Today’s modern marketing organization relies on a wide range of technology (MarTech) to create a multi-channel approach of relevant, personalized experiences for their customers and prospects. While companies continue to increase their MarTech spend and add tools to their stacks - many aren't able to keep up with the evolution of the space and demonstrate clear-cut wins for their team and management.
Why? No single solution exists to realistically cover all tasks that a marketing department handles, which makes a combination of solutions necessary.
Most MarTech stacks that companies employ help them to manage their marketing operations in full — everything from customer relationship management to email marketing and data collection. The key to a successful marketing stack is investing in technologies that provide coverage of your needs without too much overlap between the different services that you use.
How can you demonstrate a quick win when it comes to your MarTech stack? Look no further than the foundation of any compelling marketing campaign - the creative work itself - and consider the effort that goes into producing that work. Streamlining that process carries a tremendous ROI benefit. But the best part? It’s fairly easy to do.
Let’s dig into why online proofing is the quickest win in your MarTech stack.
What we'll cover
Table of contents
Online Proofing Delivers Immediate ROI
Most companies don’t fully understand the value that a proofing solution delivers until they actually start using one. In fact, 53% of marketers surveyed in our annual report admitted to not having any consistent (much less enforced) review and approval processes.
An enterprise online proofing solution delivers immediate return on investment in a number of different ways. Getting more subject matter experts and stakeholders reliably involved in the review and approval process will lead to better end products that produce better results. A proofing solution will also save time on projects throughout your company as it facilitates a faster and more efficient approval process for every project.
Let’s dig into how proofing solutions deliver immediate ROI to marketing teams:
- Faster, more accurate content reviews and approvals. If you’ve been handling content approvals through email, you probably know how difficult it can be to manage that “process”. Between managing emails, following up with every stakeholder, and trying to condense feedback into actionable revisions for your creative teams, an online proofing solution can save you a ton of time while improving the quality of the feedback that your team receives. In fact, our customers tell us that online proofing helps:
- Deliver projects 56% faster
- Avoid 30% of typical revisions required
- Reduce effort by as much as 59% - Improved collaboration leads to a better work product. Proofing solutions make it easier for your creative teams to collaborate, stakeholders, to review assets, and managers to oversee the process as a whole. The improvements to collaboration and project management will result in a better end-product for every piece you create.
- A centralized system saves you time. Trying to manage proofing through email often leads to multiple email threads, disconnected feedback, and poor version control. Centralizing your proofing process in one online system will save you and reviewers time.
- Automate time-consuming manual tasks. A proofing solution will help you to automate many tasks that a full-time employee would otherwise have to handle manually, resulting in saved time for important members of your team.
Examples of this include tasks sending email reminders, pushing review stages manually, attempting to calculate decision status, etc.
An enterprise online proofing solution will deliver immediate ROI for your marketing and creative teams and the benefits will reverberate throughout your organization.
Ease of Use Translates to Rapid Adoption
A primary concern when investing in a new solution for your MarTech stack, is how easily it can be adopted by your teams. Other concerns include its fit within your existing processes and its ease of use and understanding. Complicated solutions mean slow adoption, additional training for your teams, and more hiccups along the way.
An online proofing solution that is simple to use and understand needs very little training for your teams and is intuitive to use. The majority of the training will need to be provided to managers who will manage projects that flow through the system, but even they won’t need too much hand-holding as they learn to use most proofing solutions. For anyone that is tech-savvy, an online proofing solution should be easy to pick up and start using on day-one.
(Should be) Compatible with Existing and Future Buys
There are two ways to look at compatibility with your existing and future investments, as it relates to deploying online proofing in your organization.
First, any modern, enterprise-centric online proofing solution, will be compatible with all common media and file types in use by your creative team, ensuring that you can use the solution for an entire campaign.
For example, Ziflow supports hundreds of media and file types and adds to its supported list often. Wide-ranging support obviates the need to incorporate additional tools for one-off projects.
The second consideration is compatibility with existing and future tech investments. An enterprise online proofing solution will allow you to integrate, embed and extend your MarTech applications through APIs and webhooks. This not only solidifies online proofing’s “quick win” potential, but it also strengthens your other MarTech investments.
Online Proofing Your Entire Organization
While your marketing department might deal with the most creative projects within your company and therefore find a proofing solution the most useful, you’ll quickly find that there are uses for it throughout your organization.
Anytime that employees want to work together to produce internal or external documentation and may need approval from a variety of stakeholders, your proofing solution will come in handy. You can use Ziflow to make sure that next annual report is perfect before its sent out, get group feedback on a presentation before the next board meeting, or work with your legal teams to ensure compliance with regulations and laws that are relevant to your industry.
An online proofing solution isn’t just a quick win for your MarTech stack but your organization as a whole.
A No-Brainer Addition
Online proofing is a modest investment that will return it’s initial costs many times over for any company that produces creative content at scale. It does this by reducing challenges with manual review and approval processes, providing an easily-adopted method for collecting and implementing feedback, and working nicely with existing (and future) systems, all within days.
