Inefficiency is reported to cost organisations 20-30 per cent of their revenue every year. Luckily with some small, but strategic changes, your team can avoid becoming part of the statistic.
One of the best parts of the advertising and marketing world is working with exceptionally creative people. However, balancing creativity with productivity can sometimes be a challenge, leading to inefficient and chaotic workflows if not carefully managed.
Hidden costs associated with inefficient workflows can creep in, no matter your setup. In-house teams find content creation and campaigns sucking up more and more resources, and agency-side the issue gets existential: having low utilisation reduces your billable hours, meaning profit margins get squeezed and your growth is restricted.
So, is inefficiency holding your organisation back? Probably yes. Here are three simple ways to work smarter without upsetting the creative spirit.
Hone Your Productive Time
Organising brand assets is one of the biggest hidden inefficiencies. Marketing teams spend ridiculous amounts of time searching, filing, tagging, and organising digital assets, and agencies throw away days ’ worth of billable hours doing the same. Years ago that was the only way, but now (welcome to 2024) software platforms can do it for you.
“Seek out AI-powered platforms which automatically identify objects, people, and colours in your images and videos, and which add the right metatags for you,” said Freddie Rumsey, Canto’s ANZ lead.
“The software also exists to automatically categorise and organise content for you, so there are no more clunky content hierarchies, no more junior execs spending hours editing file names and folder structures, and no more messages between team members searching for assets,” he added.
Find out more from Freddie on these productivity-boosting functions in Canto’s ‘Introduction to digital asset management (DAM)’ webinar.
Amplify Your Content ROI
Cutting out these hours lost on administrative chores allows your team to scale up content production and keep up with demand. This is vital if your organisation is growing and expanding into new markets, or if your agency is looking to scale.
Squeezing value from every piece of content was something Amorepacific Group, South Korea’s largest cosmetic company, considered in detail. The group’s digital transformation leader, Kyongsuk Lim, was facing over 650,000 digital assets across 40-plus beauty and health brands.
She explains: “It costs a lot to produce one piece of content. Because we do business worldwide, using Canto to distribute content to multiple countries can save a lot of money. We’re now reusing more content and removing redundancies in our workflows. That’s had a significant impact.”
Using a centralised system to distribute content across markets is one way to improve your content ROI, and you can also realise value during content creation. If a new brief lands in your lap, rather than tasking your team to start concepting from scratch, you can use an easily searchable library to rediscover previous artwork and ideas, simply by searching using natural language. With AI-powered search, marketers often find content they didn’t know they had.
Collaborate Better
Don’t underestimate the complex world in which your team operates. The advertising, marketing and media industries require constant collaboration—between clients, agencies, partners, suppliers, publishers, new business leads, media outlets, and so on. How other organisations operate is out of your control, but it’s still possible to collaborate better.
“Rather than having to send and resend files externally, you can create branded environments with precise access controls. It means you can share professional-looking suites of assets with partners, journalists, franchisees, or prospective clients, giving them everything they need – and nothing they don’t,” said Canto’s Freddie Rumsey.
Because these DAM ‘Portals’ are self-service, you can boost efficiency by giving your stakeholders instant access. As well as improving efficiency, this also tightens up brand management and version control, and enables real economies to scale through a more streamlined end-to-end process.
Is Inefficiency Holding You Back?
The reality is most teams can do more to tighten productivity and improve workflow, and most agencies could carve out a few more billable hours and improve profitability. Whether you use a DAM platform or another solution to improve efficiency, it’s worth trying to identify and eliminate those hidden costs.
To explore how your marketing team can operate more efficiently, visit www.canto.com.
