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.

7 reasons Admation is better than spreadsheets

Spreadsheets have traditionally been used by marketing teams and ad agencies to track approvals, manage resources and timelines, allocate tasks and more. But recently the demands on marketing teams and agencies have increased and the needs of their clients have changed, so the tools traditionally used are not longer suitable for managing creative projects. Unfortunately, spreadsheet programs like Excel or Google Sheets lack the flexibility to manage project resources in the modern world. As the industry has evolved, creative teams have found they are managing increased volumes of clients, projects and up-to-date information and spreadsheets are no longer able to keep up. They quickly become inaccurate, inefficient, and ineffective. That's where marketing project management software comes in. Admation is a marketing project management software that allows you to manage your projects and resources with ease. Rather than using inflexible spreadsheets to try and keep track of deadlines or liaise with external stakeholders, admation integrates your project management with your resource, asset, and approval management in the one easy-to-use software. If you're still following the old school path of using spreadsheets, potentially wasting precious time or risking more mistakes, here's why marketing project management software is better than using spreadsheets.

Is your digital or creative ad agency working to it's best potential?

It is entirely possible that a portion of your creative workforce is already suffering from burnout. Every time there is a change in your work environment, it is estimated that 5-7 per cent of your employees will be tipped over the edge in terms of workload and will experience burnout. This is an important issue for any industry, but it is especially pronounced in the breakneck-paced advertising and marketing industries where operations are evolving and changing all the time in the digital age. That makes it ultra-important for agencies to not only recognise the signs of burnout and react to it but to put measures in place to prevent it from happening in the first instance. That is why we have put together this guide to help your agency manage and mitigate burnout and put processes in place to manage your workflows, approvals, and workloads so you can concentrate on being the creative geniuses that you are.

5 ways approval workflow software helps manage marketing compliance

Have you ever experienced that sheer panic when you realise Legal or Compliance hasn't approved a campaign that's gone live? If so, you wouldn't be alone. But when there's a breakdown in your approval workflow process, you leave your brand wide open to marketing compliance issues. To recap, what is marketing compliance? In a nutshell, brands are beholden to both internal and external marketing compliance: Internal marketing compliance is the set of rules and regulations that a business creates to manage its own branding such as logos, fonts, colours and messaging. External marketing compliance relates to the governance of brands overseen by industry and consumer regulatory bodies. The risks of marketing compliance can be costly to brands both in terms of their reputation and bottom line. So what's the best way forward to mitigate non-compliance issues?

Essential Guide to Creative Project Management

When one mentions project management, the first thing that comes to mind is IT or construction. What people don't realize is that project management is no longer the exclusive domain of these industries and that other industries are using it too. So, considering this, can teams manage creative projects in this way? Indeed, they can, and many are successful in making their creative projects more efficient and productive. But what exactly is creative project management and how does it work? What creative project management tools are there to help teams streamline their processes? Lets' delve into these and other questions in more detail. What Is Creative Project Management? Creative project management is simply project management in the creative industry. To give a wider definition, it's a process that teams use to organize and manage creative projects, while also nurturing the more organic way that creative ideas come to life. In other words, with creative project management, teams follow a process that streamlines their work, but leaves room for creativity. In contrast, traditional project management processes plan, execute, and control the work in a fairly rigid process that doesn't leave much scope for this. And that's where the biggest difference between traditional project management and creative project management lies.

Understanding Marketing Approval Workflow

It's a simple fact, marketing has always been important for any business to drive sales, improve brand awareness and achieve success. Today, it's more important than ever in times where a competitive market expects more innovation, more creativity, and better engagement. But here's the problem, it isn't getting any easier. Marketers have to deal with countless meetings, tighter deadlines, and increasing demands, all while they have to manage their workflow and monitor campaigns to deliver the results clients, or their business demand. Because of this, it's increasingly important that teams have an effective marketing approval workflow to better manage their campaigns and streamline the workflow. But what exactly is a marketing approval workflow and why do you need one? Here, we'll look at these questions in more detail and some of the benefits it offers.

Tips for Successful Adoption of Creative Project Management Software

So, you've found the right Marketing Project Management Software and you can't wait to roll it out to your team. Considering that finding the right product for your organization is a challenge in itself, you've done well up to now. What happens next? Well, after the time and money you invested in finding the right marketing project management tool, you obviously want a return on your investment. So, you implement it and, as is the case with many other companies, you struggle with user adoption and uptake.

