Due to the extremely competitive nature of online advertising, digital marketers and creatives have more responsibility than ever before. These teams often juggle a number of projects that are geared toward a broad range of consumers.
According to HubSpot, the average marketer is working on content for at least three different audience segments at once.
As you have likely experienced firsthand, constantly shuffling between projects can drastically impact overall productivity. That is why you have to achieve a synergistic partnership between your creatives and marketing staff.
To that end, Enormous Elephant, a creative development services firm in Dallas, has composed this guide. Below, we’ll outline 9 strategies that will help your marketers and creatives work together seamlessly towards the common mission of growing your brand.
Use Colloquial Language
Generally, creatives and marketers will use their own lingo. While this practice works in practice when they are collaborating with their peers, it can cause communication issues when two teams are merged.
If you want to avoid costly mishaps, encourage your staff to use common language that is not overly technical.
Prioritize Projects
Due to the nature of digital marketing, your team is going to have to take on a variety of projects simultaneously. It’s important to set clear expectations and deadlines for each project so that your staff can easily understand how to best prioritize their assignments.
Create a Standard Brief Format
As a creative designer, receiving an email that lacks important details regarding a new project request can be downright frustrating. If you want to prevent this source of friction, create a standardized brief document.
When your marketing staff needs to request a new project, require that they send this completed brief to the creative team.
Meet in Person
While most daily communication between your creative and marketers can occur electronically, in-person meetings still have value. Before launching a new campaign or starting on a massive project, encourage your entire staff to meet face-to-face. This gives the group a chance to hash out the details of the project and address any potential concerns early on.
Identify Priority Projects
Motivated marketers and designers tend to treat every project like it is a high-priority assignment. Unfortunately, they may not agree on what constitutes a “rush” project, which can lead to your resources being poorly allocated.
Define what an expedited project is so that your staff has clear guidelines to follow. For instance, you may define an expedited project as one that has a deadline of less than 30 days.
Keep Everyone Focused on the End Goal
By planning out projects in advance, you can keep your team focused on the task at hand. Your marketers will be less likely to request massive changes to a newly completed project. This will help your designers keep their workloads manageable and stay on track to meet deadlines.
Maintain Communication
One of the most important aspects of creating synergy between marketers and creatives is communication. This is especially vital when taking on long-term projects.
Your creatives should provide the marketing staff with regular updates on the status of major projects. These updates can be in the form of slide shows, emails, or in-person meetings.
Develop an Approval Process
You must have a streamlined review and approval process if you want to facilitate a strong relationship between all staff members.
Create a standardized document for this process so that marketers have an easy way to provide designers with feedback. In addition, we recommend limiting the number of review rounds to expedite the approval process.
Utilize Creative Development Services
As you can see, finding the perfect balance between your marketing and creative design teams can be quite challenging. This is an especially difficult task for small to medium-sized businesses that have finite marketing resources.
A great way to overcome these challenges is to leverage a creative development services agency. These organizations have dedicated teams of creative minds and marketing experts that are already accustomed to working in perfect synergy. You can use one of the firms to supplement your in-house capabilities or take over entire projects.
