Publishers are facing budgetary constraints due to the drop in advertising revenue caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Now is an excellent time to focus on auditing your internal workflows and processes so that you can find opportunities to automate and reduce administrative costs.
Identifying internal efficiencies is important for several reasons. First, more than 90% of employees say technology that helps streamline their work has a positive impact on their job satisfaction, according to a study by Ultimate Software.
Auditing internal workflows and processes also allows publishers to free up time spent on administrative tasks so they can focus on improving customer experience for their advertisers and decreasing their average cost per sale. In this article, we’ll explore a few ways your media organization can use workflow and process auditing to drive your business forward.
Laying the groundwork
To get started, we recommend you assign one stakeholder from each team (marketing, sales, finance, HR, etc.) in your media organization involved in the review to lead the internal workflow and process audit within their department. Establishing one project lead per team helps keep things organized and fosters accountability.
The project lead can then gather information on what each team member’s regular tasks include and how much time the duties currently take. If possible, it’s also helpful to evaluate the business value (i.e., return on investment) of each task.
Once you have this information, ask your staff how they believe their workload could be made more efficient or if any tasks could be eliminated entirely. Your employees are most familiar with these duties, so you’ll likely gain valuable insights from asking for their input.
Next, review everything you’ve learned, set goals that specify how much you want to increase efficiency so that you can benchmark progress, and make a plan to tackle a few key areas. Now, we’ll dive into those areas in detail.
5 ways to increase efficiency in your media organization
Eliminate manual tasks where possible
Every media organization likely has opportunities for automation—for example, in their approach to social media. Two thirds of publishers use social media automation to an extent, but only 25% have implemented full automation, relying completely on artificial intelligence (AI) to share content across channels. This means that the content they post, including the headline and image, is created using AI—and the technology even determines the best time to post.
Automating your social media content distribution enables your organization to save time on manual, repetitive tasks, so that staff can focus on higher-value activities like audience engagement and community management.
Remove steps in your ad booking process
As a publisher, you know how time consuming it can be to create custom insertion orders for each advertiser. This is also completely unnecessary in cases where multiple orders include several identical criteria.
Building templates for commonly used targeting criteria or entire audiences enables you to reduce the number of steps involved in your ad booking process, streamlining the process for your sales reps and saving time.
Implement a self-service ad portal
You can further simplify the booking process by implementing a self-service solution that your advertisers can use independently. This will enable your sales reps to step away from managing numerous small accounts, and focus instead on pursuing larger accounts capable of bringing longer term or more substantial business to your media organization.
Implementing a self-service portal doesn’t mean you’ll stop delivering quality service to your smaller advertisers. The solution simply offers a way to drive automation and efficiency in your business by enabling your sales team to prioritize high-revenue accounts.
Automate steps in your approval process
We’ve all been there before—printing, signing, scanning, uploading, and emailing contract after contract as the clock ticks on a busy work day. You can make your media organization’s approval process more efficient by using digital signatures, which increase turnaround speed on a signed document by 25x on average.
Digital signatures provide an easy and secure way to do business, reducing the time between contract sent and contract signed. They also help you save on printing, mail, and other administrative costs.
Increase flexibility within your work environment
The Covid-19 pandemic has fueled the debate around remote work like never before within the knowledge workforce, and there is growing evidence that many professionals are more productive working from home than they are at the office.
“According to our data, remote workers had a 4% increase in average daily time spent on their core work and an 18% decrease in time spent on communication (compared to office workers),” said this article by RescueTime.
The takeaway here? Higher productivity helps improve overall efficiency within your company. While you don’t have to transition to a fully remote workforce, your media organization could benefit from being open to remote work.
Use technology to automate your workflows
Lineup’s Adpoint Workflow can help reduce the time your team spends on mundane administrative tasks, enabling them to pursue revenue opportunities instead.
You can customize Adpoint Workflow to meet your requirements and adhere to your policies. Learn more and explore 10 tasks that our customers commonly automate using Adpoint Workflow.
