Bottlenecks That Throttle Marketing Production Output & How to break them

Marketing success invariably hinges on your ability to consistently output compelling content, tailored to the needs of your customers. And for global brands, on top of keeping an ever-growing list of communication channels fed with content, you also need to deliver super-relevant campaigns, contextualized for local audiences. It’s a tall order for any organization.

Production pipeline delays, skills shortages, budget limitations, time spent fixing mistakes made by marketers in the field: these can all lead to even the most thorough marketing campaign strategy going off-kilter.

With this in mind, here’s a closer look at the common causes of production bottlenecks, along with what you need to do to remove them.

Graphic designers, front-end developers, copywriters and more: even for routine marketing material, there can be many distinct specialisms involved in the production process.

Does simply recruiting a bigger, centrally-located team shield you from production bottlenecks? Not necessarily. For one thing, demands on content production staff do not just come from the marketing department. Requests linked to internal communications, recruitment, product information, or customer services to name just a few, can all amount to a significant added burden.

Meanwhile, you need a steady flow of content, optimized for specific channels, in order to maintain customer engagement levels. No matter how well-staffed your team, demand almost always has a habit of outstripping capacity.

Businesses across the globe are reporting significant skills shortages, and technically proficient, creative staff can be especially hard to find.

Even if your budget allows you to hire your way out of a content production crisis, finding the right recruits can be a big challenge. While you’re understaffed, production backlogs are only going to mount up.

In theory, delegating the production of marketing material to local teams offers two big advantages. In-the-field regional marketers know their audiences better than anyone and are best placed to adapt content to make it as relevant as possible. It also follows that by passing tasks down the line, you can also relieve pressure on central production departments.

But in practice, there will not always be the technical capabilities available at a local level to make this happen. Branch employees are happy to ‘have a go’ at creating local campaigns, but you can never be sure that the end results are going to be totally on-brand. It means the material has to be passed back up the line for central input and review: hardly 100% efficient!

Assuming you choose wisely, an agency should be able to combine local market insight with the requisite technical capabilities; thereby potentially delivering a solution to your local content production problem.

But of course, none of this comes cheap. And if you have multiple local markets to cater for, it’s potentially a huge spend on third-party resources.

Recent research shows that 62% of marketers have seen sales and marketing content demand increase by up to five times in recent years, and they expect this demand to continue rising. This growth is being driven by the need to deliver content across multiple channels, often without the resources required to absorb the additional production workload, while also maintaining tight turnaround times. The pressure to create more content, in more formats, and at greater speed is placing significant strain on already stretched teams, even before the added complexity of brand compliance and consistency is considered.

Brandgility gives even non-technical staff the ability to create beautiful marketing materials at speed, while keeping you in full control of what can and cannot be altered. It’s this type of technology that enables global and distributed brands to stay ahead of growing production demands without incurring spiraling staffing and outsourcing costs.

Find out how Brandgility could streamline your customization workflow.

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