4 Effective Strategies to Manage One-Off Marketing Requests

Ping. You got a new direct message on Slack. “Can you resize that latest ad for our local newspaper asap?” 

Ping. Ping. You’ve got mail! “Urgent request: Social image needed for local activity.”

While reading, your colleague asks if you can send her the latest photoshoot files. She can’t find them on your team's Dropbox anymore.

Your day just started, and you already have no idea how you will finish that pile of work. You have been pushing tasks for weeks with all these one-off requests.

Does this situation sound familiar to you? You're not alone. More than half of corporate marketers receive requests for custom marketing materials from their field counterparts on a weekly basis. Shockingly, up to 26 percent of brands are bombarded with these requests every single day. Think about the countless hours wasted on fulfilling these one-off requests, hours that could have been better spent crafting captivating marketing campaigns and devising powerful strategies.

It's time to reclaim control over your workload and take charge of your day. In this blog post, we will delve into 4 effective strategies to minimize local iterations and eliminate those pesky one-off marketing requests.

But first, let's kick things off with a crucial question.

What is a one-off marketing request?

One-off marketing requests are occasional inquiries from stakeholders like salespeople or branch locations for (custom) marketing resources such as brochures, ads, or videos.

Now that you know what a one-off marketing request is, it is time to eliminate them! Here are 4 ways to manage one-off marketing requests.

1. Balance your planned and reactive workload

Ad-hoc marketing requests are a work productivity killer. Unfortunately, they are unavoidable and necessary for keeping your colleagues happy. Make sure you find the right balance between planned and reactive work. The more you can plan, the more you can ensure you have the right resources available at the right time. Since you know that one-off requests are coming, why not plan them? Leave some room in your marketing team’s workload to handle unplanned requests.

2. Centralize your requests

Most of the time, one-off marketing requests come in from every direction, such as email, Slack, and in-person requests. Keeping track of everything becomes a challenge, fast. Instead of delivering the work, you spend a lot of time consolidating information. By designating one place for housing all incoming requests, you can handle the madness. You (and the stakeholders) will know who’s responsible for each request and its status. There are many project management tools available like Asana or Trello to help you get a clear view of all the work happening.

Marvia Creative Workflow feature

3. Empower field teams with a self-service marketing portal

One-off marketing requests are unavoidable, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t reduce the number of requests hitting your desk. Allow your local partners (franchisees, remote offices, dealers, agents, regional marketing teams) to access pre-approved marketing material in a self-serve marketing portal. Most of these platforms can be tailored to fit your team’s needs, thanks to powerful features and integrations. For instance, you can let local teams publish the pre-approved materials directly on various online and offline channels such as social media and local outdoor ads.

4. Ad Automation to your Creation process

Instead of being overwhelmed by a large number of local market asset requests, why not empower local teams to play an active role in the content creation process? By incorporating automation into your campaign execution, you not only decrease the number of one-off requests but also enhance customer engagement.

Local marketing automation software allows you to hand off dynamic brand templates to your local partners. They can then personalize and localize to suit their market. Branded templates result in brand consistency and a message that resonates better because of awareness of local considerations. If you want to keep control of the created material, you can add an additional approval flows for the content made.

Time to beat ad-hoc request

Marketing production has radically shifted by introducing new MarTech solutions like local marketing automation and marketing resource management platforms. Why not leverage those tools to decrease the number of one-off marketing requests hitting your inbox? Give your local partners the freedom to get the marketing content they need without going through you. Empowering them allows you to spend more time building your marketing strategy (and simultaneously reduce marketing costs).