7 Features to Look for in a Creative Management Platform

7 Features to Look for in a Creative Management Platform

Campaigns going omnichannel, today, marketing is getting more fragmented. And with each channel posing unique requirements, it becomes the need of the hour for firms to tailor their creatives in multiple sizes and formats to cater to numerous devices and audiences.

Imagine the amount of resizing and other optimizations that creative folks need to work on, which clearly takes away a significant chunk of their time. As a result, they tend to focus more on coming up with variations for the same set of creatives rather than thinking of innovative ways to hook the audience.

Used by modern-day digital firms, CMPs or Creative Management Platforms are used to tailor, optimize, and test creatives for various campaigns. To customize each creative, professionals in the firms use several automated features of the platforms, which helps in cutting down the time while ensuring high-quality work.

Designers, for instance, can use them for churning out compelling creatives in large volumes for several screen sizes, formats, and platforms. They also act as collaborative tools that improve the workflows and communication between various departments. Overall, these help brands reduce costs while improving the quality of their creatives manifold.

That being said, here are some of the top features that you need to look for while selecting a creative management platform for your needs:

  1. Producing the Master Creative
  2. Designing a creative with a large file size makes it difficult for designers who need to optimize the creatives based on various requirements and strict file size regulations. Let’s not forget that there would also be other elements such as the typefaces, which would make the task onerous. This exercise wastes a lot of their time, which the designers could have spent on more creative pursuits. This is where master creatives in CMP come handy.

    These are used to set the tone for your display campaigns and allow you to come up with just one optimized creative that can be used multiple times. For instance, a 2D Animation Tool and InDesign in the Digital Asset Management System in the CMP paves the way for easy and effortless master template creation. Furthermore, integrations with AEM, Alfresco, Nuxeo, and OpenText makes it more essential for getting things going quickly.

  3. Scaling and Versioning
  4. When you are seeking a CMP that takes care of all your creative needs, you need to opt for one that does away with repetitive tasks. Scaling the creatives for your campaign is one of the steps that may require a lot of back and forth by the designers, taking up their time. But you can’t even do away with the step because of fragmentation in mobile devices, and the ads need to be displayed perfectly on each platform and screen sizes.

    This is where the feature of scaling and versioning is a prerequisite.

    While selecting a CMP, look for a unique algorithm that takes care of all the scaling needs for the creatives and helps you create adverts without any hassle.

    It will be a plus if the platform also offers bulk production of the creatives by batch adaptation. With this feature, there will be no more depending on a single image, copy, or layout. We are talking about mass producing thousands of creative adaptations for large, multi-channel campaigns. All these are done without spending hours and without manual errors.

  5. Translation Management
  6. Think of the number of copies you will need for creating an ad campaign that needs to be translated into, say, more than ten different languages! Let’s not forget that certain languages like Arabic and Chinese have scripts that are written in a completely different manner. These nuances can increase the complications manifold and lengthen the entire creative design process until you have the best solution in place.

    Hence, irrespective of the industry or niche you are working for, you need to take into consideration translation management while choosing a CMP. It is all about talking the language of your customers as localization leads to more conversions.

    Streamlined translation management can help you get ads tailored in multiple languages without taking away from the key message and help you avoid repetitions.

  7. Rich Media Support
  8. Creatives that convert have an innovative design in their core. And why not? Your brand needs to stand out to survive the big, bad world of digital ads that have breakneck competition. Enter rich media ads.

    To enable these ads, you need a CMP that offers rich media support. It will help you create exceptional HTML5-based digital creatives for both web and mobile. At the same time, it will also let you come up with innovative personalized videos. And all this will be as easy for you as a drag and drop!

  9. Collaboration
  10. Optimizing workflows lead to better team performance and the CMP you select needs to facilitate this.

    The better the communication between the teams, the better will your campaign turn out to be – no more stalled productions, unrequired feedbacks, silos or endless email chains. Everyone is in the loop at once, and all are always on the same page. This will help you cut down costs, efforts, and time. So, when you are seeking a CMP, you need to take collaboration into account for outstanding advertising, even with globally dispersed teams.

  11. Publishing
  12. When you are done with all the creatives, how do you take care of the publishing part? Is your current process easy and seamless? Or do you face the occasional hiccups? If your answer is affirmative to the second question, then you will need to pull up your socks and find ways to publish with ease.

    Publishing effortlessly enhances your ad campaigns and scheduling by freeing up critical resources. For instance, a CMP will do away with the entire process of uploading files to ad networks and publishers, something that needs to be done on a loop every single time a campaign needs to go live.

    Hence, look for CMPs that include integrations with marketing automation platforms such as HubSpot, MailChimp, AdobeCampaign, and OracleEloqua. You can even use them to edit the post-publication in real-time. This is a far cry from having to redo everything from scratch over the simplest of errors.

  13. Print Marketing
  14. Joe Pulizzi of the Content Marketing Institute puts across a powerful point about print marketing. According to him, like television and other “traditional” advertising mediums, print marketing isn’t dead, nor is it likely to suffer a death anytime soon at the hands of the internet.

    What has changed is just the way consumers interact with various traditional channels. That’s all. Print very much allows the consumers to enjoy the underlying beauty and appeal of the traditional marketing medium.

    With an all-embracing CMP, you can personalize your print media campaigns, which tend to have a more powerful presence than personalized emails! Look for the best tools in the platform, that allow dynamic resizing of your print creatives. It includes typography control, layout rules, print-ready output generation, ability to share ready files with the printer externally, and so on.

    Additionally, you can use it to:

    • Localize the OOH and other large signage using an easy web interface
    • Build and reuse some of the best templates for all your marketing collaterals such as flyers, brochures, business cards, personalized invites, etc.

Eliminate Complexities and Embrace Creativity with Best Creative Management Platform

It is evident that with creative management platforms at the helm, you can get rid of all the complexities and embrace creativity. By using them, you can take your campaign many notches up.

Be the master of all your digital and print campaigns with Mediawide. Our creative management platform is one-of-a-kind that helps you ace various campaigns with panache. You can use this single platform for end-to-end creative process management – build, edit, review & approve, scale, distribute and measure, everything from using a single platform.

Talk to us to know how our solution can take your in-house digital advertising to the next level.

Ravi is our company President and wears multiple hats as the Product Owner. Ask him how to maximize the value of your creative enterprise.