Streamlining Creative Project Briefing & Approval Workflows

CEO and Product Owner, Darin Lloyd from Simple Marketing Solutions, discusses streamlining creative project briefing and approval workflows. Simple.io offers intuitive marketing software to optimize creative workflows and improve project management for creatives, ad agencies, and marketing teams. Learn how their solutions simplify the review and approval of marketing assets, manage digital assets efficiently, and ensure consistent project briefs. Show NotesConnect With: Darin Lloyd: Website // LinkedInThe MarTech Podcast: Email // LinkedIn // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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  Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world-class marketers that use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's the host of the Martech Podcast, Benjamin Shapiro.

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  Welcome to the Martech Podcast. I'm Benjamin Shapiro, the executive producer of the Martech Podcast, and today we've got a special episode for you, which is going to be guest hosted by Juan Mendoza, the author of the Martech Weekly Newsletter. Juan is a recovering martech consultant turned creator who writes an amazing weekly newsletter about the martech industry, and I'm thrilled to invite him and some of his friends to take the mic and share their knowledge with you, our loyal Martech Podcast listeners. All right, here's a special episode of the Martech Podcast, guest hosted by Juan Mendoza, the author of the Martech Weekly Newsletter.

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  Welcome back, welcome back, martakers. My name is Juan Mendoza from the Martech Weekly, your guest host here at the Martech Podcast. Joining me today is Darren Lloyd. He's the CEO and product owner at Simple Marketing Solutions. Simple offers intuitive marketing software designed to optimize creative workflows and improve project management for creatives, ad agencies and marketing teams. Darren is one of those fascinating guys that he's the executive of the business, the leader of the company, but he's also deeply involved in the product, the design, the development, the execution of product in the business. And it's absolutely fascinating talking with Darren in the past about his vision for how he thinks about how

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  marketing teams and creative teams can be more efficient and optimize how they do the marketing work in large companies. So today Darren and I are going to discuss streamlining creative project briefing and approval workflows. So here's my conversation with Darren Lloyd, the CEO and product owner at Simple Marketing Solutions. Darren, how are you going today?

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  Great. Thanks a lot. Thanks for the opportunity.

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  No problem. Great to have you here. And I'm excited to talk about this one because marketing can be an extremely inefficient type of role, can't it? There's so many things that go wrong in the marketing pipeline, particularly when it comes to creative, that it can be just a constant source of frustration. You and I both know that when it comes to actually generating results, growing a brand, efficiency is a massive part of that because anything that stops you from getting to market can really just hinder your ability to drive outcomes. So can you give us a view quickly before we get into this topic of what's sort of simple's purpose within that around improving processes, workflows, and the overall sort of efficiency equation in business?

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  Well, let's admit that marketing is complex. You've got many stakeholders and delivery teams that need to work in cohesion to be effective. Unless they're working together and aligned, it's going to be difficult. They've got to make sure that their messaging is consistent across many channels. And then they've got deadlines. They've often got BAU campaigns that happen every week. And then there's brand offers and then seasonal campaigns, Christmas, Mother's Day, Father's Day, you name it, Halloween. So it is a complex world. Always, you know, it's hard to stop and look at your processes. But yeah, there's a lot going through the machine at once. And unless your teams are aligned and working in cohesion, it's going to be really difficult. And what we do with AdMation, our product, is make sure that there's a workflow to allow you to be agile, but still have everything in one place and know what's going on.

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  You know what's interesting about marketing? It is probably one of the more diverse roles in a business in the sense that you have to pull on different resources in a company to actually just do the job. Whereas you've got legal or you've got finance or HR, they are fairly isolated, right? They do a specific job for a business, whereas marketing needs to pull on legal often for approvals with their content. They need to pull on finance to get budgets and to figure out where they're tracking with their revenue outcomes. And then you've got all the other product, you've got the actual people that are selling on the side. So, marketing has this very diverse, multifaceted, you have to be a real generalist, I think, to work in marketing in many ways. But let's talk a bit about the technology because I think what you guys are doing at Simple is fascinating in that you're thinking about how you can really improve that efficiency and accuracy within business.

