By deploying technology solutions that automate their workflows, creative organisations such as advertising agencies, corporate marcom departments, and publishing companies transform their internal operations and significantly enhance their bottom-line results. Automation solutions have proven to provide a range of business benefits: They boost efficiency, lower costs, and accelerate time-to-market. Even more importantly, they help improve the customer experience by allowing businesses to deliver personalised, targeted, contextual content at exactly the right moment across a complete range of media and devices. Ultimately, this ability to do “omni-channel” content marketing can significantly strengthen an organisation’s brand and elevate the overall effectiveness of its marketing efforts.

But while the benefits of automation can be substantial, the variety of technology solutions and their inherent complexity can present challenges. How do you ensure that your solutions will fit your unique workflows and deliver maximum return on investment?

In short, you need to design and implement systems that are tailored to your organisation’s needs—and you need to continually fine-tune your systems as your needs evolve. This guide details five steps to achieving measurable and lasting success with marketing automation and omni-channel content marketing solutions:

• Step 1: Define objectives, requirements, and success metrics
• Step 2: Analyse current processes
• Step 3: Improve on current processes
• Step 4: Get everyone on board
• Step 5: Refine and innovate

Step 1: Define objectives, requirements, and success metrics

Step 1 process:

• Define business objectives. Identify the business drivers behind your need for process improvement.
• Define business process requirements. Determine requirements for any processes involving the flow of information for projects, from kickoff to final delivery.
• Define technical process requirements. Determine requirements for any processes involving the handling of digital assets, from initial input to final output.
• Define success metrics. Determine how you will measure success against your objectives, for example in terms of time saved, money saved, and increased capacity.
• Enlist outside expertise. Bring in an expert consultant to ensure a thorough and clear-eyed evaluation.

It can be challenging for employees to change their workflow processes and embrace new working styles, but such changes are essential to successful technology implementations. That’s why new technology solutions should not only be platform agnostic, but they should also be driven by well-defined objectives and current workflow best practises.

Define your business objectives. To do so, determine the key business drivers behind your desire for process improvement. Does your organisation need to produce and deliver marketing campaigns faster in order to attract bigger clients? Do you need to increase the creative output of each team member to maximise your budget? Do you need to customise assets for social, mobile, or other types of media and formats? Drivers such as these will inform your objectives for any automation initiatives.

Define your business process requirements as well as your technical process requirements. Your business processes are any that involve gathering and routing information for the creation, design, and tracking of a project. Business process requirements might include the fact that new projects must be initiated by a request form, or that all packaging files must have a brand manager’s sign-off before they’re sent to the print lab, or that you must run a/b tests of all digital promotions and measure the results. Technical processes are any related to the input, manipulation, and output of digital assets. Technical requirements might include the use of particular ICC colour profiles, or they might specify that video files must be exported in a format universally supported on mobile device platforms.

Gather requirements by auditing current processes to determine the business and technical considerations behind employees’ interactions with assets, the progression of projects from department to department, and the dependencies that affect the flow of jobs.

Define your metrics for success. Ultimately, you’ll be able to measure your success and calculate ROI based on the degree to which your business objectives have been achieved. ROI can be reflected in a variety of time and resource savings, including reduced turnaround times for reviewing and approving marketing materials, faster overall time-to-market, reduced staff headcount, greater production control, fewer errors, and cost savings from soft-proofing.

Digital marketing ROI can be measured in terms of clicks, views, and sales, of course, and the best omni-channel content marketing solutions include analytics and reporting functions that make it easy to see what’s working and what’s not, and to refine accordingly on the fly.

Enlist outside expertise. Many creative organisations bring in technology solutions experts to help them implement new systems. Since the processes described above cross multiple business and technical disciplines, a third party such as a systems integrator, workflow consultant, or software developer can help ensure a complete and neutral assessment of your business and technical processes—and help you clearly define your project objectives, requirements, and success metrics.

Step 2: Analyze current processes

Step 2 process:

• Identify objective tasks. Analyze current workflows to find structured, objective tasks that can be automated.
• Weigh benefits against requirements. Ensure that automation benefits align to business and technical requirements defined in Step 1.

A thorough audit of your existing workflows will help you identify structured, repetitive tasks that can be automated for greater efficiency. Structured processes provide the best opportunity for improvement through automation.

Look for objective tasks to automate. Working with your outside expert, analyse processes to find automation opportunities based on which component tasks are subjective and which are objective. For example, your organisation may have a file production workflow that involves extensive hands-on work by one or more staff members. The objective tasks—such as file resizing for multiple social media and mobile platforms—are all candidates for automation with a premedia job-processing system. By automating those tasks, you can keep your creative experts focused on work that requires subjective intervention, such as image retouching.

