Marketing collateral automation: 7 challenges to greater autonomy

In summary

• Marketing automation primarily automates campaigns, interactions and their delivery.
• Automation can also take place upstream, in the production, updating and adaptation of marketing collateral.
• Making use of existing data reduces manual re-entry and makes it easier to update product sheets, catalogues, point-of-sale (POS) materials and other assets.
• Marketing teams can handle certain routine changes without systematically involving the design studio or IT.
• Templates, layout rules and approval workflows help maintain a controlled framework.
• This approach can reduce lead times, errors and the costs of repetitive work, while preserving each team’s expertise.

Marketing teams now have access to more data, content and tools than ever before. Yet when it comes to actually producing a product sheet, adapting a point-of-sale display, creating campaign variants or updating sales collateral, much of the work remains highly manual.

A price change sometimes means revisiting several documents. A new image prompts a request to the design studio. An adaptation for a particular market or distributor creates another version. Information that is correct in the PIM is not necessarily reflected immediately in every asset that uses it.

The challenge of marketing automation therefore goes beyond campaign delivery. It can begin earlier, with the production of marketing collateral itself.

The aim is to enable marketing teams to produce, adapt and update more content independently, while calling on IT, design studios or agencies whenever their expertise genuinely adds value.

Marketing automation and marketing content production automation: what’s the difference?

Marketing automation generally refers to automating marketing campaigns and interactions: segmentation, email marketing, lead nurturing, scoring, follow-ups or actions triggered by a prospect’s behaviour.

But those campaigns need content.

Before a product sheet, sales offer or promotional asset can be distributed, someone must produce it, incorporate the right information, select the right visuals, comply with brand guidelines, potentially personalise it and then keep it up to date.

This is where marketing content production automation comes in.

It involves using the data and content already available within the business — PIM, DAM, ERP, databases, structured files or other sources — to make it easier to create, update, personalise and adapt marketing collateral. Not every business has a PIM: what matters is being able to organise and use reliable information, whatever its source.

The two approaches are therefore complementary: marketing automation mainly automates campaign activation and delivery, while marketing content production automation addresses the creation of the content that supports those activities.

1. Keep product sheets and marketing collateral up to date

A price changes. A technical specification is updated. A new photograph replaces an old one. A description is corrected in the PIM.

The source data may be entirely up to date while some of the documents that use it are not.

This creates a very practical frustration: when information changes, how many assets must be identified, opened, amended, checked and republished?

The more product ranges, markets and versions there are, the more costly and error-prone this maintenance becomes.

Connecting collateral production to existing data helps reduce manual re-entry. Relevant information can be used to produce or update the documents concerned according to predefined rules and approval processes.

Marketing teams gain greater autonomy without unnecessarily creating another source of data alongside existing systems.

2. Produce and update content more quickly

A seemingly simple request can set off a surprisingly long process:

Marketing request → information gathering → handover to the design studio → amendment → feedback → correction → approval → export.

This process remains entirely appropriate when genuine creative input is required.

It makes far less sense when the task is simply to replace a piece of information, generate a new sheet from an existing template or produce a previously defined variation.

Automation helps distinguish between these situations.

Marketing teams can handle repetitive operations within a controlled environment, while the design studio focuses on design, visual identity and creative work that genuinely requires its expertise.

The benefit is therefore not limited to ‘saving time’: above all, it avoids involving several people in a task that the business team could carry out directly.

3. Adapt content without starting from scratch

The same product information may need to appear in a product sheet, a point-of-sale display, a poster, a catalogue, sales documentation or different versions for specific markets.

Add to that different formats, languages, retailers, distribution networks and local requirements.

The problem arises when every variation becomes a separate document that must be created and maintained independently.

Automation makes it possible to start from shared data and content, then apply the rules specific to each asset.

For example, the same set of information — product, price, description, photograph and specifications — can feed several poster formats suited to different spaces or uses, without having to re-enter the content for each one.

This becomes particularly valuable as the number of versions grows: more collateral does not necessarily have to mean a corresponding increase in manual work.

The ability to personalise materials locally while preserving brand guidelines is already central to J2S use cases involving point-of-sale displays and in-store posters .

4. Personalise more without increasing production workload

A retailer wants its own version. A distributor uses a specific product selection. A market requires particular information. A local campaign needs to feature a specific price or offer.

Personalisation makes content more relevant, but it can quickly increase the number of documents to produce and check.

With a traditional production process, each new version may need to be duplicated, amended, renamed, approved and exported as a separate file.

With an industrialised process, variable elements can be defined in advance. Marketing teams select the authorised content or parameters and generate the corresponding version within the agreed framework.

Autonomy does not mean having unrestricted freedom to change a document: it means being able to act without compromising the rules established by the brand.

5. Reduce errors and manual data entry

Copying a product reference from a spreadsheet. Looking up a price in an ERP. Downloading a photograph from the DAM. Copying a description from the PIM. Then transferring all of these elements into a document.

Each action seems minor. Together, however, they increase the risk of using the wrong version, overlooking a correction or introducing an error.

Marketing content production automation aims to use content where it is already managed rather than copying it manually.

This does not remove the need for checks and approvals. It does, however, reduce the number of manual steps that add no value between approved data and the final asset.

6. Clarify responsibilities across marketing, product, IT and design

Giving marketing teams more autonomy does not mean removing other contributors. Quite the opposite.

IT should be able to focus on systems, integrations and data availability, working alongside the teams responsible for data quality.

The design studio adds value through creative work, templates, visual identity and layout challenges that require specialist expertise.

Product teams remain responsible for the information and content within their remit.

Marketing can take on more routine operations: producing a version, selecting content, initiating an update or generating a predefined variation.

Approval workflows can then coordinate the contributions of different stakeholders when several teams need to be involved.

The point is not to eliminate collaboration, but to reduce unnecessary dependencies and back-and-forth on repetitive tasks.

7. Control production costs

The cost of marketing collateral is not simply the time required to create its initial layout.

Corrections, updates, new versions, exchanges, approvals and repeated interventions by the design studio or an external provider must also be taken into account.

A change that takes only a few minutes to make can have a much greater actual cost when several people are involved one after another.

And as the number of products, languages, markets or variations grows, those costs recur.

Automation is particularly relevant to these recurring operations. It is not about automating work that deserves creative attention, but about avoiding paying repeatedly to reproduce an already defined task.

To assess potential savings, it is useful to consider the full cost of an asset: production time, corrections, approvals, variations and update frequency, without overlooking the cost of implementing and maintaining the automation process.

Give marketing teams more autonomy without creating further disruption

Automating marketing content production does not mean replacing existing tools and processes.

In some businesses, product data is already structured in a PIM, visual assets are managed in a DAM and creative teams work with their familiar tools. In others, information comes from several applications or files and still needs to be organised.

The challenge is to make better use of what is already there.

With Simple Workspace , J2S connects data, content, templates and production rules to streamline the creation and updating of marketing collateral at scale.

Marketing teams can therefore take greater responsibility for routine operations, while IT and design specialists focus on work that requires their expertise.

Ultimately, the aim is not automation for its own sake. It is to build a process in which the right data feeds the right asset and each team contributes at the right moment.

Are your teams still spending too much time updating product sheets, adapting marketing collateral or coordinating corrections? Let’s discuss your marketing production processes to identify tasks that could be simplified or automated without disrupting your organisation.

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S. Dutilleul

Business Developer