Douglas Thede, CEO at Lytho offers tips on how enhanced creative management processes can enable better output for marketing teams on the whole:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Douglas, tell us about yourself and Lytho, how has the platform evolved in the recent years?

As a company, we can trace our creative workflow roots back to 1999.  We began as a software tool to support the review and approval of creative assets (i.e. “proofs”). We soon realized that was only part of the puzzle and began expanding our features to support the rest of the creative lifecycle. These include creative briefs and requests, collaboration, project management, resource management, review and approval, and the development of metrics and dashboards for reporting on creative operations.

If you think about those processes – they all exist on the production side of creative work – but the creative life cycle for those final creative assets continues. For example, those creative assets need to be made available and more importantly discoverable for people across the organization and outside the organization. They need tools to help people modify, personalize, or localize those assets to meet their needs – while staying on brand and without asking the creative team to make little changes all the time.

All those challenges can be solved with tools like digital asset management (DAM), which we see as a natural extension of creative workflow (and vice versa). That is in part, what drew me to the company about two years ago: the idea to expand upon a solid foundation and an ever-improving platform focused on creative and brand teams.

So, our company, a U.S.-based company formerly known as inMotionNow, which specialized in creative workflow, acquired the Netherlands-based Lytho which specialized in DAM. The combination meant we can now more fully support the creative lifecycle specifically supporting the needs of creative and brand teams.

We subsequently rebranded the unified company as just Lytho. Accordingly, we began readying the creative workflow product for the European market.

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We’d love to hear more about Lytho’s creative workflow software and how it can enable marketing and other design/content teams?

There are two parts to marketing – math and magic. The math is the quantitative analysis often enabled by technology in terms of targeting, distribution and measurement. The magic is the creative aspect – that’s the piece that influences someone to action.

Marketing needs both to be effective, but over the last 15 years or so, it has become over-reliant on the math at the expense of the magic. That’s been driven by the adoption of marketing automation, automated ad platforms, and other technologies. Those are great tools, but they also put everyone on a level playing field in terms of the math – and so it’s the magic, the creative, that drives brand differentiation.

B2B marketers are beginning to realize this too. For example, new research from LinkedIn found 82% “of senior B2B marketers say, ‘creative confidence’ is growing as B2B companies become more confident with producing creative campaigns.” In addition, “9 in 10 recognize that brand building is just as important to driving long-term revenue growth in B2B as it is in consumer marketing.”

Consequently, effective marketing is more reliant than ever on creative. Creatives are being asked to do more on tighter deadlines and without all the outside agency resources they had before.  As a result, they are wrestling with growing work volume and juggling priorities. A phrase we hear often is ‘help us tame the chaos’ and that’s exactly what creative workflow does for creative and marketing teams.

Why do you feel that creative teams in B2B today need better workflow tools: what best practices besides adopting a tool would you share with creative teams of today?

This is a great question and there are several things marketing leaders can start doing right now to improve collaboration between creative and marketing:

1. Invite creative teams to the strategy table.

Sadly, we have seen creative teams treated merely as service bureaus shown through hastily prepared creative requests with incomplete information and even unreasonable deadlines. When that happens, the creative teams do not have sufficient context and intent to produce great creative content. More importantly, the business misses out on the greatest benefit of having an in-house creative team: creatives are problem solvers, and the best way to tap into that skill set is to consult with them early and prioritize providing the context and purpose of a project.

2. Document the creative processes and create SLAs.

Creatives will tell you the creative requests they receive often lack the detail they need to get started. They spend hours chasing down information and getting feedback. Review and approval is another process challenge. Suggested edits come in from all sides, are out-of-sequence, and often lack substance (i.e. ‘I think this widget should be green’). A sure-fire way to fix this is to put it in writing so you can identify the challenges, improve it and create a service level agreement (SLA) that keeps everyone accountable.

3. Build a quantitative feedback loop.

Creative teams rarely get quantitative feedback as to the performance of an asset in market. How can you improve your marketing if the creative team never sees the results? The solution is to ensure the creative team is part of a formal measurement process.

Another benefit to doing this for marketing and creative leaders is that the exercise will help you to evaluate whether or not you need a platform for collaboration. If you do need one, this process will help define the requirements – is review and approval a critical need? Do you need the ability to track team members’ workflow, or the use of assets? With that, you can build the business case and foster support for implementation and adoption.

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In what ways do you predict the use of creative workflow tool will grow over the years; how are you seeing creative teams or departments use these or similar tools to drive their processes?

Creative teams need time and focus to create, so the key task for any technology is giving them that time, focus, and space. We want tools that reduce or even eliminate the rote work and allow us to focus our attention on higher-level tasks. This is fundamentally what provides a team with scale – the ability to do more with less and without sacrificing quality.

More specifically about workflow, these tools are going to become more integrated and better at linking creative to quantifiable results. For example, integrating workflow with DAM, marketing automation, and perhaps even financial tools.

Five thoughts on what it takes for B2B teams to optimize creative output in a crowded market with the aim of standing out from the noise.

B2B teams need to optimize creative outcomes.  While efficiency is necessary to produce more output, what we are trying to do is help our customers achieve better content outcomes. For example, we want the creative assets to thrive and have a true impact for our customers. With that in mind, I offer the following thoughts:

• The first thought I have is to be boldly creative. Too often in B2B, we look around to see what others are doing first. But to be different, we need to be boldly creative.
• Second, experiment. There’s merit to going with tried-and-true practices, but we have to be open and systematic about trying new things. Experimenting with creative ideas should be a priority.
• Measure your efforts. Experimenting loses its utility if we aren’t keeping score. Track your experiments over time and you’ll begin to notice trends.
• Foster a culture of creativity. Doing things differently sounds easier than it is in practice. The way around this barrier is to build a culture that celebrates creativity – rewards success and learns from failures.
• Throughout this interview, I’ve referred to creative as a process and it is. So too is the process of continuous improvement.

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Anything else you’d like to add before we wrap up?

As we know, there are thousands of software solutions aimed at marketing. Furthermore, there are many established players providing project management and workflow tools. However, our experience has shown us that the specific needs for creative and brand teams – especially a solid review and approval tool – go beyond most of the ‘companywide’ project management and workflow tools. We are excited to bring Lytho Workflow to the European market to specifically and only serve the project management and workflow needs of creative and brand teams.  These terms thrive when given the proper tools and our goal is to allow them to thrive.