Make-or-break priorities for creative operations leaders this year

 Here are five make-or-break priorities for creative ops leaders in 2022.

1. Seize the omnichannel opportunity to power revenue and growth

Research shows leaning into omnichannel marketing is a credible strategy for growth:

• Marketers that use three or more channels to connect with customers enjoy 250% more engagement and sales
• Omnichannel shoppers typically spend 4x more than in-store-only customers
• E-commerce shoppers exhibit higher brand loyalty than those who shop in physical stores

There are also opportunities for increased engagement through content personalization - and revenue creation through content monetization. This means senior leaders are looking to content and marketing professionals to power revenue and growth. However, this increased expectation isn’t always matched by a commensurate increase in resources. This leaves marketing teams looking to creative ops to provide a strategy for doing more with less.

According to marketers surveyed by McKinsey and Company - for their report into growth in the CPG sector - one of the major roadblocks to seizing the omnichannel opportunity is poor digital asset management. Without an adequate DAM system, the content supply chain can fall victim to chaotic practices that sap productivity - and increase exposure to risk.

2. Create a higher-performing content supply chain

Ambitious brands recognize that a high-performing content supply chain confers significant commercial advantages by:

• Reducing inefficiencies that leak time and money
• Automating manual processes that thwart productivity
• Improving time-to-market for competitive advantage

But they’re also realizing how challenging it is to create a streamlined system - one that can:

• Accommodate large numbers of internal and external contributors…
• Engaged in complex content workflows for digital and print media…
• Disseminating content across an ecosystem of multiply customer touchpoints

But creating a higher-performing content supply chain is essential if organizations want to generate more customer value, revenue and loyalty through content. Because the real advantage of a high-performing content team isn’t found in quantifiable metrics like turnaround times…

The real advantage of creating a more efficient content team is that it makes time for strategy and creativity. Creativity is the secret ingredient that elevates marketing from easy-to-ignore noise to impossible-to-miss storytelling. So don’t just view content efficiencies in terms of hours and dollars. The bigger picture is higher brand relevance, resonance and loyalty.

3. Standardize processes to maximize workforce utilization

Idle resources - staff who are underutilized due to peaks and troughs in demand - cause money and productivity to leak from your content supply chain. But reassigning staff to different projects can be more trouble than it is worth. Once you’ve briefed them on the task, trained them in new processes, and they’ve got up to speed, any advantages are seriously diminished.

Standardizing your processes removes these barriers to staff reassignment. When all of your projects use a standard workflow - and software - there is no learning curve to slow staff down. They can be reassigned where they’re needed most and hit the ground running.

This means you maximize your resource utilization and reduce your staff costs overall. It also helps with overall capacity planning and accurately predicting what your team can achieve in both the short- and medium-term.

4. Embrace appropriate digital transformation

It’s clear that adopting transformative technology is the answer to the content supply chain conundrum - how to create more content, that’s more engaging, without requiring more resources. But the extent of that transformation will depend on the level your organization currently operates at.

Traditional companies should focus their efforts on technology that can digitize their current analog and offline processes. Whilst organizations that already have digital processes should focus on facilitating cross-departmental workflows and automation.

IT projects can be complex to implement and prone to failure, so consider investing in a third party to help you analyze and define your software needs. IT consultants are well-versed in sector challenges and the software that solves them, so investing in their expertise now can help you leverage long-term ROI.

5. Integrate new technology faster to accelerate ROI

The cloud is rapidly becoming the standard way to deploy software. The benefits - including flexibility, scalability and cost savings - are well documented. Another key benefit is the speed of execution, which supports the fail-fast-learn-faster approach of more agile organizations.

But what about speed of integration? High-performing organizations are already aware that an integrated software stack delivers efficiency and productivity gains. But developing bespoke integrations delay ROI, which is why it is also important to execute software integrations at speed.

As a creative operations leader, faster software integration methods should be on your agenda. Instead of relying on DevOps engineers to develop your integrations, leverage off-the-shelf technologies like APIs and iPaaS to speed up your stack-building.

Discover more about why software integration is so important in the content supply chain.

If you want to learn more about how to integrate your MarTech and add new technologies to your creative operations, you can talk to us any time.