Chapter 4: Bringing it all together

In this chapter, we’ll cover:

1. Best practices for agencies

2. Best practices for brand and marketing teams

1. Best practices for agencies

Agency life comes with a unique set of challenges. You have to juggle multiple campaigns, clients, and deadlines all at once. And you need to collaborate on and deliver an ever-expanding variety of creative assets.

This can cause chaos when it’s time to get feedback and approval on your work. So let’s look at how Filestage can restore order to your agency’s review process.

Setting up your agency workflow

When creating reviewer groups for a project, think about the key groups of stakeholders who need to sign-off on your content.

A simple workflow could look something like this:

1. Internal – everyone involved in your project on the agency side

2. External – everyone who needs to give approval on the client side

Or, if you’d prefer to split internal approval into separate steps, it could look more like this:

1. Creative – key stakeholders in the creative department

2. Management – account and project managers handling the relationship with the client

3. Client – everyone who needs to give approval on the client side

💡Top tips for agencies

• Create separate folders for each client, then use projects for specific campaigns

• Hide comments and replies from clients with team-only comments

• Copy comments between reviewer groups to filter and share relevant feedback

• Invite freelancers and production companies as external uploaders

2. Best practices for brand and marketing teams

Brand and marketing teams come in all shapes, sizes, and specialisms – and so do their review and approval workflows.

Let’s look at some common workflows used by brand and marketing teams in Filestage.

Setting up your brand and marketing workflow

In regulated industries like finance, alcohol, and gambling, pretty much everything needs to be signed off by compliance before it goes out the door. So it’s important to have a robust process that supports every type of content you’re creating.

Here’s an example of a typical enterprise approval process:

1. Brand and marketing – key stakeholders from your brand and marketing department

2. Product – product experts who need to check the accuracy of your content

3. Compliance – legal specialists who need to give final approval on imagery and messaging

💡Top tips for brand and marketing teams

• Use sections to organize different types of content in the same project

• Export file reports to keep a record of your approval process

• Invite your agencies as external uploaders to share files in your reviewer groups

• Set due dates to hold reviewers accountable and make sure deadlines are met