Dog wearing a cute hat straining on a leash
Capitalizing on relevant trends can be an effective way to gain reach in social marketing. But it can be nearly impossible with the long timelines required to get work through some organizations. As company structures become increasingly complicated, with more and more stakeholders needing to weigh in, here are four tips to help speed things up.
Establish a single source of truth in the cloud
Give everyone on the team one place to share, discuss and revise, as well as build a unified location to pull final assets for deployment. If you do nothing else, this could help you save enough time to get ideas out while they’re still on the fresh side. If you’re primarily using Instagram and Facebook, the Meta Creative Hub is a great tool for this. If you’re working across platforms, you can use Google Workspace or something similar. This can be uncomfortable for organizations not used to working outside of Adobe or Microsoft environments, but constantly moving across tools can be a huge time suck.
Negative Example: Creatives build mockups in Photoshop, export them to PDFs, present the PDFs in Zoom and then send via email. Stakeholders comment over email, project managers mark up the PDF, creatives make changes, export a new PDF, proofers check changes against the original PDF and inevitably find things missing, thus creating a loop that can last in days. Then, when the work is finally right, the project manager creates a spreadsheet, which goes through rounds of proofing and approval, and is finally delivered to the person deploying the work.
Replace status meetings with hot sheets
The problem with status meetings is that they tend to cover all open jobs, some of which may have deadlines days or weeks away. This takes the team’s time and focus away from content that needs to deploy right away. And let’s be honest, when you pull together 10 to 20 people on Zoom, there’s bound to be a bunch of extra chatter. Instead, use Teams or Slack to send a hot sheet of what the team needs to focus on that day.
End the relentless pursuit of perfection
Of course, you want your content to look and sound good. But focusing on tweaking small details can delay deployment to achieve a result the audience will probably not even notice. Could the caption be a little funnier? Could the video edit be a little tighter? Sure. Make that a note for next time and push the content live while it still resonates strongly with your audience.
Be okay with saying okay
It’s common in some organizations for stakeholders to feel obligated to make a comment or change to the work, even if they feel nothing is wrong, for fear of being called out for not doing their job. Do what you can to foster an environment where recognizing good work and not making changes for the sake of change is a sign of competence. This will help eliminate rounds of changes that are unlikely to make a real difference to the effectiveness of the content.
Bottom line: Shaving time off the approval schedule can have a dramatic impact on relevance to your audience.
Daniel Quentin Zuber
Co-Founder of 2113 Labs and influencer in trance music, cyberpunk, and vaporwave culture on Instagram and TikTok @therealquentinZ.