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Content is at the heart of every great marketing campaign. Every team strives to create the perfect copy, beautiful imagery, and eye-catching graphic design. And when your team achieves that perfect balance, there's no better feeling. There's only one problem: your deadlines. While you may have the perfect design, have you accounted for the 80 different sizing variations needed for digital banners and social ads across all different platforms? What about the translations for your global campaign? Or the overall quality of your imagery? These bottlenecks can hinder your progress, reduce the quality of your content, and frustrate your team. As the saying goes, the devil is in the details – and this couldn't be more accurate for your campaign.
Over the years, we have worked with various clients who have reached out to us to help meet their deadlines quickly. Read on as we dive into some of the most common creative bottlenecks we've seen so you can build this into your marketing team's project plan.
Lack of Talent and Resources
"It's important to surround yourself with people who are better than you. That way, you will push yourself to be better, too. Collaboration is key." — Anna Wintour.
The first common bottleneck that teams often face is the overall structure of resources and talent for producing content and facilitating communication across multiple cross-functional teams. To overcome this challenge, leaders should evaluate their team's strengths and talent and the desired structure needed to execute the strategy. As more marketing teams are pressured to do more with fewer resources, investing in expert outsourced resources to produce content can help supplement your teams' efforts—helping you work smarter, not harder.
Consider how you would structure your dream marketing team – from cross-functional operations to designers, photographers, and pre-and post-production specialists. Who do you need to support daily operations? Who do you need to bulk up your team for seasonal campaigns? What talent exists on your current team – and how can you leverage your teams' innate skills? What are your talent gaps – can that be outsourced to specialists? What collaborative tools – such as content and data management platforms – are necessary to facilitate efficiency with content creation?
Starting at the foundation of your team and building from there will elevate your content within your budget and bandwidth.
Low-Quality Images
A common obstacle marketing teams face today is not standing out on platforms due to low-quality photos. Poor composition, brand inconsistencies, overutilization of stock photography, post-production imaging, resolution, and color management issues all contribute to image quality. With today's many channels and competitive industry marketplace, marketing teams must ensure their images are impactful, informative, high-quality, and consistent upon capture. To truly stand out in the eyes of an increasingly discerning target audience, teams should consider leveraging creative studio teams of photographers and post-production artists. These teams often have seamless processes and workflows to capture and quickly deliver high-quality imagery end-to-end, complete with retouching and color management services. Seamless processes with expert teams like this can also contribute to long-term cost efficiencies – eliminating the need for multiple vendor management or issues with asset transfer. These services help create order out of chaos, ultimately setting your team up for success in their campaigns and allowing you to refocus and re-invest time in creative strategies rather than the tedious day-to-day execution.
Layout and File Preparation
Another frequent challenge across print and digital marketing is the incorrect layout and formatting of assets, leading to inaccuracies, reprints, redesigns, and production delays. As the demand for marketing content grows, these bottlenecks become more frequent in print collateral, digital banner ads, and social media ads, making it an omnichannel challenge. To overcome these obstacles, companies should partner with a specialized premedia solutions, layout, and formatting provider to streamline creative production. The specialized provider should provide creative teams that excel in versioning different ads. Versioning ads involves taking an ad created by a graphic designer and resizing it to meet the specifications of various digital platforms, maintaining consistency and impact. This task can be tedious and time-consuming, but by allowing a partner to handle the resizing, graphic designers can focus on the creative aspects rather than the tedious tasks. These solutions will strengthen brand engagement, enhance efficiency, ensure consistent brand integrity, and allow more time to develop a marketing strategy.
Poor Asset and Document Management
"Great things are done by a series of small things brought together." — Vincent Van Gogh.
Teams still struggle with asset and document management in today's data-rich, AI-enabled environment. These struggles often lead to miscommunication, duplicate work, outdated information, and – ultimately - employee burnout.
Many collaborative tools facilitate collaboration and digital communication between internal teams, but how can you ensure seamless communication and collaboration between your team and vendors?
On the creative premedia and print side of marketing, it is important to ensure your partners have the right technology and workflows in place.
Here are a few factors to consider when evaluating potential partners' workflows:
- Efficient Team Collaboration: Tools such as TeamBase DAM enable multiple teams to manage, design, and collaborate on extensive collections of photoshoot images and archives.
- Integrated Copy Database: Integrate a copy database into your DAM tool to expedite production and time-to-market for print, catalog, and e-commerce teams by linking web and catalog copy directly to images.
- Remote Collaboration Capabilities for Copywriting: With tools such as TeamBase ES, facilitate collaboration between remote merchants and copywriting teams to streamline the development of print and e-commerce marketing efforts.
- Centralized Digital Document Management: Utilize a digital document management platform to centralize assets, enable on-demand printing, and streamline inventory management, ensuring efficient operations and maintaining brand integrity.
- Cost-Effective Integration Solutions: Offer affordable pricing and seamless integration of multiple tools and systems, reducing complexity and optimizing workflow efficiency.
Conclusion
Creative bottlenecks are bound to happen, but they can be minimized or avoided by using the right resources, utilizing efficient data management, prior preparation, high-quality images, and maintaining a controlled budget. While bottlenecks like these are common in planning and executing content campaigns, recognizing and addressing them can help you prepare for, navigate around, and avoid these challenges. You can keep your content campaigns on track by using sufficient talent and resources, proper asset and document management, consistent layout and file preparation, high-quality images, and controlled costs.
How Kodi Collective Can Help
At Kodi Collective, we empower brands to excel in their content campaigns by offering a range of resources, including studios and U.S.-wide location photography, end-to-end video production, and streamlined turnkey services. Our professional retouching, simple setups, production management, and closed-loop color management ensure top-quality results. We provide flexible data management, up-to-date material, efficient material management, a document procurement portal, on-demand printing, authorized lifestyle production, inventory management, storage, and financial reporting.
Kodi Collective supports your preparation through content development, color accuracy, creative production, and production management, enhancing brand perception, consistency, and integrity. We deliver high-quality images with simple services like complex masking, flesh tone balancing, retouching, and G7-certified color scientists for an authentic product experience. Kodi Collective helps you save costs with streamlined production, increased efficiency, effective budgeting, time management, and cost control using Kodi Studios. We'll take it from here.
