If the reason for your interest in Brand Automation is more control over marketing production and less margin for human error, we need to have a serious conversation about our Approval Workflows.
One of the largest challenges that our more regimented clients face, is the balance between allowing regular, everyday team members to self-service and controlling what that material looks like without slowing down production time.
Most of you are already familiar with how templates in Outfit take care of controlling brand elements and the design - allowing users to produce material from high churn designs - so I won't go into detail in this article about that (for those who don't know, check out this article that explains how).
While the templates themselves allow us to lock down much of what users can edit, there are still areas that must be updated by users in order to allow them to self service. Changing a CTA (call to action), updating a headline or an image; these all leave opportunities for creative interpretation to happen. In most cases this is of course a good thing, but every now and then a little help is needed.
Here's where the Outfit Approval Process comes in.
When a user is in Outfit, has created a Project, filled it with Documents and edited them to fit their need, we can activate an Approval Process that they must progress through before they are able to export the finished document out of Outfit:
From an Admin's perspective, Outfit allows you to add a range of reviewers for a single tier of approval or you can even impose a second level of approval for a particular team.
As the document passes through each level of the Approval Process, reviewers have the option to impose changes themselves or send back detailed notes so the document owner can make the changes themselves (and the best part is, it's quick and easy and can be done from any device):
Both the Reviewer of the document and the document owner will be notified via email of any updates to do with the progression of their document through the Approval Process but they can also manage these notifications via the Notification Centre:
Once all changes have been approved, the document can be exported as per usual. Thankfully with this workflow in place, the finished product is on-brand and error free!
To learn more about an Approval Workflow in your Outfit Account, either use the support chat window or contact us direct.