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  But what does that kind of look like? When you go to a customer and you set them up, say with Simple, what are the sort of things that you see are like the obvious things that often a business doesn't do until they get the right technology in place?

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  Well, let's start at the very beginning of the campaign. When you don't have a platform and you're briefing just using a Word document or a Google Doc and you're sharing it, it's difficult to control and make sure that the delivery teams who are going to receive that brief have got all the information they need to get started. What do you need? When do you need to buy? What's the budget, et cetera? So, when you've got a tech platform in place, you can capture the manitries and say, we absolutely need to know audience. We also find that marketers can be lazy sometimes and can't we all? But there's key things. Today, we can measure success really easily. We can measure open rates, et cetera, conversions. It's very easy. But unless we know what you want to do when you set out as part of your brief, you're always retrofitting that. And then you're not really getting a true understanding of how successful your campaign

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  was. So, we start with briefing by putting in a platform, you capture the manager fields and we can focus things on like, what are your success metrics? What are you wanting to do? And some of these campaigns are seven figure numbers and just making sure that there's the opportunity for someone to approve that before it actually starts in production and not, hey, why are we doing this? You can capture it early on. And also, if your brief's detailed, it allows the delivery teams that you're dependent on, as you mentioned, there's a lot of stakeholders, it allows them to plan and allocate resource so they can service the marketer for their campaign.

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  It's interesting that approval process because I would assume that without the right technology in place, a lot of that's just happening in the office or it's happening sort of ad hoc in emails. You know, you send sort of the CMO or you send the head of marketing or whatever, you send them the campaign plan or the creative and then they go, yep, okay, no worries, approved, ready to go. But then when something goes wrong, that's when the technology really helps, right? Because it gives you that paper trail to go, well, exactly what happened at what point throughout that entire creative process? Because then you can go back, oh, no, you actually clicked the button and approved this thing, or you set, it's actually recorded in the software as a source of truth, as opposed to trying to dig through spreadsheets and emails, which like a lot of that work is still hap- like despite of these sort of process technologies out there, there

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  is still a lot of stuff happening in spreadsheets. Heck, even my own business is happening in spreadsheets. It's crazy. So I can kind of see how a lot of businesses would really benefit from having that sort of source of truth of who approved what, what were the actions taken off the back of these different steps within the creative process.

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  Exactly. A lot of today's campaigns have lots of deliverables, many assets for the different social media platforms, digital owned media, paid media, et cetera, all happening at the same time. They need to be consistent. So you need to, having that in a platform just gives you that sort of helicopter view of what am I doing, when I need it by? And the other thing that's really important is often changes happen really late in the approval process. They come deadlines looming. And when you make a change to one asset, you've got to change all the other channels because our consumers, they want to make sure that it's consistent across channels. So what I'm getting on an email is what I see on the website is what you pushed them on an SMS, et cetera. So if you have that in a platform, you can make sure that, okay, we've got a change in our call to action and you update on all the assets. And so one of the things that I encourage is if

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  you're getting into a tech platform, make sure that it supports batch review, batch markup, batch approve, and then, and then batch forwarding. Because sometimes you receive something and you're not quite sure. So you want to forward it to other stakeholders, maybe three or four people, get their input and then the ability to collate their feedback in a system and have it on record and say, well, you know, everyone was happy with it, therefore I'm going to approve it. Or everyone asked this change, so I'm going to make this change. So these are just some of the small benefits you can have when you've got your approval process in a managed platform.

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  There is that element where, say, doing campaigns which are multiple channels. Man, it's frustrating when a last minute change happens. It might be a date change or some language that needs to change or the asset needs to change or something last minute. Of course, it's always last minute, Darren. There's nothing that comes in early in marketing. We all know this. You spend 10 minutes in this industry and you know that everything is the last minute. Let's be honest with ourselves.

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  Absolutely, and it doesn't have to be last minute as well.

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  Exactly, yeah.

