One of the biggest challenges of managing marketing, design, and creative content projects is an internal and external collaboration between several parties that take part in creating content. Many projects require a lot of feedback, fast actions, and responses such as:
- Agency or client approval of the project
- Approval of the product and its design
- Content handoff
- Legal review of the final project
Getting feedback and tracking status between creative teams and stakeholders in these scenarios is often free comments, change requests, and new releases, as well as lingering in inboxes, chat threads, and constant (and often missed) replies.
This clutter of access content often leaves a lot to be desired in terms of delivery time and customer experience.
Creative teams may have a variety of collaboration tools at their disposal to solve problems, but when bringing in external partners and clients, it can be difficult to find the right balance between content and system access. That’s why it is better to implement creative project management software like Krock.io to make your life easier.
Check External Content
The biggest challenge when it comes to picking the creative agency project management software is that internal teams find it difficult to integrate content created and submitted by freelancers that create different types of content into the internal system of the project. External collaborators should not have full access to internal content systems, but sometimes they start the work from scratch and need to have access to specific files and information.
When submitting relevant project content like a project description from a new client or a new product design from a partner brand, you can simply add it to the common folder on Google Drive or elsewhere. Such information can get lost which will create chaos in communication.
We address the linking of internal and external content to receiving forms, which are web-accessible and can be shared with external collaborators to submit content so your team can review it and work through the stages to complete the review.
Not only does this option helps be sure that content is processed correctly from remote collaborators without any additional administrative overhead, but it also creates an audit trail and collaboration space that can be used throughout the production process, keeping everyone aware of the real-time status of feedback, revisions, and additions.
Work With Review Groups
As soon as the reviewing process begins, it becomes challenging to make sure that there are some members who have access or those who don’t. Moderation groups allow teams to better control and speed up the feedback process by bringing stakeholders into different groups with different access levels and commenting capabilities. Review groups are useful for describing roles and responsibilities internally by the team during the reviewing process.
Review teams can also connect to different stages of the review workflow to notify the right people at the right time in the creative process. For example, you can set up workflows that send content to various internal groups and ultimately to customers or external groups. When new versions are created, decisions are made, or other groups add comments and other action-based triggers during the review process, these groups can be notified or involved in the process.
Apply Minor Versions For Internal Review Cycles
In many cases, creative assets must be reviewed internally before they can be shared with external team members or clients. Krock.io’s review workflow, with the help of agency project management software, allows easy control over when clients receive content for review.
Based on your workflow style, this might not be the ideal process. If the content is shared externally, you can share different versions.
You can start a new review at this point. The disadvantage of this approach is that it separates the original review from the version created only for customer review and breaks the link between internal actions and external feedback. Also, managing two reviews increases the workload for the team as they try to track the activity of the two separate documents.
Secure Guest Reviewing
During the review process, teams often encounter a “temporary reviewer situation.” That is people who may need to provide feedback but are not part of the regular team or external reviewer group or who are not part of your internal team.
Depending on your workflow or security needs, giving this person full guest access to the content may not always be ideal, especially if you are concerned about accidentally sharing sensitive content with unauthorized people.
So how do you involve individual reviewers in the process without compromising security and access standards?
Make sure to adjust settings in your creative agency project management and make sure that only specific people have access to specific files.
Separate Internal Conversations with Private Commenting
You often need to share content with your customers, but you don’t always want to share everything besides that.
Imagine you’ve gone through several internal review cycles for a new ad design and are now ready to share it with your clients. Your external client reviewers add comments to the review form, which may contain some difficult problems that need to be solved internally before progress can be made.
You probably don’t want your external reviewers to see the conversation taking place in their comments. Often, you’ll be forced to have these conversations offline, via email, chat, or phone. Not only does this approach break the audit trail around proofs, but it also makes it more time-consuming for your team to notify other internal reviewers when making a decision.
You can enable private comments for specific reviewers grouped in the attestation stage. The review can then be discussed privately and only visible to reviewers at certain stages while making sure that all decisions and comments remain part of the feedback.
Conclusion
Now you know that it is not that hard to run project management for creative teams as you don’t need to use e-mails, shared folders, or something else. Now you can keep it all in a nice creative agency project management software that is easy to find.
Such apps help manage teams and run reviews and feedback sessions really easily and according to your team’s schedule. You can manage and administer all processes on a day-to-day basis and make sure the content gets created in time or even faster. You know yourself — the better you plan, the better you automize the processes — the better projects you create in a shorter amount of time.
