Marketing workflows for efficient content localization

Delivering content in multiple versions and languages is essential for marketing - especially for global companies. Social media content, flyers, web banners, analog and digital brochures: umpteen marketing materials are created, reviewed, adapted, localized, distributed, produced by many internal and external stakeholders. Without structured marketing workflows and software tools, you quickly lose track of the resources involved and have to deal with unnecessarily slow and expensive processes.
Today it is better, easier, faster, more transparent.

You may have heard of content management workflows, marketing workflows or even localization workflows. Such workflows always unite three essential ingredients: Processes, Tasks and People. A workflow is a work process in which it is precisely defined who does what and when, and how the interactions between the participants take place. The localization of marketing materials in 5, 50 or more languages can nowadays be perfectly mapped and executed as a flexible process.

The 7 most important benefits of an automated marketing workflow:

on-time implementation of your marketing project
efficient project control and communication
automated documentation of all steps and tasks
brand-compliant content creation and adaptation
automated destribution and production of content
recycling of workflows for other projects
almost unlimited editorial possibilities

Building marketing workflows

Start with the analysis of your manual workflow

First, look at who has which tasks in the content process: Colleague(s) from the central marketing team, sites or departments, as well as external agencies, freelancers, translation agencies, sales partners, etc. everyone involved in content production, adaptation or release needs to be on your list. Once you have everyone accounted for, define the tasks and roles for everyone in the project. Who is responsible for layout and design adaptations? Who proofreads? Who approves the content? And who has the final ‘sign-off’? Is it product managers or your head of marketing? Is the legal department also involved? It's important to have this overview.

Now the interesting part of the job begins: You can start to create an automated marketing workflow and optimize the interactions between stakeholders.

Processes and Challenges

The approval and coordination rounds are often the most time-consuming and complicated process steps. They present lots of potential for optimization. Where do the interactions between the participants take place? Are there any process breaks? Usually, the graphics department works with different tools (InDesign) than marketing or the approving colleague in management. InDesign, Word, PDF, translation tools, verbal agreements and many e-mails - you certainly know the plight! But all of this can be effectively brought into a workflow and tool. You can easily automate the following typical steps of a marketing workflow with one2edit™, without system breaks:

Automated email notifications: As soon as someone starts the marketing workflow, completes a task or asks a question
about content, a notification can go out to one or more predefined people. This way, no time is wasted writing unnecessary emails and the project manager keeps track of the project progress at all times.
Automated export and sending of documents: This can be defined in the marketing workflow with any triggers (e. g. a
release) to any group of recipients.
Automated pre-translations: Google Translate, Microsoft Services or DeepL Services can be easily integrated into
the marketing workflow (it is a standard feature in one2edit). This allows you to receive automatic text translations. For DeepL services, one2edit users do not even need additional licenses. You can have any amount of text translated in a few seconds with high quality.
Interactions with other systems of your choice can be triggered via web services (standard function in one2edit).

Choosing a solution for marketing workflow optimization: What should you look for?

1. Flexibility and agility are the key!

When setting up a marketing workflow, make sure that it is not rigidly designed. Processes, tasks and participants can change, and you as the project manager must be able to adapt your workflows on your own. It is important to be able to change the process steps, participants and tasks at any time without outside help, IT support or programming knowledge. This is not possible with some workflow tools. one2edit is oriented towards real life, often in larger companies and their international marketing. You can use it to design workflows via simple drag & drop, change them and adapt them again and again to your current projects - without limits. You can freely define or change process steps and participants, add languages, move dates, etc. If plan A doesn't work, you may quickly switch to plan B or C within our workflow.

2. Management of participants

In the analysis phase, you will quickly come up with a considerable number of internal and external participants who contribute directly or indirectly to the various content processes. So, flexible people management is essential in any marketing workflow. With our workflow, it is possible to remove or add experts, redistribute tasks, etc.. quickly and easily, without losing valuable time.

3. Easy Integration of workflows to other systems

Marketing workflow is not just about localizing content as efficiently as possible. Content must also be produced and distributed as efficiently as possible, be it in print or digital form. Ideally, this step should also be automated. For this, standard interfaces to common systems and social media channels must already exist or APIs must be available. This is the case with one2edit.

4. Brand-compliant editing of documents

In any marketing workflow, it must be ensured that participants can work with brand templates in an uncomplicated way. All participants in the marketing workflow should be able to edit templates in terms of the content: e.g. fill them with content, comment or translate them, and do so in a brand-compliant manner. With one2edit this is easy and secure. There’s no need to upload and download documents. Copy & paste of content was yesterday’s practice, so simply link the data sources, e.g. Excel files, with corresponding templates and have them updated automatically! There is also no need for further communication (e.g. annotating PDFs and sending them by mail). This not only saves valuable time, but also makes a significant contribution to quality assurance. The brand-compliant processing of documents is secured by individually adaptable rules. All participants use the same database and thus save so-called transaction costs, i.e. localization, adaptation, and coordination and approval rounds are significantly faster.

5. Secure documentation

Complete documentation plays an important role in the production of any communication material. This is particularly crucial for our many corporate customers and well-known brands. It’s particularly vital in regulated industries such as pharmaceuticals/life sciences, banking and insurance. Equally so for stock market-relevant materials such as annual reports. When selecting a solution, you should therefore ensure that all tasks, steps, approvals and changes are automatically documented. With one2edit this is the case.

6. Simple browser-based collaboration

The tool of your choice should enable browser-based collaboration. After all, the solution should significantly reduce your marketing workload and ensure simpler and more transparent collaboration for everyone - and not become a complicated IT project. Local installations of special programs are more of a hindrance and cause additional effort and coordination with IT. one2edit enables browser-based collaboration that is secure and fun. With one2edit, all participants do not have to license and install fonts and the like. That alone saves a lot of budget.

Example of a marketing workflow created with one2edit:

A designer creates a layout for a marketing brochure. Then the designer uploads the layout and the defined participants in marketing, translator, agency, ... are given the opportunity to work on the content according to their role: e.g. create new content, edit, review, translate, release. Everyone sees the layout in the browser, as it will be produced later. In Addition, only brand-compliant changes can be made during editing. For this purpose, there is a whole range of functions to keep the brand guidelines in the layout. Only when the document is completely finished and approved it will be produced as desired, either as a PDF or JPG document.

7 steps to an automated marketing workflow:

Define goal of the project (e.g. localize a product brochure for 5 markets)
Define roles and responsibilities
Describe handover, approval and coordination rounds
Identify which steps can be automated
Implement your workflow using a state-of-the-art tool, e.g. one2edit
Communicate and test
If necessary, make some adjustments and save the new workflow as a template for other projects

Who benefits from automation using marketing workflows:

All companies that do their communication in more than 3 languages.
Agencies that produce and localize marketing materials for clients. Communication and delivery of content and marketing materials is optimized. The speed of delivery is increased.