Creating and managing marketing assets in a regulated environment presents a unique set of challenges.
The expectations of what marketing should deliver remain unchanged, but the processes needed to get content approved are often convoluted, resource intensive and slow.
Having a system in place to store your content centrally and get content approved will get you so far, but will it allow you to master the management of the full lifecycle of your regulated content?
Here are 5 essential abilities your Digital Asset Management (DAM) system must have, along with key metrics to measure its effectiveness:
1. Create the right workflows
Not all content will follow the same approval process and ensuring that all applicable regulated content is approved by compliance is critical.
Make sure you can:
- Set up review & approval processes for new and existing items, both for regulated and non-regulated content, allowing minor amendments to be fast tracked.
- Assign bespoke stakeholder groups including marketing teams, compliance, legal and product specialists for each stage of approval.
- Have multiple stakeholders review items simultaneously or in parallel.
- Alert each stakeholder of action required via email alerts and flags on their dashboard.
Key Metrics: Measure the total number of approvals to gauge the volume of content moving through the system by looking at an Approval Completion Report
2. Manage content expiration
Ensure you have a process for managing content not only during the creation process, but also when it is due for review, becomes out of date or has expired.
Your system needs to:
- Have a central Asset Store to track item ownership, approvers, version numbers, next review and expiry dates.
- Notify item owners when an item needs updating.
- Ensure Expired items are automatically locked down and can’t be downloaded, shared or printed.
- Archive Items that are no longer required.
To strike the right balance between restricting access to expired or unapproved content and allowing stakeholder access for auditing, your DAM should also offer:
- Public links to content that can be controlled
- Content subscription options to see updates and latest versions
- Access controls to limit who can see approved, in-progress, and archived content
- Alerts to subscribers when content is updated, approved, or archived
- Prevention of downloads and disabling of links to old/archived versions
- Integration with other systems via API to propagate updates
Key Metrics: Use bethebrand’s Red, Amber, Green (RAG) reports to monitor asset progress through each stage, identifying bottlenecks and inefficiencies.
3. Get final sign off and approval
Getting final approval from compliance first time saves costs, time and provides a competitive advantage. In order minimise the risk of rejection make sure you have:
- Built-in checks to ensure that only items approved by all required stakeholders can be submitted for final sign off to compliance.
- Automatically checked the content for common errors prior to sending for approval.
- All supporting evidence and recorded confirmation that users followed the correct procedures.
- Automated processes to save approved items into a centralised Asset Store, where they can be downloaded, distributed or shared.
Key metrics: Monitor the percentage of assets approved on the first submission (Right First Time).
4. Prove your Compliance
To pass an audit you need to be able demonstrate control over your regulated content processes and back it up with full evidence. Your system needs to:
- Provide your auditors with a full audit trail of all items and changes made. Including 1) all stakeholder comments and reviews 2) associated verification/evidence 3) regulatory testing i.e. Consumer Duty
- Retain the evidence for extended periods, 7 years in UK Financial Services.
- Ensure expired assets are easy to access only by users with appropriate permissions.
Key Metrics: Ensure expired assets are retained for the required period and easily accessible to authorised users. Regularly test your system's ability to provide a full audit trail and maintain compliance with current regulations.
5. Monitor and optimise your processes
Company requirements and structures change and new regulations are introduced. This means you will need to change your processes accordingly. To do so you will need:
- comprehensive reporting, so you can quickly discover the most common reasons for rejections of files and identify stakeholders or departments that delay review cycles.
- to quickly find bottlenecks to ensure assets are produced quicker, with fewer errors and less rework and cost.
- a system that allows you to implement new regulatory changes seamlessly to stay compliant and stay ahead of the market.
Key Metrics: Measure system adoption rates and gather user feedback on usability, functionality, and satisfaction. Use these insights to identify areas for improvement in training and workflow design.
By incorporating these essential capabilities and monitoring the associated key metrics, you can ensure that your DAM system is effectively supporting your regulated content operations. However, implementing a comprehensive DAM solution that meets all these essential capabilities can be challenging without the right expertise and support.
That's where bethebrand comes in. Our DAM solution is designed specifically for financial services organisations, with integrated, configurable solutions designed to automate how you manage your content lifecycle. With features tailored to meet the unique needs of compliance and marketing teams, bethebrand helps teams become compliance confident.
To learn more about how bethebrand's DAM solution can help your organisation, contact Sales Director Ross Jenner at ross@be-thebrand.com today.