Improving Marketing Workflows: The Power of the Right Marketing Technology

Why are marketing workflows such a hot topic at the moment? The question can be answered just by looking at some of the challenges facing marketing teams all over the world, according to Wipster's former marketing and partnerships manager Andre van den Assum. There are three main trends impacting marketing teams that are putting pressure on the workflows they may have employed in the past: More channels to market More content is required to feed these channels More tools are required to manage all these processes. “Old workflows just aren’t going to cut it,” van den Assum says. “A lot of these tools solve niche problems that marketers are having. But there are so many of them. How are they all working together?”

MS Word Approvals: The Game Changer Within Simple Admation

Imagine a world without MS Word. Or Excel and PowerPoint. It’s almost impossible. Without a doubt, MS Word and the Office 365 suite is the most popular document creation software. As a standalone cloud service, or as a part of Microsoft Teams, with its more collaborative bent, it is the world’s fastest growing application. Life changing as these applications are, they are often inadequate for real world scenarios. Let’s look at companies that use MS Word to create assets. For example, heavily regulated industries such as financial services and pharmaceuticals produce reams of product documentation. A simple product disclosure statement could have several reviewers and may need as many as 15 sign-offs. Not only must a document go through a stringent approval and compliance process, every change must be logged and recorded in an audit trail.

How to Take The Pain Out of Managing Marketing Requests

Managing marketing requests and project briefing is a major pain point for many marketing teams and internal creative departments – especially when they are located in different divisions, geographical areas, or timezones.

Redefine marketing campaigns with marketing project management software

As the number of marketing campaigns increase to satisfy multiple channels, marketers are faced with new challenges. Project management tools and processes that may have worked previously are just not cutting it anymore. Take email approvals for example. Research shows that workers receive 100 emails a day on average. No wonder marketing professionals are struggling to manage multiple campaigns and endless approvals at the same time. This only compounds the problem of not having the right tools to adequately resource projects. Throw a few branding issues into the mix and you've got a cocktail for chaos.

*Best Practice for Maximising Marketing Operations

Best Practices for Marketing Operations Following on from our article “What is Marketing Operations?” - here. It can be easy to limit marketing to only customer interactions. After all, the marketing department leads communication between the company and its target audience. As necessary as that side of marketing is, it’s powerless without a strong organizational structure and cross-department support; a function that we often look to marketing operations to fulfil.

Simple's New Website Showcase their Marketing Operations Software

You may recall last year Simple and Admation joined forces to deliver the marketing industry with a comprehensive product suite that helps solve marketings biggest challenges. Our combination technology, people, processes, and insights enables us to offer customers a powerful product suite with exceptional user experience. As such, they can eliminate the cost and complexity of legacy marketing platforms and tap into Simple's marketing management solutions that drive greater efficiencies and improve ROI across their marketing operations. Simple currently delivers its marketing technology to over 80 clients globally across various industries includingcompliance driven banking, finance and insurance as well as retail, tourism, education and government.

Tips To Improve Collaboration and Communication Within Creative Teams

A few years ago a Stanford University study found that collaboration fosters motivation and transforms "work into play". In simple terms, effective collaboration creates a dynamic environment where team members can cross-pollinate and create. It becomes a space where team members are inspired to come up with great ideas and do excellent work. Because of this, effective and efficient creative collaboration is crucial in any creative project. And it sounds simple to implement, doesn't it? Sure, that was once was the case and teams had their collaborative processes in place. But our past two year living with COVID-19 has required teams across the world to find new ways to collaborate.

10 Hidden Costs of Poor Marketing Process

Much of the effort when it comes to optimising marketing activity results tends to go into distribution channels, or finding the ight media mix. And in times gone by when media spend comprised a much higher proportion of total marketing budgets, that made perfect sense. But in tough times, it pays to ensure all your marketing operations are run efficiently.

Marketing Project Management Trends Continue To Shape The Industry

In the past few years, there have been significant changes in the marketing landscape from new social media platforms, new ways to generate awareness about a brand or product, new technologies, and, let’s not forget, a global pandemic that had devastating consequences for the world’s economies.

