Many marketers know the “Good, Fast, or Cheap” rule: pick any 2. Everybody wants their projects to hit all 3, but getting that to happen is pretty much impossible.
Today, the struggle seems to be actually getting to pick two, versus accepting the two that your current situation sort of forces on you. We’ve heard from many leaders and marketers that timing, or how quickly a message or program gets to market, is the factor they have least control of, even when they’re spending money to speed it up.
In studying these situations, we’ve learned the reason time often feels out of control is a lot of it is wasted or spent inefficiently. Rather than actually moving the project toward the goal, people get stuck in an eddy, maybe waiting for assets, or for revisions, or for approvals, or any number of things. As a result, someone in the project flow might decide to shortcut the process, to expedite getting it done. The result: likely a negative hit to quality or budgets or both. And usually a negative reflection on the teams involved, too.
So what can you do? You have to pull apart the processes and workflows to see where things stall. Prioritize which of those has the biggest potential negative impact, and decide which would yield the most benefit in terms of time or quality if you could fix it. Then scope out what’s involved to get those steps fixed and moving smoothly again.
Maybe you’ll decide that organizing assets in a single repository would eliminate the creative sourcing struggle. Or perhaps a unified workflow management system could auto-assign jobs and tasks to the next person or team, and keep the comms organized and out of Inboxes. Maybe the entire process could be built into a self-serve model, where product or sales teams create certain branded materials from templates, leaving you or your team out of the sluggish processes, to work instead on more high-value projects.
All of the above can help you increase efficiency. When you have systems and processes that work, you don’t have to choose between good, fast, and cheap, because they’re all possible. You may already have a couple of these things in place, and that’s great! However, if you’re jumping between applications or systems because they don’t integrate seamlessly, there may be ways to connect or consolidate to be more efficient. Start analyzing if you’re using the right platform for your organization by identifying the gaps, the biggest daily challenges, and what you could achieve if you had “X”.
If you’d like to set up a consultation to talk about your systems and processes please give us a call. We’re happy to talk through it with you and see if there are ways to make it a win for all.
Helping create, manage, and deliver brands from start to finish.
In collaboration with Bluebird Branding