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  When you're using a platform, some of the things that we capture silently in the background are approval behaviours. So we can identify if someone doesn't look at an asset until it's version three and we can call that out to someone in the business and go, okay, Alice doesn't look at anything until it's version three. And they can go to her and typically the answer Alice goes, well, I don't like to look at anything until it's mature. And that's not a really good business reason because what you're doing is you're adding another version when Alice could have been giving her input and feedback earlier on in the process. So the little things like that, these little behaviours, these quirks of human nature, it can be captured and you can address your bottlenecks as well.

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  It almost sounds like it's a political tool, Darren, because you're kind of using data to go, well, this person, the reason why we're constantly blocked or the reason why we're not getting to market quicker is because Alice is just waiting forever to get approvals done. And in every business, it's not right to point fingers, okay? We love Alice, but the point being is that you can actually use data to diagnose where the blockers are within a process.

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  Exactly. So when we report on sort of the approval response time, we don't just give you the average Alice takes or John takes five days to respond. We say they take this long, but they have an average of 30 approvals a week or 20 a day or whatever it is. So we put it in context because maybe they need support. And again, we don't make the judgement, we just provide the data. We say this person on average processes this many approvals on a day. This is how long they take to respond on average and the business can choose to do with it what they want.

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  When I was a prior career, I used to work in the more product and the feature side. So that was kind of that agile methodology where you do your sort of burn downs at the end of the month. You'd go, okay, how many tickets did we close? What was our target? Where were the blockers? What was the sort of amount of time that things were sitting in design or development or for approvals, et cetera? And that was like really helpful as a ceremony because that whole ability to go, oh, okay. So if we wanted to ship faster or better quality work, these are the correlations to what's good and what's bad. And if you give the whole team that visibility, then all of a sudden the conversations become less finger pointing and more constructive. As you say, oh, maybe Alice is just not lazy, just needing some more help. Maybe she needs more resource.

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  Maybe there's a conversation that's happening that she's not involved in earlier, which is a really kind of interesting because you'd think that most martech is about executing the stuff. But the work that you're doing with simple is actually about the people and the process, which is probably the highest leverage, highest impact things you could work on to improve your marketing in a business. It's just, it's a bit particularly large enterprise businesses. It's just those processes and the people roles within them as well.

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  The larger the organization, the bigger the challenge. So often you're just even something as simple as knowing who do I send a brief for? If I need something done by marketing, that's our three. When you've got a platform, it directs your briefs to the right delivery team and the delivery team can review it and it goes into the queue and gets assigned. Just all these things. So the larger the organization, the bigger the benefits. The other thing that's sort of happening in today's world is regulatory scrutiny. There's a lot of regulators looking at every bit of marketing, jumping on you and you something wrong. And they should because consumers need to be protected. But that puts a lot of focus on organizations, especially in regulated industry like insurance, finance, farmer, et cetera. And you have to have a demonstratable workflow where you can say these peers reviewed this before we went to market.

• 12:29Speaker 06

  And email just doesn't cut it. It's not if you're going to get investigated, it's when you're going to get investigated. And we make that whole, they're the push of the button. You can output what the regulator needs and they're more forgiving when you've got a robust process than if you don't, if you're just being a cowboy with the email.

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  Well, what it reminds me of actually is the rise of software-based marketing programs, so like Xero and MYB and QuickBooks. And a lot of that has made that whole process, the paper trail, the expense tracking, all that stuff has made it really simple when you work with an accountant or a bookkeeper. It's like, okay, just give us your QuickBooks file and then we'll be able to see what your business has been doing. And it's almost exactly the same but for marketing when you say it's so relevant to regulatory requirements is that, okay, so what's the past 12 campaigns look like? Well, here's the simple file and here's everything you can see about what we've done, what was approved, and then you can have that paper trail. That, to me, is just kind of smart business, right? It's having that marketing, not being this fluid, chaotic process, but having all of