Delivering Value in a Disrupted Marketing World

Marketing is facing disruption and change on a scale not seen before. How do you win the hearts and minds of your customers and your organisation at a time of rapid digital transformation? Simple held a panel event on this topic recently and invited speakers to address the technological, operational and media impact of disruption.

Transform The Way You Manage Product Information

Simple’s Product Information Management Software helps you streamline your sales and marketing processes by simplifying product information management across your operations and processes. With it, your processes will be more efficient, your teams more productive, and you’ll improve your customer experience.

Streamline Your Retail Marketing Processes

In a competitive market, it’s crucial that you get products and accurate product information to the market as fast as possible. When you do, your customers will always have reliable product information when they need it, which increases your conversion rate and helps you make more sales. Simple’s RetailPath retail marketing platform helps you do this and more.

Simple Welcomes new Directors to it's Board

Simple.io is excited to announce today that we have appointed two new non-executive directors, Fraser Woollard from Mediaocean and Richard Potter from Microsoft, to our board of directors. Both these directors bring a wealth of knowledge and experience to the simple.io team. In welcoming Fraser and Richard to the team, our CEO, Darin Lloyd, said that their Richard’s appointment would allow us to maximise and use our investment in the Microsoft technology stack and Fraser’s expertise will be of great value to extend our ecosystem. Ultimately, this means we can grow our range of integrations and partnerships, which are both key elements of our strategy to deliver needs-based solutions to our valued customers and stay at the forefront of innovative marketing operations technology.

Ampath Labs select admation for Marketing Operations

Ampath Laboratories is one of Southern Africa's foremost pathology laboratories that aims to deliver innovative, professional, and quality pathology and medicine services to healthcare practitioners and patients. As such, its more than 140 registered pathologists serve the medical fraternity, insurance, governmental, managed healthcare, industrial organisations, and other pathology practices with quality results.

Simple partners with Sesimi.

Simple is proud to announce a new partnership with leading Brand Management platform, Sesimi.

Simple appoints Darin Lloyd as new CEO as part of post-merger strategy

Marketing management software group Simple today announced the appointment of Darin Lloyd as its new CEO, as part of its amplified strategy focusing on product and user experience following the company’s recent merger with marketing management platform Admation.

Admation recognised as one of the Best Online Project Management Solutions

For years, Admation's project management software has helped customers make their project management more efficient and their marketing teams more productive. So, we're excited to say that Admation has been listed as one of the best project management software platforms.

Best Practices For Marketing Teams Working With Freelancers

Let?s face it, marketers now work harder than ever. This is due to a few reasons. For one, since the COVID-19 pandemic, more people are using the internet and social media than ever before. This means more people work online, shop online, and consume entertainment online. In turn, as a result of digital transformation, many businesses now also focus their marketing and selling efforts on digital channels. Unfortunately, this also means there?s more competition between marketers to get their products in front of the right people at the right time. Simply put, marketers now have to put in more time and effort to stay relevant and reach their goals. It?s thus easy to see why resourcing will be one of the main challenges for marketing teams going into the next year. Simply put, these teams will need the right people in the right positions to ensure success. The problem is that the demand for quality talent is expected to outstrip demand. And that?s where freelancers come in. They give teams the ability to find the right talent when they need it. This simply means that, you?ll probably use freelancers at some stage in the future. And when you do, you?ll not only need to manage them but also your workflow and processes to ensure that you deliver high-quality, consistent results.

Essential Features of Marketing Workflow Management Software

Let's face it, marketing content approvals can be challenging, especially if your team is working on multiple projects. Compounding the problem is the fact, after abuoyant post Covid-19 market we have moved into tougher times with a recession looming and competition increasing. As a result, marketers constantly need to find innovative ways to reach their audience and make an impact.

The New Year is the Best Time to Review Your Marketing Workflow

It?s a new year again. Yes, it?s that time of year when you can reflect on the year that has passed, the processes that worked well, the goals you achieved as well as reviewing parts of the business where you did not achieve your goals or the desired outcomes. It is also an opportune time to think of what you?ll do differently to reach more of them, be more efficient, and more productive.This is especially relevant for marketers, considering that effective marketing isn?t becoming easier. So, to reach more people and create more awareness, you will need to work harder and spend more time and effort in finding ways to be more relevant. And let?s face it, it?s not going to change anytime soon.