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Admin can be one of the biggest time-wasters for marketing teams. Allowing your marketing team to spend their time on admin represents a really poor use of a skilled team, with direct and indirect costs that can have significant impact on your business.

A 2019 survey found that marketers spend over 60% of their time on low-value or unnecessary tasks. 90% believe a lack of processes to manage and streamline work is making marketing teams less effective than they could be.

And this doesn’t just impact the marketing team – the knock-on effects slow down entire businesses. In another survey, 9 in 10 managers said their productivity depends on the efficiency of routine work processes provided by other departments including marketing – but the majority of managers say these processes are “time-consuming”, with about half describing them as “frustrating”.

Whether it’s briefing creative agencies, liaising with other teams to initiate and progress marketing projects, managing the compliance approval process, or doing the admin behind a hundred-and-one other marketing tasks: it’s clear that repetition, inefficiency and duplication stalk the marketing machine.

Some of the thorniest areas for marketers when it comes to wasting time on admin are:

• Compliance approvals

When it comes to regulatory compliance, it’s important to get it 100% right. In 2021, 564 of the 1,686 financial adverts the FCA reviewed had to be amended or withdrawn for compliance breaches – not something you want to risk.

But compliance approvals can be slow and inefficient. Reviews and approvals done over email involve time-consuming and repetitive chasing, with marketing teams responsible for collating getting agreement and communicating any edits.

Manual review processes also risk errors, with marketing and compliance teams lacking the controls to ensure all content is approved before it’s used. Having a robust audit trail is important – but trying to create it manually risks omissions, and isn’t a good use of marketers’ time.

• Checking for brand consistency

Consistent application of your brand standards is vital to a strong brand. But policing this also risks bogging marketing teams down in unnecessary admin. Controlling brand consistency across numerous marketing assets can be difficult and laborious.

And trying to applying the same branding rigour to materials produced elsewhere – like sales proposals and pitch documents – can see marketing caught in a tug-of-war between brand and the business. Not a good use of your time.

• Reinventing the wheel

If your business constantly creates new marketing and sales materials from scratch, it’s likely that you waste significant time updating very similar pieces of content.

Marketing teams should be using their expertise identifying target markets, crafting content and building on-point campaigns – not fiddling with logos, boilerplates or disclaimers. Especially when it’s highly likely that a very similar piece of content already exists within your marketing assets.

• Inefficient processes

With marketing budgets at their lowest levels for years, you need to be ruthless in stripping out inefficiency from your processes. Whether it’s chasing approvals over email, time-consuming proofing cycles or long-winded sign-off processes – inefficiency compounds admin and wastes time.

• Poor marketing asset management

Tracking down existing marketing assets is another time-thief for marketing teams. You’re sure this new request is similar to something you produced a while ago… you just can’t find it. Or you can find an edited proof…but not the final copy.

Accessing the most up-to-date collateral is a bugbear for marketers. Without easy, user-friendly, searchable access to marketing assets, you can spend hours looking for the right document.

All of this not only wastes your time, but is a poor use of your business’s spend and your own marketing budget.

Ditch the admin and maximise your productivity

Admin isn’t a fun way to spend your time. It means you can’t deliver the value a marketing professional should be providing. And it prevents you from achieving your goals.

There are ways to defeat the admin monster, though.  A good marketing platform can be a game-changer, bringing new levels of efficiency and rigour to your marketing activity through:

• Built-in compliance checks – reviews and approvals via automated workflows minimise the potential for error, and cut out inefficient review and sign-off processes. Compliant audit trails are automatically created.
• Brand consistency made easy – bespoke branded artwork templates can be used as the basis of your materials.
• Admin-free reviews and approvals – with all reviewers able to edit documents in real time, and the ability to set reminders and follow ups, marketing teams no longer need to chase colleagues, collate edits or feed them back to design teams.
• Suppliers can be integrated to the best platforms, allowing access not only to your creative agencies but also your suppliers, streamlining your supply chain management and ensuring prompt turnarounds.

With marketing teams stretched, and business expectations growing and compliance requirements getting ever-stricter, it’s not surprising that many marketing teams are turning to automation to reduce their admin, increase efficiency and provide assurance that best practice is being followed.

Perivan’s marketing automation has been helping marketers ditch the admin for 19 years. The first version of Enable was launched in 2003. You can find out more about Enable, our marketing distribution and brand management platform here, or get in touch with us to learn more.