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When you’re creating marketing content, reviews and approvals are a vital part of the process. Checking your collateral for brand consistency, accuracy and regulatory compliance issues can be time-consuming but it’s something you need to pay attention to if you want to produce professional, on-brand content.

Why is the creative review process so important?

It doesn’t matter what type of collateral or content you’re producing; thorough reviews are vital.

This is equally true when you’re creating digital content like emails, sales presentations, interactive webpages, online adverts or social media posts as it is when you’re publishing hard copy material like brochures.

Having more than one person review a document brings new perspective, and if you’ve worked on a piece of content from the start, introducing a ‘fresh pair of eyes’ can be invaluable in picking up any errors or brand inconsistencies you may have missed.

If you work in a regulated business, this review process takes on elevated importance, as approval from the compliance team can be a requirement before materials are published.

All too often, though, the creative review process can be an admin-heavy, labour-intensive and frustrating one. Get it wrong, and creative reviews can hinder your ability to get materials to market quickly.

That’s why we’ve pulled together 6 tips to help you make your creative review process more efficient, reducing the time it takes and removing inefficiencies to ensure you can publish accurate, on-brand marketing content as swiftly as possible.

6 tips for improving your creative review process

1. Pick the right partner. The creative review process starts long before you are at the stage of reviewing any content – and hinges on making sure you’re working with the right design partner. Choosing an expert design team to bring your brand to life is the foundation for all your creative success. You need a reliable partner you can collaborate with on design projects of all types and sizes.

2. Get the briefing process right. Your creative brief is central to a streamlined review process; it ensures that your vision is clear to your design team, and helps to manage expectations on all sides. Get your creative briefing process right and your review process will naturally be smoother and simpler, as your designers will find it easier to translate your ideas into reality.

3. Be consistent. A systematic review process is equally important for printed and digital materials, with the same degree of rigour needed for each. This is especially important when it comes to compliance; the Advertising Standards Authority rules are platform-neutral, meaning that wherever you’re advertising, you need to follow the same guidelines.

If you’re regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, the same is true of their financial promotions rules, which apply equally whether you are producing a social media post or a whitepaper.

4. Make sure you’re in control of your collateral. You can only review and approve content you’re aware of – but all too often, marketing or sales content is produced elsewhere in the business, often by people with only a passing knowledge of your brand standards.

Putting in place a structured approach to digital asset management can make all the difference here. Having your marketing and sales content available in a single online system ensures everyone can access what they need, preventing teams from‘ going rogue’ to create their own materials, and means that the marketing team is always aware of materials being produced, enabling you to keep control.

5. Involve the right people. The marketing team, of course. Your sales team, if you’re producing sales collateral, and any stakeholders within your business. If you work for a regulated business, your compliance team will also need to be on this list.

Other reviewers may change depending on the nature of the project and your firm’s structure. And of course, involve your external designers as if they were members of your own team – a successful end result when it comes to creative content is dependent on your close relationship with your designers.

6. Make the review process easy. People are far more likely to buy into a process that is intuitive and simple to follow.

Consider implementing a solution that enables teams to collaborate on content production, sharing proofs and reviews online to ensure that internal teams and external designers work together in the most efficient way.

By improving version control and reducing duplication and rework, this can make the creative review process more robust and less time consuming, with the risk of human error reduced via fewer manual processes. Improving collaboration on design projects is a key step in improving your creative reviews and driving a better end result.

Develop a more efficient review process with a more robust output

These tips will hopefully help to make your creative review process as efficient and robust as it can be. In doing so, your brand will be strengthened, you will be able to get materials to market faster, and approvals will be a seamless collaborative effort, not an admin-heavy chore.

Producing the best marketing content possible means being ordered and inclusive when it comes to creative reviews, managing the process efficiently and effectively, and working closely with your chosen design professionals to create the end result you’re all looking for.

To find out more about Perivan’s design capabilities, and how our expert team can help you with everything from brand development to creative artworking, visit our website or get in touch.

Nothing in this document should be treated as an authoritative statement of the law. Action should not be taken as a result of this document alone. We make no warranty and accept no responsibility for consequences arising from relying on this document.