In another example, let’s say your organisation’s job trafficking system requires project managers to perform the objective task of printing out collateral drafts and moving them from department to department via paper job jackets. If you implement a digital job tracking system, files will be routed automatically. This allows project managers to efficiently monitor jobs from their desks via a web browser—and make much better use of their time.

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Evaluate automation benefits against business and technical requirements. As you and your workflow expert identify tasks to automate, evaluate the potential benefits as they relate to your business and technical requirements. Just because a task can be automated doesn’t mean it should be, particularly if automation doesn’t support any of your business requirements. In the job-tracking example, automation would help you meet a number of business requirements, including improved cross-organisation collaboration, better executive visibility into project status, reduction of costly production errors, and facilitation of time tracking to help teams manage workloads and measure ROI. From a technical standpoint, an automated system would supply editorial stakeholders with low-res files adequate to the task of reviewing copy onscreen, but then it would populate the edited files with the high-res data needed to generate printers’ proofs.

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Step 3: Improve on current processes

Step 3 process:

• Create a plan. Outline technology solutions and an implementation plan.
• Implement the systems. Set up dynamic processes based on business rules.
• Test and evaluate. Ensure that everything works properly, document processes, and evaluate initial results.

Choose and implement technology solutions that deliver big efficiencies throughout your organisation.

Create a plan. Enlist your technology expert to outline specific workflow solutions that will address your issues and meet your objectives and requirements. Create a phased implementation plan if necessary, beginning with the solutions that will deliver the most immediate benefit

Implement the systems. Once the plan has been approved, give your expert the green light to set up dynamic processes for routing, manipulating, and delivering files based on the business rules you’ve defined. For example, your workflow solutions for print can be programmed to automatically check document integrity, perform trapping, convert files, and output final files in multiple formats for different types of media. Or you can integrate your solution with your Product Information Management (PIM) system, and have it automatically deliver digital promos and campaigns across specific media channels based on customers’ past purchasing behaviour, interests, social media feedback, and more.

Test and evaluate. Post-deployment, have your expert thoroughly test your new software and hardware then document the new workflow procedures to ensure that end users will have a great experience as they get up to speed. As testing proceeds, evaluate the initial results and compare them to your previous, manual processes to understand the benefits you’re gaining in terms of time, resources, consistency, and quality.

Step 4: Get everyone on board

Step 4 process:

• Get executive-level support for adoption. Make sure executives communicate the goals and value of the new system.
• Create a pilot program. Train key employees—and have them help shape the new processes—to ensure that the system is championed and used to greatest benefit.

Evangelise new systems and processes throughout your organisation to ensure best practises and maximum ROI.

Manage adoption from the executive level in the organisation. In order for the improved processes to stick and your investment to pay off, system adoption must be managed from the top levels in the organisation. Executives should clearly communicate the business goals of the new system so that end users understand the bottom-line value. End users’ motivation and acceptance are essential to their ability to embrace the changes in their day-to-day work.

Create a pilot program. Management should establish a pilot program for key employees, giving them the opportunity to see marketing automation and omni-channel content marketing solutions in action, receive thorough training, and help determine how the system will be used throughout the organisation. By helping to define the new processes, these employees will be committed to following best practises and championing the technology and its benefits as they train others. This train-the-trainer methodology will help your organisation avoid internal resistance to adoption and ensure that all users follow the new processes.

In larger, geographically dispersed organisations, it can be helpful to implement a pilot program at one site. As the new processes are implemented and shown to be successful, it’s easier to use a primary site as a model for other locations.

The advertising giant JWT first implemented a marketing automation solution in its New York office. Once the New York staff had established the new solution, and achieved their technical and business requirements with measurable ROI, additional locations felt confident about adopting the new technologies and practises.

Step 5: Refine and innovate

Step 5 process:

• Measure system ROI. Evaluate the results of your automated campaigns, and refine your targeting, personalization, and channel strategies accordingly.
• Systematise workflow efficiency. Appoint a process manager responsible for continued training, best practises, and system enhancement.
• Partner with experts. Create a long-term relationship with an integration expert for support and guidance in a changing technology landscape.

Continually refine and improve your processes to drive greater efficiencies and better business results year-round.

Measure system ROI. As you begin using your system to create and deliver marketing communications and campaigns, measure and analyze your results. Experiment with different approaches to customer targeting, content personalization, and channel optimization, and keep analyzing results and refining as you go so you won’t just understand system ROI—you’ll actively enhance it.

Systematise workflow efficiency. Even after your new solutions are up and running and everyone in your organisation has embraced the new ways of working, continue to refine your processes to further reduce manual intervention and boost staff productivity. Appoint a process manager whose is responsible to for continually driving acceptance, monitoring and improving training, fielding suggestions and other feedback, and overseeing technology upgrades and workflow enhancements.

Partner with experts. Establish an ongoing relationship with systems experts who can suggest process improvements, deliver customizations, and provide continued support to ensure the complete satisfaction of everyone in the organisation.