How Retailers Can Control Holiday Campaign Versioning (Before It Breaks)
Version control for holiday campaigns becomes difficult long before peak season begins. How can retail marketing teams be prepared to bring order and effectiveness to the holiday production process?
Every retailer knows that planning for next year’s holiday campaign production begins as soon as the current holiday season ends. For a November-December push, the marketing team typically begins in early January, looking at what worked and what did not. By mid-June, they will have set new objectives and budgets, promotional frameworks, and featured product plans. Summer is when chaos really begins, with designers and production staff laboring to create new content for print and digital channels.
This production was already challenging when the main channel was printing catalogs and inserts. It is exponentially more difficult now, as the number and type of digital channels and e-commerce sites have grown. To make matters worse, retailers must now consider multiple versions of holiday campaigns,
How has the growth of digital channels affected retailers’ holiday campaign planning?
including regional offers, price zones, product substitutions, language variations, and retail media placements. Since CMOs don’t have access to a time machine, they cannot begin holiday campaign production any earlier than they do. There must be another way to overcome the problem.
What’s the Central Problem?
What are the steps involved in a complex holiday campaign, and what do they mean?
A single holiday campaign reveals a lot about the weaknesses in a retailer’s marketing production system. These problems might be smoothed over or ignored when you’re dealing with simple inserts or web ads, but very few campaigns are simple these
days. A list of all the familiar steps involved in a complex holiday campaign will help frame the challenges that creative and marketing directors face with all retail campaigns:
- Regional and demographic variations – One size does not fit all. Large retailers with multiple locations must allow for holiday offers that reflect the unique needs and preferences of each store’s customers. It means the retailer must have robust version control for every
How can regional locations create local holiday promotions while ensuring accuracy and retail brand consistency?
output channel—allowing each region to create local holiday promotions while also ensuring brand consistency. It will also ensure the accuracy of the product information and assets used in the campaign.
- Pricing and availability issues – Holiday campaigns are just as sensitive to price competition as any other promotion—perhaps more so. If a promoted product becomes unavailable before the holiday season, or if pricing must change, the marketing production system must be flexible enough to accommodate these changes, especially for online and mobile channels.
- The multichannel challenge – With so many new digital channels and e‑commerce options, even a simple campaign can become difficult to manage. When faced with a holiday campaign, with its months-long planning and production runway, the task seems impossible. Only a unified “single source of truth” data model can enable the marketing workflow automation a multichannel retailer needs.
What Are the Risks?
The pressures and risks of creating multiple versions for multiple channels cannot be overestimated. With each version and channel, there is an increased risk of incorrect pricing, outdated images, missed approvals, incorrect offers, off-brand creative, duplicate edits, and final files sent to the wrong location. The cumulative effect is an
What are the reputational and financial risks of not using a marketing production system?
enormous, costly increase in manual tasks to prevent reputational and financial damage. Now apply those risks to the holiday season, where production timelines are tighter, and mistakes are more visible. Without a strong, flexible, centrally managed marketing production system, such risks and damage will only multiply.
How To Regain Control
How can retailers manage all the data variables required to plan and execute a campaign?
planning, and all other systems used to execute a complex, multichannel campaign.
One such application, Comosoft LAGO, provides a truly integrated data approach to complex, multichannel campaigns. With full access to all the relevant information, retail teams can effectively manage all these variables. It gives marketing directors greater visibility, creative services managers cleaner handoffs, marketing production managers stronger control, and production artists fewer repetitive fixes.
Holiday campaigns move too fast for teams to manage scattered files, manual updates, and disconnected approvals—especially when each campaign has multiple versions. Schedule a demo to learn how Comosoft LAGO helps retail marketing teams control every version from product data to final output, so that holiday campaigns can launch with more speed, accuracy, and cost-effectiveness.
