don?t like to invite change, how do you make the experience easier?

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How marketing technology is making life easier at Mumbrella 360

With all the new technology solutions at our disposal, it's hard to believe that over 60% of marketers still use email approvals and Excel spreadsheets to manage their marketing projects. But there must be a good reason for this. Right? Actually, no.

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Best Practices S9: Getting the most out of your ad agency freelancers

Freelancers play a crucial role in the advertising industry, often swooping in to save a creative project on the brink of collapse. They not only fill skill gaps but also provide ad agencies with the flexibility and cost savings that come with avoiding full-time hires. However, mismanaging freelancers can be a costly mistake. With this, here are our best practices for maximising your return on freelancers, and ensuring they want to work with your brand on your next project.

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4 strategies to improve your marketing team's efficiency

You?ve done the preliminary work in getting the right people onboard, so now your creative team should be operating like a well-oiled machine. Right? Well, not exactly. Even if you?ve got the best people on the job, they still need to be supported by effective processes, an organised project framework, transparent communications and schedules that allow them to be at their creative best. Here are four strategies that will enhance your team?s performance:

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Tips on Refining Your Marketing Content Approval Process

This year, marketers plan to ramp up their marketing output to maintain a competitive edge. But even so, the area of content creation remains a challenge for many. According to Curata, one of the top five content marketing challenges for B2B marketers is producing content consistently. The fact that only 30% of marketers believe their content marketing is successful might also say something about their challenges at an operational level.

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4 Costly Mistakes You Can Avoid with Approval Workflow Software

Advice on how to improve your marketing approval processes exists for very good reason. The bottom line, to excuse the pun, is to save your business money. Whether you like it or not, persistent errors in your approval workflow will financially impact your business on a number of levels.

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Champion your Best Workflow Management Software

There are many factors that will determine whether the implementation of your small business workflow software is a success. Obviously, a well-planned selection process and adequate training prior to launch are integral to a successful roll out. However, one important step that often gets overlooked in the implementation process is nominating a champion for the software. So what do I mean by 'champion'?

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Best Practices Session 7: Retaining your ad agency talent

Losing your ad agency talent can be a costly endeavor, with replacement costs estimated to be anywhere between 50% and 100% of the person's annual salary. And that's not even considering the immeasurable value of their unique skills and attributes. Surprisingly, statistics show that one in four people are likely to leave their agency job this year in search of better work cultures, challenges, and opportunities. With staff turnover eating into your profits, it's essential to find ways to retain your valuable talent.

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Marketing Project Management Challenges, Meeting Deadlines and Budgets

There are many challenges that marketers face today: a fiercely competitive marketplace, the pressure of producing memorable content for multiple media channels, and the day-to-day management and execution of marketing projects. If we shine a light on managing creative projects, a common issue that marketers face is deadline delays, a symptom indicative of other issues bubbling away below the surface.

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Is juggling multiple project management tools good for business?

Something is multiplying at a rate of knots and it?s not the number of hours that marketers are being freed up each work day. Not only are marketers feeling the pressure to perform across multiple platforms, now they?re managing their creative projects with more than one marketing tool. According to Winterberry Group?s research report , 55.1% of marketers are using five to ten different marketing tools to manage data and advertising campaigns, with 27.3% juggling up to 20 tools. Aside from marketing automation tools, these figures include marketing project management tools such as time tracking, collaboration, file management, resource management, online proofing tools and asset storage.

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Best Practices Session 6: Solving Marketing Project Management Issues

According to the Asia Pacific Content Marketing Report 2016 by HubSpot and Survey Monkey, a remarkable 63% of businesses in 2016 increased their efforts in content creation. However, an astonishing 56% of marketers encountered the challenge of producing high-quality marketing content. The quality of marketing output has always relied on the efficient management of the creative approval workflow. Smooth-running marketing projects result in a harmonious fusion of quality and speed. However, when obstacles arise, it is no surprise that the quality of output suffers.

Admation agency management software offers integrated DAM features.

Recently, we caught up with again Dave Ewers who is a technology consultant to the advertising and marketing industry specialising in digital workflow and digital asset management (DAM) software solutions. With over 30 years of industry experience, Dave has a wealth of knowledge on current market trends and leading software solutions. Previously, as a guest blogger Dave has highlighted the importance of a DAM solution being integrated with other agency project mangement software. Today, Dave is reviewing admation and the benefits of its integrated DAM functionality.

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Is your agency project management software too feature rich and complex?

The internet ? no training required? Think about it for a moment, you use the interne t every day to do some amazing things. You check your email (probably too often), search for and locate almost anything, book flights and holidays to anywhere in the world, buy and sell any product you need, watch and listen to literally anything you want. But how did you get to this point?How much training were you required to take before you were let loose on the web? The answer is almost certainly none. And yet look at what you can achieve with no training. The power at your fingertips is staggering. So why is it that this feeling of empowerment is often missing when using agencyproject management softwaresupposedly designed to help you to be more productive?

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5 Tips to Streamline Approval Workflow & Eliminate Distractions

Workday interruptions have become commonplace across many professions today. Responding to relentless emails, phone calls, meetings, urgent work (the list goes on), have proven to reduce productivity. Additionally, studies show that distractions are putting more pressure on workers making them increasingly prone to tiredness and error. With clunky approval workflow,tedious administrationand manual processes,creative teams are not immune to these issues. But there is light at the end of the tunnel. In this post, we'll show you how to streamline approval workflow, eliminate those workday distractions and let your creativity flourish.

