Most businesses have embraced remote work, whether by setting up fully remote teams or hiring more remote workers. However, some critical processes can be slower in a remote setting, such as getting feedback and getting content approved in a timely manner.
So what causes these delays in the marketing approval process?
When teams shift to a completely remote environment without the proper tools and workflows in place, miscommunication and mistakes can occur more frequently, slowing everything (and everybody!) down.
Luckily, this is precisely the problem that Gain was designed to solve.
Gain is a simple tool that allows teams to define a clear workflow for any marketing asset or social media content and then use automation to streamline the approval process, minimizing miscommunication and mistakes.
Let’s take a look at some of the ways Gain helps remote teams automate tasks and streamline their marketing workflow.
Organize all your digital files and marketing assets in one place
Tools such as Slack, Trello, and Google Drive are quite helpful for streamlining communication and content collaboration amongst remote teams.
However, these tools were not designed to support the final and arguably most crucial step: approving content.
Using multiple tools for communication, it becomes too easy to lose track of who reviewed and approved what or where feedback was sent when working remotely. Did they put their feedback in an email or Slack message? Or did they leave comments inside of a Google doc?
It’s also incredibly easy to lose track of the latest version of a document, post, or file when it passes through multiple hands and conversations. That’s why sharing content and keeping track of the conversations about each item in a simple, centralized place is crucial for remote teams.
Sharing content and keeping track of the conversations about each item in a simple, centralized place is crucial for remote teams.
Gain allows you to create unlimited workspaces where your team can organize all your digital files and assets neatly by client or project and then discuss and collaborate on them.
From Photoshop files and PDFs to Word documents and client presentations, you can upload it all to Gain. You can also import any work your team creates in other tools, such as Canva, Google Drive, Dropbox, and more.
Once your files are in Gain, collaborate with your team from anywhere. You can comment, assign tasks, and leave feedback on each individual asset or social post, and keep an organized history of that feedback and any changes on each item. In other words, all comments, feedback, and change requests are tied to each specific asset.
When everyone can be sure that they’re looking at the latest feedback or latest version of an asset or social post, remote collaboration flows so much better!
Say goodbye to those messy email chains, scattered conversations, and confusion!
Keep your accounts secure
Remote work means that your team can easily work from anywhere with an Internet connection, whether at home, at a coworking space, or in a cafe.
However, information security becomes even more important when team members are working in different places. You need to be careful about who can access specific accounts, and who can publish content (with or without approval). Any time you manage content for a brand, they’re trusting you with their reputation, so it’s crucial you keep their content secure.
Information security is also important in highly-regulated industries, such as banking or healthcare, that require data to be protected.
Gain makes it easy to control what every team member and approver can see or do in all your different workspaces with role-specific permissions.
For example, a “contributor” on Gain can create, draft, and edit content. But they must send it to a designated approver before it goes to a client or gets published.
Defining each person’s role and level of permission makes it easier to streamline the marketing approval process. When content or posts are ready, Gain automatically moves them along to each person in your customized workflow.
Only when each person that needs to approve the content hits the “Approve” button will Gain consider an asset approved or publish social media posts.
You can also see a detailed log of all the activity that happens with each content item, including changes, comments, and approvals, with names and timestamps, in case you ever need it for compliance reasons.
Finally, Gain allows you to enable 2-step verification, an important security feature that all remote team members should activate to minimize the chances of losing control of their accounts.
Save time with automatic reminders
Keeping projects on track is another challenge for remote teams. Delays often happen when the work is complete, but stuck pending final approval by a key stakeholder or client.
When this happens, you end up spending more time chasing the approver and sending them annoying reminders and less time on more important work. Over time, this can really hurt your team’s productivity.
Gain sends friendly, automatic reminders to stakeholders or approvers when they owe you feedback or approval so you don’t even have to think about it. These (optional) reminders go out 6, 12, 24, 48, and 72 hours after the first time you notify them that the content is ready for their review.
Setting up automatic marketing approval workflows is quick & easy
When teams work from different locations, collaboration can be tough without clearly defined workflows.
Think about how you can create workflows for your most repetitive tasks, such as reviewing and approving content. Who creates the content, and who needs to review it before sending it to the client or final approver? Who is in charge of sending follow-ups and reminders when the marketing approval process stalls?
Think about how you can create workflows for your most repetitive tasks, such as reviewing and approving content.
Once you define all of the activities that need to happen, you can assign specific tasks or steps to each team member. Putting these repetitive tasks on autopilot helps those who don’t need to be involved in every step of the marketing approval process focus on more important tasks. And for remote teams, that’s a major win for productivity!
Gain is an easy-to-use tool that automates the gathering of feedback and approvals from clients or stakeholders, specifically designed for marketing assets. Start a free trial and save precious time with an automated approval workflow for all your marketing content!
