5 Tips to Boost the Performance of Your Team
No matter your role, our working lives are dominated by digital content. So what’s the challenge heading into 2020, and what can you do to increase both the wellbeing and productivity of your team?
The nature of working in marketing means we’re often under greater pressure than other in-house departments or types of agency or consultancy. Dispersed teams and suppliers, big campaigns and short-notice requests all make up the average day.
A new survey has explored the impact of an ever-increasing volume of digital content. The People Cost of Content report reveals teams in our industry waste 13 days per staff member every year hunting for digital assets and filing content.
This inefficiency is impacting performance, with 41% admitting it’s caused their team to delay releasing materials, and it’s also taking its toll on staff morale and wellbeing. Almost half (46%) of those surveyed have worked late because they’ve lost time hunting for files.
Despite all of this, over two thirds of marketing decision-makers (69%) said they would still like their organisation to produce more marketing content!
It’s well known that our people are our most valuable asset, so allowing this sort of impact just doesn’t make good business sense. What can be done?
The problem is not that there’s too much content.
From photographs, graphics and videos, to documents, presentations, design files and other media, digital content is fundamental to marketing and is only going to increase. The problem is that it’s not stored in a user-friendly and efficient way.
Here are some tips to boost the performance of your team in 2020:
1. Get everyone to work in the same way.
Put tools in place so that everyone has to work in a consistent way. This ranges from adoption of communication tools like Slack to team workflow management apps like Asana. But when it comes to saving time lost storing, searching for, and sharing files, the latest Digital Asset Management (‘DAM’) software is ideal. Your team need no longer save to desktops, shared servers or overflowing Dropbox and Google Drive accounts. DAM means files are tagged and easily searchable so you can find what you need regardless of whether you’ve worked in the team for five years or five minutes!
2. Modernise your agency, in-house and freelancer relationships.
Files for a particular project are typically saved in a master folder location and it may not be appropriate to grant full access to all that content to an external party. But nor do you want to waste time organising files into multiple folders and putting version control at risk. With DAM, admins can allow approved individuals and teams access to only the assets you deem they need.
DAM helps with clear version control; a common problem for creatives. Different studios or agencies can unwittingly be working concurrently on different versions of a project file. Clients will undertake a review but of which version? DAM makes this hassle free, by managing updates to all file types, including images, presentations and documents.
3. Create custom-branded portals to make marketing assets instantly available.
If you work for a brand that regularly offers new visual assets, an externally accessible library quickly customised to your brand is a great time hack. There are some good examples here.
And for many firms, being able to provide a brand portal containing prescribed assets for external parties to use is vital for global design consistency. For example, firms may have their own templates which they want to give secure access to, and through one familiar centralised system.
4. Make small design edits faster.
This is often a time-consuming part of the creative review and approval process between client and designer. DAM software helps as it integrates with Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop. This enables speedier editing, particularly where quick and simple changes are required. The designer can work on the file where it’s centrally stored, rather than launch the design programme before editing and resaving to the right location.
5. Prepare for growth by investing in services that scale.
Often in-house marketing teams and agencies have their own cloud-based storage methods, including common services like Dropbox, Google Drive or Box. But in a creative environment, storage capacity and ease of sharing and access can quickly become an issue.
Typically, images and files shared are high-quality and smaller agencies or start-ups in particular can run into the problem of having too much data for a smaller general system like Dropbox. Dedicated DAM software uses the likes of Amazon Web Services to offer plenty of storage that can scale with your needs.