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Which Software is Right? Understanding Marketing Software Categories.

The role of the marketer has evolved over time to keep up with technological advancements and business demands. Today, not only do you have to be a jack of all trades, you also have to be a master of one pulling together a range of media streams and marketing management strategies to achieve one crucial objective: ROI for your business. It's comes as no surprise then that marketers today are turning to technology tools to help automate and streamline many aspects of their role. img src="https://20878613.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/20878613/Imported_Blog_Media/AdobeStock_99618674.jpeg" alt="AdobeStock_99618674.jpeg" width="803" height="515" class=""

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Is less really more when it comes to agency project management software?

Today we welcome back our guest blogger, Dave Ewers, who is reviewing admation?s user-friendly interface that combines a number of project management, resource management and approval workflowfeatures.

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Debunking common misconceptions about project management software

Managing your creative projects is no easy feat. Not only do you have multiple jobs on the go, you also have to resource tasks, chase feedback and approvals, brief changes, stay on budget, and meet deadlines, among other tasks. For this reason, more brands are turning to marketing project management software to take back control of their projects. However, while some businesses have caught on to the benefits, there are still many marketers that trudging through their work day without an effective tool. According to the 2017 In-House Creative Industry Report, 71% of those surveyed said they didn't use a tool to streamline their project management. So what's holding them back?

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Questions to ask before investing in ad agency management software

Juggling multiple tools to manage your ad agency projects? Tired of endless email trails and scrambled audit trails? Difficultly ascertaining where your jobs are at any given moment? More ad agencies are implementing agency management software for greater transparency over their creative projects. Nonetheless, it?s easy to invest in the wrong agency management software. Here are ten questions to ask before investing in ad agency project management software to ensure you select the right tool for your ad agency.

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Best Practices Session 4: How to Manage Ad Agency Freelance Resources

Effectively managing your ad agency's freelance creative resources is crucial for the growth and success of your business. By utilizing these resources in the right way, you can give your agency a competitive edge. Here are some tips to make sure youradvertising agency gets the most out of its creative resources and freelancers.

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Why standalone DAM software is outdated and integration is the future!

What is a 'traditional' DAM system?The Digital Asset Management (DAM) marketplace currently consists of many vendors, all of which have generally followed a similar business model. Most DAM systems exist as a clearly defined standalone product that have their own user interface and unique look and feel. They often feature a proprietary database in which to store all the records and metadata for assets contained within the system.

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Understanding Your Marketing Approval Workflow and Utilising Software

Today, marketers are juggling up to six social media sites at any one time and outputting 75% more content than the year before. Still a majority feel they should be performing better. With this in mind, effective creative workflow management is vital than ever. Marketing approval workflow plays an integral role in the production ofmarketing collateral, from briefing projects and creating artwork to getting final approval. If it isn?t in good shape, it can adversely affect the quality, cost and timeliness of your campaigns. It?s important, then, to understand your creative approval workflow and the kinds of challenges associated with managing it. Only then can your brand implement the right tools and processes to achieve the best outcomes for your creative projects. For a creative agency, this may mean implementing project management software.

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Best Practices S3: How Small Digital Agencies Punch above their Weight

In the rapidly evolving landscape of 2023, small digital agencies face a fundamental question: how can they effectively compete with larger agencies? As brands increasingly bring tasks in-house, the competition becomes even fiercer for start-ups and small businesses. Establishing a strong foothold and outshining their larger counterparts requires strategic thinking and innovative approaches.

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10 Benefits of Implementing Digital Asset Management Software

If you are in marketing, whether it be retail or a corporate brand, it?s likely that you manage thousands of digital assets.Digital assets can describe anything from photography, logos, illustrations, animations and audiovisual media to presentations, spreadsheets, word documents, and other digital formats and their associated metadata. Inthe past, digital assetswere typically managed in-house, hosted on servers or saved across various media. Access could be anything from an organised archive system, to attachments on an email in a random persons? over full inbox. Hunting for these marketing assets was frustrating, unnecessarily time consuming and sometimes the logo, PDF or imageyou were looking for had simply disappeared into thin air.Luckily, things have progressed, and the use of digital asset management software or DAM is becoming the norm for most brands and other organisations. If you?re not following the norm just yet, these 10 benefits of a digital management system might be enough to convince you it is time to make the change.

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How Businesses Can Stay on Top of their Marketing Compliance

With regulatory bodies and consumers (think social media) monitoring brands more closely for their marketing practices, marketing compliance should be top of mind again this year. After all, the alternative isn't a desirable one, with hefty fines being doled out to brands that don't comply and reputations on the line.

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How to Build a Creative Advertising Agency that Thrives

Let's face it, the reason creatives get into this business is to be, well, creative. But all too often poor planning, clunky approval workflow and outdated management tools eat into creative time. If you?re thinking about how to grow an advertising agency and enable full creativity, here are some tips on how to get more structure into your work day and improve your marketing workflow and processes, which will ultimately leave you with more time and head space to be creative.

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2023 Best Practices S2: Customer Retention Strategies for Ad Agencies

Statistics for client retention isn't what it used to be for creative ad agencies. In fact, today clients are only staying as long as two and half years, with other reports indicating that clients ditch one in three agencies every twelve months. So, what does that mean for your ad agency? Well, the thing about statistics is that you can either become one or rise above the status quo. In this Best Practices session, we'll provide a number of customer retention tips for ad agencies to ensure they achieve robust, long-term relationships with clients.