Agility is key to an organisation’s success – it must be able to react, adapt and pivot quickly to stay on top of its game. The business landscape is constantly shifting, and consumers are confronted with more choice and more competition than ever before. The ability to market in these changing conditions effectively and quickly is crucial.
Outfit’s Director of Sales and Partnerships John Craig says traditional approaches to marketing campaigns are cumbersome, expensive and time-consuming and dissuade many organisations from considering additional campaigns.
John recounts working with a major Australian enterprise to launch an additional tactical marketing campaign the “old-fashioned way”: from briefing designers, to scaling the marketing and advertising collateral, management review, legal compliance, and finally, to execution.
“I estimate there were about five days of back-and-forth that was just time lost,” he says.
“Executing an extra campaign this way was a tonne of work but it ultimately delivered results. The quote this organisation gave me was: ‘If we can get one more of those out a year, it can equate to $500,000 net to our business.”
Save time
When an organisation joins Outfit, elements such as branding, style guidelines, approved designs, legal compliance and terms and conditions are all set at the beginning of the process. Components can be pre-approved and templates set so they don’t need to be revisited or redesigned for each campaign.
“With Outfit, all of those design and branding conversations happen at the start so organisations can build the correct parameters and restrictions into their templates, simplifying the review and execution,” John explains.
Streamline workloads
Marketing professionals are faced with a dizzying number of methods to reach consumers; from traditional print collateral and outdoor advertising to increasingly sophisticated digital and social platforms.
“About 10 to 15 years ago, a marketer would have to execute a website that was pretty basic, being in the early days of social media they probably had a Facebook page to manage and maybe some print campaigns,” John says by way of comparison.
“The goal today is to get new campaigns out with more personalised messaging, but the more personalised the messaging requirements, the more production it creates and the more complex it becomes. Bringing in Outfit simplifies that process and a time-consuming component of their job gets streamlined drastically.”
Focus on strategy
John emphasised that using a time-saving, cost-effective automated brand management service to simply saturate the market with campaigns is never an effective marketing strategy.
“At its core, what Outfit does is enable frontline teams to be more self-sufficient and self-creative within the parameters of a brand. Outfit doesn’t simply shift the burden from one team to another, it empowers frontline teams to design brand-approved campaigns and content themselves; they don’t have to defer to marketing teams. This frees up organisations and teams to be more strategic. Outfit has created breathing room for centralised teams by enabling teams across the business, eliminating the back and forth of repetitive and time-consuming design and content requests. The end results are strategic and well-executed marketing campaigns, more frequently.”
Test and learn
Extra campaigns – be they high-impact integrated marketing or niche targeted approaches – allow organisations to experiment within the safety of Outfit’s parameters.
“The way we’re executing now, through automation platforms we can drive slight nuances and slight changes that can have a big impact,” John says. “If organisations are smart upfront and strategic about it, they are executing slightly varied campaigns all the time. Outfit enables them to play, edit, test and learn what works within their branding guidelines.”
Increase Longevity
“Marketers have a huge tendency to churn and burn work,” John reveals. “They’ll create something that’s beautiful and when the campaign is over, they’ll throw it in the bin. Then, they start from scratch again on the next campaign instead of thinking, ‘maybe we can scale this for a year or six months and then maybe, through iterative changes to it, we can leverage the great work that we’ve invested so much money in’.
"This is where Outfit comes in – it can still enable flexibility to get creative and get more in market without burning the great work already created.”
