Creative people always face the challenge of having to come up with fresh ideas for each campaign. Their work doesn’t stop there, either. They are also involved in the entire production process. So with visual content production being labour intensive, it’s great to use creative automation. This helps marketers to scale production and meet the demands in a stress-free way.
What is creative automation?
Creative automation doesn’t actually refer to the creative process per se. It doesn’t replace the value of creative work, which is a unique and valuable skill.
Creative automation is actually about adopting technology into your process. This helps you massively reduce the time you spend on repetitive tasks. The tools you use to do this take care of the more low-skilled aspects involved in the task.
Who Needs Creative Automation?
Basically, if you need to produce hundreds of assets for a variety of campaigns, then creative automation is for you! If you belong to the following groups/teams, the more you need to automate your process:
1. Digital marketing teams. Digital marketing teams benefit the most from creative automation. It helps them to increase performance of marketing materials without the team struggling with the tedious, repetitive work involved.
Achieving success in marketing is not only all about attracting the target audience into your campaigns. It is also about being able to plan ahead and please the audience with improved images and messaging in future campaigns. Automation helps to maintain momentum, so that the marketing team’s efforts will be appreciated for longer.
2. In-house design teams. In-house design teams also get to have more work done by automating the production of assets. It can be very taxing to individually edit digital assets in order to fit a certain criteria. There is a real need to stay consistent to maximise brand impact. Instead of manually creating hundreds of asset variations, they can instead spend their time on the actual creative process. This time can be spent generating new ideas that would benefit the brand the most.
3. Tech enthusiasts and beginners in design. You don’t need to belong in large teams of designers in order to see the benefits of automation. As long as there is a consistent need to produce designs in a fast, and convenient way, the need for automation is always valid. Automation helps make workflows efficient, so that they can effectively meet client demands.
11 Reasons why Creative Automation Tools are Important
Marketing teams need to tap into their creativity in order to be attractive to consumers. Following a design phase, more of their work comes into play during production.
This is when it is clear that an extra set of hands, or a graphic design tool alone might not quite cut it. Here’s some specific reasons why you have to consider having creative automation for your team:
1. They improve productivity
When time is short and the demand is high, you have to adapt and work hard to bring the campaign to life. Even with plenty of willpower, a human’s capacity is limited. The brain can handle only so many ideas in a day and it is only natural for a person to feel overworked and be less creative when the job finally takes its toll.
Automating the production process helps free a team from repetitive tasks. The time saved keeps the team productive. This is because they can work at a more relaxed pace, whilst still creating high quality assets reasonably quickly.
Automation eliminates the need to work under pressure, because the team to scale their production process quickly. The result is a high-volume of high-quality production for a consumer hungry for content.
2. They can help maintain brand consistency
Being consistent with your design across all marketing materials is essential for creating brand awareness. Even with the right imagery, a campaign won’t work in your favor if it doesn’t speak of your brand.
Another roadblock in maintaining brand consistency is when you need to tailor your campaign for different markets and platforms. It would be both time and energy-consuming to do it all without the help of automation. It’s challenging to manually produce countless visual assets and be consistent, so your only hope is through creative automation tools.
Automation makes it possible to apply the same branding into your campaigns. It’s fine to not consider it when working on a single campaign, but it could be a problem if you are to run numerous campaigns across different channels.
3. They improve collaborative workflows.
Real-time remote collaborations are now possible, thanks to several automation tools with built-in collaboration features. You can discuss plans, tweak designs, and solve issues right on the spot. This makes the team more productive, even across time and location differences.
4. They help eliminate errors.
Real-time remote collaborations are now possible, thanks to several automation tools with built-in collaboration features. You can discuss plans, tweak designs, and solve issues right on the spot. This makes the team more productive, even across time and location differences.
People are expected to make mistakes, especially with time pressure and limited resources. Because of the advanced algorithms in automation tools, campaigns will look perfect every single time. The team only has to focus on customizing the tools to remove manual adjustments and keep things accurate.
5. You can reach and attract your audience faster
Shorter production cycles mean that there will be faster time-to-market. The audience get what they want earlier. This also gives you a chance to be ahead of the competition. Social media automation, for example, will allow your brand to take advantage of current trends, rather than launching campaigns when interest is waning. This would make your brand extra relevant. The effect is an audience that anticipates what you will offer next.
6. They improve your workflow
With more time available, it is easier to find gaps in campaigns and work fast to fix them. This solves the process of waiting for assets to be completed hurriedly before looking out for any mistakes. This time saved helps you to polish your campaigns with an automated production process.
7. You can keep your priorities in check
The problem with doing everything on the design process manually is that it can actually strain the whole team both physically and mentally. Marketing automation allows everyone to relax and invest more of their time on pressing matters, instead of getting stuck at the production process.
8. They buy back time
Time is an essential factor in any marketing campaign. With automation, the whole team has more time on their hands. They can use the extra time they have to be more creative. They can also use it to recuperate or do something else that is value-adding.
9. Create creative content at scale
Creative automation can scale content production even with limited resources, mainly for creative professionals. There is less involvement involved in the actual content creation because the tools can take over those most repetitive tasks.
10. It is a cost-effective solution
You also get to cut down on unnecessary costs within the creative process. Your team can choose a specific solution to work on a campaign with ease. As for other costs, it would benefit your brand the most if you get to use creative automation tools that do it all, from production tasks down to team collaboration features. This will make it easier to oversee the assets, communicate with the team, and get the work done.
11. It is easy to implement
Amazingly, creative automation tools are so easy to use, with almost no learning curve involved. The interfaces are intuitive and functions are straightforward. This allows everyone on the team to use them effectively, avoiding errors in the process.
Conclusion
Personalized and micro-targeted digital content is the norm these days. The only way to scale content production with consistent results is by changing your approach to creation. With creative automation, the menial tasks associated with digital content creation are cut down. Instead, your team has the opportunity to focus on higher-value work that is actually more creative.
With more control over how creative content is created, your company can optimize and experiment with different campaigns. Your creative team gets empowered and have the time to create better digital assets that are effective.
Subsequently, more time and resources are saved by the whole marketing and creative teams by not focusing on the repetitive tasks. The demands of modern content marketing are getting higher by the minute. The only way to get by and even surpass your goals is by using creative automation tools.
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