• 13:29Speaker 05

  that content information and all that knowledge stored up in a platform where you can actually track it back. Obviously, it saves it up for a rainy day in case, as you say, you probably will be audited at some point for your marketing. And increasingly, I actually see that there's a need for these kinds of platforms. There are some platforms out there that allow for like the data management and tracking or where things go. But increasingly, I'm seeing that on the marketing, people and process front, yes, for executing campaigns is very valuable, but increasingly, brands are using data to drive marketing. And so the use of the data, the compliance, the regulatory requirements for that use of that data, I think there's a huge opportunity on that side as well, which is all about how do you trace back the lineage of the data that you're using in your marketing, whether it be an

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  email campaign, sending it down ad tech tools, sending it into your website or your app? All those things are different points in which, again, approvals are made, decisions are made, and you'd probably be wise to track that as well. But my question to you is like, how deep do you go here? Do you really sit at that people and process layer? Or what do you do specifically around the content and the platforms that actually use that content, such as email marketing and other platforms?

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  We service all channels as you have to, otherwise you're only a part solution. We start off with a good brief to make sure that everyone's aligned. We then assist with resourcing, so who's going to do what and when. There's dependencies, so creatives need to provide concepts and then the salesforce team need to do the email build, et cetera, or the team doing the SMS push need to know when they're going to receive stuff. Obviously, the content that's on the brief needs to appear in the creatives. There's variable fields and there's personalization, so they need to be called out. So we make that all obvious, but probably our biggest benefit is a campaign on a page view where someone can go, what are we doing? And it's got what you're doing, how many email sends you're doing, when's it going live, the key dates and who's doing what?

• 15:17Speaker 06

  All on one page and just having that clarity in all the documents for its purchase orders, estimates, anything you need, concepts, all in one place. We take that off marketers and anyone in delivery's mind and it just gives them more time to be efficient and focus on, is this call to action right? Should we say stop now or buy now? And we've also got checklists along the way, so when they're reviewing something, we're big fans of not having more than five or six items. Is the disclaimer correct? Do we have enough inventory to sell this? Are the images correct? Do we have permission to use the images? So the basics that get marketers in trouble, because we don't want to get them in trouble. We want to help them. We want to be an environment which encourages good work to come out at the end of it. And we don't try and get too much in the data, although we do have it.

• 16:02Speaker 06

  We have it in the brief and your metrics and that does get handed over and we do tag things accordingly. But our focus is more on the creative side, so the briefing, the look, the feel, and that's kind of where we live.

• 16:14Speaker 05

  And that's great. Well, Darren, thank you for joining us and shedding a bit of light on how technology can enable better processes, better outcomes, better alignment with our marketing teams. It's absolutely fascinating to think through like the technology can actually drive a lot of change in this space and it can create opportunities for marketers to be way more smarter with how they use their time. So that wraps up our first episode, one of two. And part two of this interview, which we'll publish tomorrow, Darren and I are going to discuss transforming client feedback into new product features. So we're going to go a different track and talk. About how customer feedback can be put into a process in which it can drive new product features, optimization, and obviously new opportunities for businesses to drive growth. Thank you to Darren Lloyd from Simple Marketing Solutions for joining us.

• 16:58Speaker 05

  If you can't wait until our next episode, you'd like to learn more about Darren, you can actually find his LinkedIn profile in our show notes, or you can visit his company website at simple.io. Darren, thanks for joining us.

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  Thank you, Juan.

• 17:10Speaker 04

  Okay, that wraps up this episode of the Martech Podcast. Thanks to our guest host, Juan Mendoza, the author of the Martech Weekly Newsletter. If you'd like to get in touch with Juan, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes, or you can contact him on Twitter. His handle is Juan Mendoza, but it's spelled crazy pants. It's J U four N M E N D zero Z four, or it's a little easier to just visit his company's website, which is themartechweekly.com. Just one more link in our show notes I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to martechpod.com where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletters, and you can even send us your topic suggestions or your marketing questions, which we'll answer

• 17:55Speaker 04

  live on our show. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is martechpod, M A R T E C H P O D, on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, or you can contact me directly. My handle is Ben J. Shap, B E N J S H A P. And if you haven't subscribed yet, and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, we're going to publish an episode every day this year. So hit the subscribe button in your podcast app, and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy.

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  Thanks for listening to the Martech Podcast, an I Hear Everything production. Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand? Then visit iheareverything.com.