How Custom Marketing Solutions Can Help Improve Your Creative Operations

Marketing technology integrations can provide significant improvements to your team’s creative operations. However, disparate base-level tools and packages are often not sufficient or suited to your organization’s specific needs. Integrated custom marketing tools allow for the development of effective marketing strategies, streamlined workflows, connected and optimized systems, and your own custom marketing solution. 

What are custom marketing solutions for creative teams? How can custom solution design benefit marketing and creative teams of all kinds? We’ll answer these questions and more.

Challenges of a Marketing Technology Strategy

Marketing and creative teams are all too familiar with the bottlenecks, silos, and gaps within their marketing technology stack. Day-to-day challenges include:   

• Workflow inefficiencies: Breakdowns in your workflow slow down project progress
• Workload opacity: A lack of workload transparency can result in team overloading and burnout
• Communication breakdowns: Ineffective communication leads to misinformation and misunderstandings across team members
• Delays and slow delivery time: Delays can result in overdue projects, which is not ideal for client satisfaction
• Disconnected resources: Disorganized assets can waste time and resources

The downfall to breakdowns in the creative process extend beyond daily frustrations. Creative teams are creating more content than ever — and faster — to meet consumer demands. A study by Accenture found that “nearly 70% of marketing executives say that the past year has completely exhausted their employees.” 

In the face of an unwavering focus on customer experience and the new channels and tools available in the digital era, it’s essential that your creative operations flow smoothly and in the way you need them to. A custom marketing solution allows you to meet these demands and find time to innovate by identifying exactly where your team’s unique inefficiencies are located and creating opportunities to resolve them.

What Is a Custom Marketing Solution?

A custom marketing solution brings together your unique processes and tools and information from key use cases and user testing to put in place an optimal creative operations system for your organization. A custom solution can be an improvement of a single marketing tool or application, or it can bring together and integrate multiple existing tools. A commonly referred to example would be an iPaaS, or Integration Platform as a Service, which is a platform that standardizes how applications are integrated with one another and as part of a greater organizational system.

Who Can Help Me Build a Customer Marketing Solution?

Solution design experts, like those at IO Integration, can help you determine and achieve your organization's goals for a custom solution. IO Integration starts with the Solution Design Process, which gives teams a deeper understanding of the intricacies of their system to address granular details and test out custom solutions. 

The outcome is a solution that organizes your workflows, integrates the right tools within your technology stack, and remediates pain points experienced by members of every team. For example, if you notice project bottlenecks at certain points of the process, a custom solution will smooth out workflows. Or, if your marketing technology isn’t improving performance as much as expected, a custom solution will ensure your software is seamlessly integrated into your operations. Similar but with subtle differences from an iPaaS is IO Integration’s IO AppFlow, a low-code integration platform that allows IO’s team to seamlessly connect applications of existing IO customers. The deliverables for a custom marketing solution like this one designed specifically for your team will include: 

• User story: A user story narrates an overview of what needs to be accomplished and how we’ll work together to go achieve those goals
• Detailed diagrams and mock-ups: Diagrams, swim lanes, and wireframes are used to visually represent the UI, UX, and composition of your solution
• Use cases: Use cases are provided detailing the various options to satisfy the user story
• Success criteria: Success criteria are mutually agreed-upon standards that will illustrate what final acceptance of the system looks like
• User acceptance testing: After implementing the custom solution, it undergoes continued testing to ensure requirements are met

The end goal of these deliverables is to create a final system design that delivers what a single tool or multiple disconnected tools can not.

Results of a Custom Marketing Solution

A customized marketing technology solution creates an integrated tech experience that is uniquely designed to meet the needs of your team and organization. Aligning your tech stack solution with the intricacies of your processes creates:

• Workflow efficiency to keep projects moving
• Workload transparency to prevent team burnout
• Streamlined communication to avoid misinformation and project breakdowns
• Speedy, productive deliveries to keep projects on time and clients satisfied
• Centralized, connected resources to optimize file storage and asset collaboration

Customize Your Marketing Technology with Solution Design

The marketing technology solution that will be best for your team is the one that is specifically designed to meet your unique needs. With a custom marketing solution, you can take the best features of every technology and integrate them into one solution. To learn more about how IO Integration’s Solution Design Services can create your ideal custom marketing solution, get in touch with an expert at IO Integration today.