An established publishing company, this Hive customer has been a leader in the science fiction and fantasy (SFF) genre for decades and has won every major award in the SFF field.
Collaboration and communication are key for the publisher, with 98% of the marketing work handled in-house across its dedicated marketing team and advertising promotional (ad promo) team. Together, the marketing and ad promo teams create a wide range of assets, ranging from digital ad campaigns to paper materials, with the ultimate goal of making their books shine and stand out to retailers.
Books require long lead times for planning. Throughout this process, the marketing and ad promo teams work particularly closely with the publisher’s cover department, as book cover design plays a significant role in the look and feel of marketing and promotional materials. They also work closely with the publicity and editorial departments when planning and creating new assets for a book.
We sat down with the Director of Advertising and Promotion to learn how this publisher uses Hive to efficiently market and promote its books.
Before Hive: A pieced-together project management system
Before using Hive, this publisher kept track of its marketing work using a combination of various project management tools and email platforms. This system relied on pieced-together tools and did not have the efficiency and functionality the marketers required. Together with another colleague, the team’s Director began to explore project management software solutions.
“Initially, two of us were keen to get a new project management solution off the ground,” they explain. “We were really lucky to have a lot of support from the top of our department and division. We got started with Hive in October 2019, and just six months later — in spring 2020 — we began working from home due to the pandemic.”
“The sudden transition to remote working was much easier for our team with Hive. It helped us so much.” – Director of Advertising and Promotion
Currently, the marketing and ad promo teams are almost 100% remote, with a few individuals opting for hybrid working. Let’s take a closer look at how these teams use Hive to collaborate and organize day-to-day operations.
Under the hood: Using Hive projects to organize authors and titles
The team creates Parent projects for each author name, with corresponding Child projects for each of the author’s book titles. These book title projects follow a specific naming structure based on whether it is hardcover or paperback. Under each book title project are Action cards for each different marketing and promotional activity, grouped either by due date or a wide range of topics.
Action cards can range in complexity and scope. For example, an Action card could contain a simple activity such as an email marketing campaign, or a much larger promotional effort such as a competition to win exclusive merchandise or special editions of the book. For competitions, an Action card could have subactions tracking information about prize items and packaging materials, or even corresponding Hive Forms that track competition entries. On the other hand, an e-blast Action card would just have a few subactions to facilitate the email send.
This project structure in Hive makes it easy for the marketing and ad promo teams to look back over previous activities they have completed for each author and their corresponding titles. The team can easily look back and see which designers and marketers worked on a specific project, who left comments on previous elements, and who gave input in the past. This is helpful for team members who have been working at the publisher for years, as well as new hires just joining the team.
“We have a really great record of our work dating back to 2019 when we started using Hive. We work with the same authors over many years, so to be able to pull up those files and see everything is so helpful. And because we do most of our work in Hive, we have access to all the granular details of our previous projects.” – Director of Advertising and Promotion
Using Hive Forms to templatize requests and assign work
Team members use Hive Forms to get work up and running quickly. Each form submission creates an Action card containing all necessary information to execute the activity or create the deliverable, as well as making sure work is routed to the right people.
They also created a handful of custom Hive Forms that capture requests based on the specific category of work. For example, one form is used for paid social media requests, while another is for physical materials. They have also created a “standard” form which is a catch-all for any general work that doesn’t fall into a specific bucket.
Within these forms, information is gathered about who needs to see the request and what specifications are involved. These responses then determine which teammates the card gets assigned to and how many subactions will be listed on the Action card.
Streamlining feedback with proofing & approvals
The company works on a large number of marketing and promotional elements for its books, so marketers are responsible for a high volume of work. And because they work closely with other departments — including the publicity, editorial, and cover departments — keeping the workflow organized and efficient is key. Hive’s proofing and approvals functionality has been crucial for this.
“One of the big reasons we wanted Hive was because of the proofing function within Hive Action Cards,” the Director explains. While the marketing team does much of its planning outside of Hive in collaboration with other departments, all of the specifics are then logged and tracked in Hive for the team to execute on those plans.
The team has a long approval process that always includes internal marketing teammates, and often includes external users as well as people even outside of the company. Hive is where they can track this entire process and make sure the right people have signed off on work.
When it comes to approvals, Hive’s notification feature helps everyone stay on top of what needs to be tackled as it comes up.
Conclusion
Using Hive has enabled the publishing company’s marketers to streamline day-to-day work, centralize the approval process, and strengthen communication across remote teams.
The Director concludes, “our marketers are all really comfortable with Hive at this point. Everyone’s onboard, from the people who have used Hive since the beginning to the people who have just started working at Tor. We’ve gotten a pretty good system, and they’re really comfortable posting their notes and feedback within Hive and using notifications to see what has come up and to keep things moving.”
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