Automating complex print and digital advertising workflows can streamline numerous mundane tasks, delivering significant time and cost savings. This frees a publisher’s team to focus on more strategic and creative aspects while eliminating inefficiencies. In this article, we look at the ways in which automating workflows to manage advertising can save publishers both time and money.
One of the most significant benefits of advertising workflow software is that it can significantly reduce the time spent by your team on repetitive, mundane tasks. Removing manual data entry by ensuring systems and proper integration coupled with transferring media between systems without humans moving and naming files appropriately significantly reduces mistakes and introduces improvements in throughput, providing substantial financial and resource savings.
In parallel with automation, advertising workflow software provides constantly updated task lists and progress and tracking facilities, enabling staff to monitor and deal with exceptions. Providing a high-level view that can be drilled down into and maintained without human effort ensures no workflow step, exception, or issue goes unresolved and, again, reduces staff overheads while providing overall focus.
This level of automation ensures staff spend less of their working day on mundane administrative work and can focus on high-value activities like creative design services or more elaborate and complex ad campaigns. Automated advertising workflows let publishers scale operations efficiently, upskilling and broadening roles without limiting growth or inflating overheads.
Another significant advantage of implementing a self-serve digital advertising workflow system is that it reduces headcount needs. When much of the process is automated, publishers require fewer people to manage the same volume of advertising. This automation translates into significant labour cost savings over the long term. Publishers can maintain the same throughput with a streamlined team or increase output without expanding headcount.
Either way, reducing the labour intensity of ad management through automation delivers major cost benefits, and these savings can be invested into content production, better platforms, or new revenue initiatives.
While humans bring adaptability and insight to a workflow, they’re also fallible. Integration and automation ensure tasks like delivery of files are named appropriately, and technical and quality assurance checks are consistently applied. Whilst seemingly small in isolation, the thousands of small mundane tasks add up and present opportunities for mistakes, often resulting in financial and reputational impact.
Everyone pushes the limits around deadlines and the ability to increase throughput and work to tighter deadlines without additional staffing has become the norm. The information must pass manually between sales, design, approvals, and production, which can easily cause production bottlenecks. People become the constraint. With automated workflows, however, ads can progress seamlessly from end to end without waiting for human dependencies.
The accelerated process increases publisher responsiveness, allowing advertisers to book and publish campaigns faster in response to market demand. Publishers delivering speedy turnarounds satisfy advertisers and are more likely to secure repeat business, and automation not only reduces costs but also improves operational agility.
The collaboration features in advertising workflow systems connect stakeholders through seamless information sharing, whether in the office or on the move. Productivity is enhanced when all customer data, production status, conversations, and assets can be accessed in one place, keeping sales, designers, client services, and publishers on the same page.
To learn more about implementing an automated advertising workflow, please book a free consultation today with Papermule. Our specialists can help you reassess your workflows and develop a tailored solution to help you transform advertising from a cost centre into a strategic asset.
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