CREATIVE MANAGEMENT PLATFORM - WHEN DO YOU NEED ONE?

Marketing experts nowadays have access to endless tools that make their job easier but also much more complicated to do. Today we are focusing on one solution that not only simplifies the creative production in a company but has the capabilities to multiply results, optimize budgets and decrease execution time significantly. Let’s dive in.

Definition of a creative management platform (CMP)

Essentially, creative management platforms (often referred to as CMPs) are a cloud-based selection of software tools and solutions that help content marketing, campaign managing and ad planning teams plan, modify and create a big amount of marketing materials in a short period of time for a minimum effort.

CMPs help advertisers not only to create their ads but also to set them to create themselves adding dynamic data, images, illustrations, videos, etc.

What type of teams benefit most from using CMP tools and why?

To justify the need of using a CMP solution for your company, you most probably have a lot of marketing materials that you need to be created on a daily basis. It’s also highly probable that you are looking for the most optimized way to have them done for less time, less money and less effort.

Simply put, there are three main stakeholder groups that choose to use creative management platforms in their work. Who are they?

Marketers

Depending on the company structure, marketing teams are still very often the main engine of all advertising efforts. Thus, they become responsible for the whole ad creation process from ideation to production. (This, by the way, could be used as a powerful strength because it gives you the availability and control to manage, assess and tweak all little ad details on the go and without following up with external teams.)

Oftentimes, though, the Marketing team’s focus needs to be placed on a strategic project and there is only limited amount of time that they can dedicate to the ad creation process. Using a CMP can help direct your marketing team’s efforts towards what’s on focus and ditch spending tons of time on banner creation management. Professional marketers are more and more looking for a reliable solution that will provide all they need in the ad campaign's creative process.

In-house designers

If your brand has established a design team within the company’s organizational structure, it means you own a superpower you want to use the right way. And losing multiple design hours a day amending, slightly changing or adapting ad sets to different data, advertiser’s criteria or media specifics means you are losing potential.

A lot of entrepreneurs, C-level managers and marketing leads choose an external provider with the sole purpose of freeing up their design team’s capacity to follow a more strategic and creative course.

Ad teams/Campaign managers/Performance marketers

Focusing on the results often turns out to be a great strategy so campaign managers own dedicated space in this list. Still, looking deeply at the results does not mean neglecting the creative aspect.

But if you want to use most of your team’s focus and time on the important numbers, you can avoid their collision with the risk of putting a wrong game date or team name on the banners. You can leave that to your CMP to get a quick, flawless and effective solution.

Signs you need a CMP for your company

You are looking at ways to optimize production costs with automation.

Design is expensive. And good design is not only expensive but will also take time. There is no need in putting enormous time and financial investments into creative production when you can find an automated solution for recurring design tasks. As long as the CMP you choose does not compromise on quality, it can save a lot of resources and free up time for more meaningful and inspirational tasks for the team.

You are aiming at brand consistency across campaigns and creatives.

That one could be easily underestimated but treat this as a reminder to think about it in detail. As marketers, we all agree on brand consistency's importance. But how do we always manage to keep it there at all times? Doesn’t this effort sometimes prevent us from experimenting and deciding on more courageous creative directions with the only goal of sticking to the brand? Using a good CMP will be able to provide a safe space for creative experiments without overlooking the brand guidelines.

You struggle to keep up to date with all the ad providers and social media’s size and file specifics.

Depending on the size and structure of your team, you may not always be able to closely follow all the latest size guides and design guidelines of different programmatic platforms and social media channels. The good news is, you don’t need to. A well-working CMP will be able to create by default all the sizing options that you can imagine. And many more on top, as well.

Your design team is struggling with a ton of tedious repetitive tasks and their creativity is starting to fade.

It doesn’t matter if you have in-house designers or manage this externally - tedious and redundant tasks are the first thing you need to avoid in order to count on a strong inspiration flow. Make sure you don’t occupy most of the designers’ time to redesign and amend small details on well-performing ad visuals. When you have the CMP doing that for you, it’s easy to focus the design efforts in the right creative direction.

You would like to broaden your advertising strategy but you cannot keep up and organize the banner creation process.

Growing is busy. When your business is expanding and growing, volumes are quickly keeping up and it’s quite easy to lose it at a point. This happens very easily in the dynamics of a startup but it’s also often seen in multi-brand companies offering various lines of products and services. There comes a point when the team cannot keep up with the new volumes. And that’s actually a great sign showing it makes even more sense to look for a working CMP tool to implement.

Are creative management platforms flexible enough to fit your brand's internal processes?

They are but they don’t always need to be.

The best CMP tools offer at least a limited number of features that allow brands to customize their settings and process flow so that they could fit their internal requirements. Some would be more flexible, of course, and some will ask you to adapt to more of their flows and way of work. Most CMPs will offer a ready-to-use solution and will not be flexible enough to fit your internal processes. Keep in mind to look for the best match to your specific expectations when choosing a creative management provider. It’s useful if you give it a thorough consideration of what features and functionalities will serve your brand’s situation most and which ones you are willing to change and improve.

Here are some additional questions to consider when researching and choosing your CMP provider:

• Platform security - how is your data protected in using the tool
• Approval options - what options do you have for approval levels, especially useful for regulated markets
• Campaign division - grouping ads in campaigns make it easy to swap info from one campaign to another
• Language support - in case you work in multiple markets internationally
• API integration - ultimate level of automation as content gets published without operator interaction

If you would like to dig deeper into how CMPs help brands in 2023, head here to read our two cents on the topic. If you are ready to see what Sreameye can do for your business, book a demo with our team and we will be happy to show you around.