For marketing teams, there’s a constant pressure of the fast approaching deadline.
Trends come and go fast. Campaigns are often on a time crunch. Go live dates don’t move. Seasons have firm start and end dates. Dependencies get stacked.
Those short, tight deadlines become even more stressful when confusing feedback and lagging approvals slow things down.
With content held up in approval purgatory, the result is frustration for everyone involved. With marketing teams facing the perfect storm when it comes to proofing creative work, these holdups can happen far too often.
Having to juggle various media formats and work with multiple stakeholders and departments, it can be a nightmare to keep track of feedback scattered across different channels.
But it doesn’t have to be.
Online proofing for marketing teams enables a streamlined review process, faster delivery and more effective collaboration across the board.
The Complexities of the Marketing Content Workflow
Marketing content workflows have a lot of moving parts. Copy, design, product, and management teams (to name a few) are all important stakeholders in getting a project over the finish line. Marketing teams will also often have outside creatives, consultants, freelancers, or partners to collaborate with.
Given the complex, cross-functional nature of the process of delivering marketing content, there’s room for a lot of bottlenecks. When it comes to proofing content, delayed feedback or approvals, confusion about versioning, and poorly communicated feedback can all derail projects.
The problem is that many typical methods of sharing files for feedback or gathering approvals fall short. With long email chains, important information gets buried. Comments in Slack, Dropbox or even PM tools often aren’t specific enough (particularly for visual assets like video proofing) and can easily get missed. And having multiple marked-up PDFs floating around is a recipe for confusion.
The other typical way of gathering feedback is in meetings or other offline conversations. These are usually not only inefficient but also require additional effort for the information to be communicated effectively to the wider team.
Why Online Proofing for Marketing Matters
Online proofing software gives marketing teams tools specifically designed for gathering feedback and getting creative signoff.
All feedback is centralized, with threaded comments making it simple to consolidate everyone’s input in context of the creative. Visual markup tools mean all stakeholders can leave precise and clear feedback on assets like images, videos, and websites. Version control features limit the possibility of reviewing or approving the wrong version. The ability to track when a comment, task, edit or approval was done adds accountability for the whole team.
How Online Proofing Speeds Up Marketing Project Delivery
Here are some ways online proofing speeds up and simplifies the review and approval process for marketing content.
Streamlined Feedback Collection
Having a centralized and unified space for collecting feedback means it’s easy to get an overview of everyone’s input, leading to better creative decisions. Additionally, comments are less likely to be missed (or even seen by the wrong people, for that matter).
Fewer Rounds of Revisions
Clearer markup and threaded conversations mean there’s less chance of work needing to be clarified or for missed tasks. All feedback is gathered in one centralized space, reducing the need for new versions after each stakeholder gives their input.
Faster Approvals
Automated workflows, approval deadlines, and customized notifications mean everyone is clear on what they need to do and by when. The process isn’t reliant on manually sending follow-ups or relying on memory to approve a particular file.
Better Alignment Across Teams
Online proofing tools enable stakeholders to stay in sync, meaning there are fewer delays due to unclear expectations, misunderstandings, and miscommunication. This also means much less friction between teams. Threaded comments make it faster to get clarity – and that information is accessible to everyone, enabling faster alignment.
How Marketing Teams Use Online Proofing in Practice
Online proofing solutions like ReviewStudio can save marketing teams time, energy – and the bottom line.
Simplifying the Campaign Delivery Process
Whether you’re working on ads, email campaigns, social content, or a full 360 campaign, online proofing speeds up your creative workflows. It makes it simple to gather feedback, from V1 to delivered. Everyone is fully aligned across every stage, cutting down on the likelihood that work will need to be redone.
Centralizing Creative Assets
For product launches involving multi-channel creative assets, it offers a single source of truth for every element. All assets can be grouped together, giving everyone a holistic overview of the entire project.
Improving Internal Workflow Coordination
For internal projects like product launches or internal decks that require layers of approval, it makes the process friction-free. Workflow automations and notifications simplify how the creative moves through approval stages. And for the person doing the approving, intuitive controls mean signing-off is quick and simple.
Getting Projects Done Faster
Lastly, it makes bread-and-butter content marketing projects (like producing blogs, whitepapers, and videos) much easier. Teams spend less time waiting around for feedback and can more easily action it, enabling individual pieces of content to move through the workflow smoothly. It also means approvers can check in to a single space and review everything asynchronously in one go.
This means teams can be much more agile and are better able to respond to pressing content needs and to take advantage of marketing trends while they’re still relevant.
Features to Look for in Online Proofing Tools
To help you gauge whether a tool is the right fit for your marketing team and the others who’ll be proofing creative work, these are some essential features to look out for:
- Markup Tools – Easy to use and media-specific tools for all the formats you work with.
- Workflow Automations – Members don’t have to spend time on endless project management and coordination tasks.
- Robust Version Control Features – Stacking versions for sequential consolidation with the ability to quickly compare files side-by-side.
- Easy Sharing – With features specifically built for collaborative proofing, so it works well for other internal teams who need to provide feedback and approvals, across all departments.
- Intuitive Interface – So team members and other stakeholders – especially approvers – can get the hang of the features quickly.
Online Proofing for Marketing: Clarity and Control
By centralizing feedback and facilitating smooth cross-functional collaboration, online proofing makes the marketing workflow a lot more manageable. It means faster delivery, better creative decisions, and less friction.
