Content has become vital to marketing success for enterprises in virtually all industries. As a result, the volume of content that marketers must develop and manage is growing dramatically, and the pace of content development is also increasing rapidly.
Content review and approval processes are a fact of life in most enterprises, and they can be a bottleneck that significantly delays important marketing projects. In a survey of attendees that was conducted at the 2015 Content Marketing World conference, 19% of survey respondents said that review and approval processes delay their projects for more than a week.
In an article for the Content Marketing Institute website, Marcus Varner discussed seven steps that marketing leaders can take to make review and approval processes more efficient:
- Create a template for review/approval processes that describes the steps in the process and includes a process timeline
- Limit the number of reviewers and approvers to people who may be required by applicable laws or regulations and people who can make a valuable contribution to the process in a timely manner
- Limit the number of rounds in the process by obtaining consensus on critical points before the content development process begins
- Get commitments from reviewers and approvers on critical project deadlines
- Educate reviewers and approvers on the consequences of project delays
- Enable more specific and informed feedback from reviewers and approvers
- Perform a post-mortem after each project to identify what worked and what went wrong with the review and approval process
These are good suggestions, but we believe that using the right technology tools can also significantly improve the efficiency of review and approval processes. In the Content Marketing World survey mentioned earlier, 62% of respondents said their preferred method for routing content for review and approval was paper files, email attachments, or links to shared folders. None of these methods is efficient, and they all increase the probability of errors and delays.
A robust, enterprise-class digital asset management solution will provide capabilities that enable enterprises to define and streamline review and approval workflows, and it will include collaboration tools that enable reviewers and approvers to easily provide meaningful feedback on content resources, including rich content resources such as images and videos.
To learn more about how Aprimo Digital Asset Management (formerly ADAM) enables and supports efficient review and approval workflows, take a look at this short video.