Quick guide for in-house marketing teams

Gain works for any team that needs marketing content approved before it goes out. If you're part of an in-house marketing team, your reviewers are probably your colleagues: brand, legal, compliance, product or leadership, sometimes in other regions. This guide helps you set up Gain around the way your company signs off content.

You don't need to connect any social channels to get started. You can upload files, write text docs and add web pages, and send them for approval on day one.

Tip: This article helps you decide how to set up Gain for your team. For step-by-step instructions, see the Quick guide for Admins.

Jump ahead

• 1. Plan your workspaces
• 2. Invite your team and your stakeholders
• 3. Set up workflows that match your sign-off chain
• 4. Add your first content
• 5. Connect social channels when you're ready
• 6. Keep a record of every approval

1. Plan your workspaces

A workspace holds its own content, calendar, folders, approval workflows and people. Workspace Admins, Account Admins and the Account Owner can create workspaces. Agencies usually create one workspace per client. In-house teams usually organize by:

• Brand or product line, if each one has its own look, reviewers or legal requirements
• Region or country, if local teams create and approve their own content
• Business unit or team, if different teams market to different audiences

Inside each workspace, you can organize content further:

• Folders for types of content or channels, for example Print, Email, Web and Brand assets. Learn about folders
• Calendar labels to mark campaigns and launch periods on the calendar. Your Team Members and Clients or stakeholders see them when they open the calendar. Learn about calendar labels
• Content tags to group content by theme or campaign. Team Members can filter by them in the Calendar and Gallery views, and your Clients or stakeholders can see them too. Learn about content tags

Example: Amarillo Cafe's marketing team has one workspace for the cafes and one for its packaged coffee range, because each has its own brand manager. In the cafes workspace, folders separate Print, Email and Web content, and a calendar label marks the autumn menu launch.

👉🏼 Learn more about workspaces

2. Invite your team and your stakeholders

Gain has two kinds of roles: Team Members, who create and manage content, and Clients, who review and approve it. In an in-house team, the Client role is for your stakeholders. (The name comes from agency terminology, but the role works the same way for colleagues.)

When you invite someone, you can give them access to every workspace or only to the ones you choose. Give your stakeholders access only to the workspaces they review. A legal reviewer who signs off everything might have access to all of them, while a regional manager only needs access to their own region's workspace.

Clients or stakeholders don't need a password. They get an email whenever content is waiting for them, with a secure link that takes them straight to their approval queue. In Gain, they see their approval queue and a Calendar view with every item they've approved that has a publish date.

👉🏼 See the full guide to user roles and permissions

3. Set up workflows that match your sign-off chain

An approval workflow is a template for who approves what, and in which order. Set one up for each sign-off chain your team uses, and reuse it every time you send content for approval. Each workflow can have as many rounds as you need, and each round can have one reviewer or several.

Some examples:

For each round, you choose whether Everyone must approve or Any single person can approve, and whether to turn on Auto-advance, so the item moves to the next round as soon as the reviewers in the previous round approve.

Team Members can see each workflow's name and the people in it. Clients or stakeholders can't, so name workflows in whatever way helps your team, for example Print: Brand then Legal.

👉🏼 See the full guide to approval workflows

4. Add your first content

Start with the content your team already sends around for sign-off by email:

• Marketing files: upload PDFs, presentations, videos, images and design files. Reviewers can annotate files right where their feedback applies. Photoshop (PSD) and Illustrator (AI) files are converted to PDF so they can be annotated too. Learn about uploading files
• Text documents: write briefs, blog drafts and press releases in Gain. Learn how to create text docs
• Web pages (in beta): use Embed to add a landing page, email or newsletter, so your stakeholders can approve it before it goes live. Learn how to use Embed

Two things help your stakeholders find and review content:

• Add a publish date, such as the date a file goes to print or a page goes live. Clients or stakeholders only see items with a publish date in their calendar. Without one, they'll still find the item in their approval queue when it's waiting for their sign-off.
• Write a description with what each reviewer should check, for example "Brand: check fonts and colors. Legal: check prices and claims."

When the content is ready, select it in the Gallery or Calendar view, click To Approval and choose a workflow.

👉🏼 Follow a file from upload to final sign-off

Tip: Some colleagues only need to see content, not approve it. You can share a read-only public link to any item with anyone, even if they don't have a Gain account. Learn about public previews

5. Connect social channels when you're ready

If your team also manages social media, connect your social channels in Workspace Settings (⚙️) > Channels. Social posts go through the same approval workflows as everything else, and once they're approved, Gain can schedule and publish them for you.

You can also use mockup channels to create social posts without connecting a social network. You can send these posts for approval, but not schedule or publish them. They're useful while you wait for access to your company's social accounts, or if you use Gain only to get social posts approved, not to publish them.

👉🏼 Learn how to connect social channels · Learn about mockup channels

6. Keep a record of every approval

Gain keeps a time-stamped record of each item's approval, so you can show who approved what, and when:

• Activity: every comment, annotation, change request and approval, with names and timestamps.
• Approval: each round of the workflow, who has approved, and who is still to approve.
• Version history: if a file has annotations, you can see its earlier versions.

To share the record outside Gain, for example with your compliance team, export your content and choose Excel (includes activity). This is the format that includes the approval history.

👉🏼 Learn more about tracking content activity

What's next?

• Share the Quick guide for Clients or stakeholders with your reviewers, so they know what to expect in their first approval email.
• Share the Quick Guide for Content Creators with your Team Members.
• During your first 14 days, book a personalized training session with our Customer Success team. If you have questions, chat with us in the app or email support@gainapp.com.

Related articles

• Gain overview
• Quick guide for Admins
• Route a marketing file through brand and legal review
• User roles and permissions
• Creating Approval Workflows
• Workspaces