Making Your Life Easier, One Click at a Time

Marketing requires a lot of thinking, a lot of strategizing, and a lot of content creation, a lot of days spinning wheels and not feeling quite as productive as you’d like to have. And, all too often, the things we produce have to be produced again for different regions, dialects, languages, personas and distribution channels. All this means is that one piece of content, say a 500-word blog, can take days to get approved, translated and eventually publish. Could your time be better spent working on a new piece of content rather than recrafting the same piece over and over?

Moving the Stone Up the Mountain

Creating marketing material is rarely an easy task. Or, I should say, having marketing material approved is rarely easy. The bureaucracy, the nit-pickiness, the inefficient workflows, it all adds up to dread for most creative people. The approval process alone is inefficient, let alone when you have to have the same piece of content approved five times for five different channels. If technology is available to avoid this nightmarish scenario why do more companies not utilize it?

The truth is, inefficiency seems cheaper and easier than actually fixing the problem in many cases. The buying process of such robust technology alone can be exhausting, requiring full time dedication to research, demo, and test the technology. The implementation stage is rarely as smooth as simply ingesting a few digital assets, then there’s the learning curve of new software. It’s easy to see why the investment into full digital software isn’t always done. Inefficiency is expensive, but it can’t necessarily be measured. The buying, testing and implementation process can be expensive and timely, but it’s also a necessary step and eventually measurable toward the overall investment.

Life on Easy Street

Now that the boring stuff is out of the way, let’s explore how much better your work life could be with this exciting technology. Imagine an approval process where the workflows are set up and all you have to do is finish your portion of the content, press a button and move on with your life and do what you were hired to do, create more content.

This series of articles is based on switching to a content first mentality. As the number of distribution channels, target personas, and types of content continue to expand while the number of hours in each day remain the same, spending time on creating variations of each piece of content not only seems daunting it can be practically impossible. The hurried nature of content creation and approval dilutes the end product so that your audience does not get what they deserve; quality material.

Will convincing your company to move the proverbial stone up the mountain make your life easier? Once it’s done, surely, in some ways. Content creation isn’t supposed to be easy. But, shouldn’t your challenge be to create better, more enticing content rather than tracking people down for approvals and recreating the same ad for different distribution channels? It can happen, it might take you to instigate it, though.