How 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.

Sounds familiar? You are not the only one. More than half of corporate marketers state they get requests for custom marketing materials from the field at least weekly. Up to 26 percent of brands receive these requests as often as daily. That’s hundreds or even thousands of wasted hours. Hours that could have been spent on creating engaging marketing campaigns or strategizing.

Time to gain back control over your workload today. In this blog we'll discuss 4 ways  to reduce local iterations and cut one-off marketing requests.

Let's get started with an important 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.

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

Rather than handling a high volume of local market asset requests, why not empower local teams to participate in the content creation process. By adding automation to your campaign execution, you reduce one-off requests and increase customer engagement.

Local marketing automation software allows you to hand off branded 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).