5 tips to optimise your time to market
Encodify
4 min read
Having the optimal Time to Market is highly relevant to your organization – but how do you get there? Dive into these 5 different areas to find a solid starting point for the optimization process.
What does Time to Market mean?
Time to Market or “TTM” are synonyms describing the period of time it takes from initial idea to finished product – whether that is a marketing campaign, a product or another operational process.
The Time to Market-process is the sum of combined efforts of all stakeholders, including workflow steps and strategies involved throughout the process.
Why is Time to Market important for your business?
Time to Market has become an increasingly discussed topic across industries. That is because having the right – often very short – Time to Market, gives you an essential competitive advantage in an ever faster moving market.
In that way, TTM is closely connected to how innovative your company is. If your Time to Market is too long, the risk is that competitors will pull ahead of you and present customers with an equivalent solution or product. So, your ability to react fast on market opportunities and challenges in combination with at short TTM should be a cornerstone of your business.
Why reduce TTM?
As mentioned above, this is well worth your time and money. The main reason why you should reduce your TTM is, simply put, that a shorter Time to Market gives you a competitive advantage, where you can react faster to market changes and always be one step ahead of competitors.
Furthermore, launching a campaign or product faster will, per definition, give you more time on the market to generate revenue before the market matures and declines.
5 tips to improve Time to Market
Having the optimal Time to Market is highly relevant to your organization – but how do you get there? Dive into these 5 different areas to find a solid starting point for the optimization process:
1. Manage and optimize your workflows
One of the absolute first steps you can take to shorten your Time to Market is taking control of your workflows. By analyzing workflows, you will be able to identify steps that can be eliminated, bottlenecks that prolong the process, repeatedly over- or under-booked resources, and so much more.
Find more information on workflow management here.
2. Shorten approval processes
Approval processes are essential to any product or campaign launch – and keeping track of the latest version and corrections is crucial to ensure a smoothly running process, not to mention the best final product. The challenge is that these processes are tremendously time consuming since they often involve a large number of stakeholders.
So, to shorten your overall Time to Market, taking a closer look at approval processes could be a great option. Register and download our whitepaper that covers how you can get down to just ONE approval round here.
3. Automate!
Automation is key. You have inevitably heard it before, but how can it help you optimize your Time to Market? Essentially by automating parts of your workflow, where you will save time because you decrease the risk of (human) errors – forgotten deadlines, wrong versions of critical information, etc.
Furthermore, automation can improve communication. When the system handles tasks and due date notifications, your team members do not have to waste time figuring out when what is needed from them – or following up on where the process has come to a halt.
But this is just the tip of the iceberg – automation holds infinite opportunities to save time and resources.
4. Integration is everything
Marketing campaigns and product development both require large amounts of data, communication, blueprints, and much more. And the team responsible is unavoidably scattered over several departments – not to mention freelancers, suppliers, agencies, and other external stakeholders.
Because this is an unchangeable fact, to ensure the shortest possible time to market, you need data and materials always to be accessible to everybody – regardless of time and place.
Therefore, a vital step to optimal TTM is finding a solution, which allows you to integrate all systems and tools used throughout the campaign process. Thereby you ensure that all information, data, and material is stored in ONE place – and your TTM will not get delayed by the person with the latest version of the needed material being unavailable.
If you would like to explore your options, having a closer look at an aPaaS-solution like the Encodify system could be the next step to integrating all your systems.
5. Adapt as you go
The final step of your Time to Market optimization process is investigating your adaptability. One thing is taking your campaign or product to market fast. Still, suppose your organization cannot adapt to sudden changes in regulations, demand, marketing channels, etc., during the process. In that case, chances are, you will have an overall longer Time to Market – or perhaps even worse, launch something that does not live up to the needed standards.
Being adaptable, however, is not only a mindset that your organisations should have – it also requires your workflow system and tools to have the same flexibility.
