Managing Your Materials and Submissions For Success

Materials can quickly become outdated or irrelevant, even within the same company. People often find themselves overwhelmed with materials flying at them from all directions - emails, calls, texts, PDFs, and physical mailings. With technology constantly shifting in creative circles, it is hard to keep up and learn new tools while keeping organized.

One of the biggest challenges is simply keeping track of which materials have been submitted and what kind of response has been received. Sending out materials requires a lot of coordination and effort, but response tracking can be an additional challenge. What happens when materials are sent to the same entity more than once? It can be difficult to tell if something has been sent before, especially with so many avenues of communication.

Collaboration is a critical component of any creative endeavor. This means sharing materials with others, like producers and executives. But when it comes to version control, too many cooks in the kitchen can spell disaster. How do you ensure that multiple versions of the same material don’t get sent out, mixed up, or even lost? Without a proper system in place, it is also hard to know who has made edits when there is no way to document the process. It can also be difficult to distinguish between versions of the same file. Keeping up with materials isn’t just a matter of convenience - it is essential for any creative business or endeavor.

Not maintaining an archive of outdated materials is a major problem that can have serious consequences. An archive enables creatives to reference past projects easily, find materials quickly, and continue to build on their ideas. An archive also ensures that outdated materials aren’t mixed up with current material, which can lead to confusion and mistakes. It provides a record of materials for future reference so that you can track progress over time. Without an archive, you are simply throwing away your hard work.

Internal team members need access to materials at all times, which means the ability to search and find them quickly. If materials are stored in various locations, staying organized and ensuring everyone has access to them is critical so they can do their job more easily. Not everyone needs access to everything, though. Creatives need to be able to control who sees what, when, and how. This requires the ability to assign different levels of accessibility. As a leader, without that capability, opportunities dwindle.

Protecting Your Critical IP and Business Materials

Protection is important; it is one of the greatest fears amongst creatives. In order to move your career forward, you must share your ideas, but securely doing that is difficult. Intellectual property is a creative's livelihood. If it gets stolen or lost, they can lose years of work and investments in a matter of moments. This has produced the current mindset of rarely sharing ideas, yet that only hurts the creatives trying to scale up.

Security and access can coexist, but it's up to the creative team to ensure that those two elements are in harmony when managing materials. Figuring out how to safely share with external partners and maintain ultimate control over your materials is essential to any successful creative venture. It is the responsibility of creators to protect their materials, but having a system in place that can handle such tasks makes it much easier.

As you can see, there are a lot of types of materials. It is important to get this under control. Otherwise, you will descend into creative chaos. Having a system to manage your materials can help make things easier. You'll be able to find what you need when you need it easily, and share.

Your business is unique, and so are your material management needs. Building a system that works for you by understanding what materials you need and who needs them will produce an effective structure for success. The results of a powerful materials flow system are:

Increase in Team Member Efficiency

Having a system for managing materials and creative assets will allow you to work more efficiently. This will help increase productivity and save time. In turn, the quality of work improves. Keeping a close eye on materials will help you ensure that they are of the highest quality.

Having a materials flow system in place will make it easier to respond quickly to executives and clients. When everyone has access to the right materials when they need them, it makes the process faster and smoother. This can be a great way to increase customer satisfaction and build stronger relationships that lead to future opportunities.

A materials flow system will help you keep track of expectations and deadlines. With everything organized, it is easier to stay up-to-date on schedules and ensure that everyone has the materials they need to meet those deadlines and make the project run smoother. With the ability to track materials better, you will be able to monitor the progress of projects to help identify areas that need improvement and ensure things stay on track.

An efficient materials flow system will make tracing and keeping track of materials easier. This is especially important when working with large teams or multiple stakeholders. When everyone has the right information, it ensures that everyone is on the same page. As materials are sent out, a well-organized system will make it easier to monitor where they travel to. This will help ensure that the right information is shared with the right people at the right time.

The best way to achieve all of this is to stay organized is to create a system. Taking the time to build an organized materials management system pays off in the long run. It saves time, energy, and money - not only now but in future projects as well.

Creating templates for your materials can help you save time and energy. Not only do they provide structure to the documents, but they also help keep everyone on the same page with format, content, and expectations. An important step is to figure out what you are organizing. Removing outdated or irrelevant information will help you extract the important ideas and make templates consistent across the board.

Organize by project, talent, or client so you can quickly locate the relevant materials for each. This will help you track what is where and who has access to it. Categorizing by specific details will aid in cutting down sprawl and materials ending up in the wrong locations.

Using too many different applications and tools can be overwhelming. Not only that, but the data within each application may not be compatible. A best practice is to use one source of truth to consolidate the data and share it among team members. This will help you maintain control, keep everyone up to date and save time. Opting for apps that serve multiple needs will payoff in the long run.

Digital solutions are a great way to store and share materials. Whether you use cloud storage or shared drive, having a secure and reliable place to store content can greatly help. This way, everyone on the team has access to the materials, so you are all on the same page.

Symbonic provides the Materials Library to make materials management seamless. The system is capable of supporting any file type or link. Utilize the columns to prioritize your needs and easily filter to quickly find the material you need. On top of all of that, there is integrated IP protection to ensure your materials are always safe.

Setting up standards is a great way to ensure that brand consistency is maintained throughout all materials. Everything from tagging, folder systems, keywords, and naming conventions should have standards in place. Make sure everyone on the team understands these and how to follow them. Following these will help you create successful projects that stand out from the crowd.

No matter how you choose to organize your materials and submissions, the best systems are the simplest ones. The more time you spend on making your system overly complicated, the less time you have for execution and implementation. Keep it simple, organized, and consistent. Review your system often and make adjustments as needed to help you stay on top of the materials quickly.

Additionally, establishing a solid system that is simple and organized with yield clarity into obligations and deadlines to help streamline the process and keep everyone on task, increasing efficiency.

With the right tools and organization methods, materials management can be a breeze. Material library solutions like Symbonic provide convenient features to ensure lasting organization. Take advantage of digital solutions, and start becoming more productive. With these best practices in place, material management will become successful for any creative business.