Any enterprise has multiple teams involved in the content marketing process. Marketing and creative stakeholders should work harmoniously to deliver better campaign results. The alignment here may need to be stronger to achieve creative marketing team goals.
So, how do you fix it, and what strategies and tools do you need to maintain alignment? Let’s find out.
The Challenges of Hitting Creative Marketing Team Goals
Marketers and creative staff should always be collaborative. Marketers develop the content strategy and content plan that drives creative campaigns. If barriers in the process affect content collaboration, it causes challenges. Data suggests that nurturing the relationship between these groups is critical, as only 47 percent said there was any improvement.
The problems that arise between marketing and creative often involve these areas:
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- Lack of details on creative briefs
- The volume of requests is too great for creatives to keep pace
- Feedback from marketing to creative is minimal or nonexistent
- The number of channels requiring creative work continues to grow
- The impact on the business from creative contributions is unclear (43% of teams said this was a concern)
- Technology tools are ineffective in supporting creative marketing team goals and don’t provide reporting on creative production
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- Slowed creative time to completion due to long review rounds, proof approval, and admin tasks. The statistics below show how these things substantially impact marketing operations from a creative management report.
Image Source: InMotionNow
All these challenges make it hard for everyone to meet the necessary goals around creative assets. However, solutions exist to streamline processes, enhance collaboration, and understand performance.
Solving Marketing and Creative Team Misalignment
If a gap exists between marketing and creative teams, you’ll easily see it in how projects move forward (or don’t). To strengthen and sustain alignment, you’ll want to introduce these solutions.
Ensure All Parties Understand Your Content Strategy
Your content strategy is your marketing bible, which includes creative parameters and goals. If creative teams aren’t privy to this or don’t get to contribute to it, they aren’t going to engage with the information. The best way to get everyone aligned is to develop the strategy as a team and make it available to all who need it.
The content strategy should also contain creative brief best practices. If the content marketing team uses these, it should remove confusion on the project. The directives should include creative goals for every channel used and any differences there may be. For example, if you have multiple audiences, you may have a slight variation in the color palette for each one. It becomes a standard associated with that persona.
Define Specific Responsibilities for Marketing and Creative
Everyone needs to know their role in the working relationship to deliver creative marketing team goals. Marketers must provide direction to creatives, while creatives should understand how design supports the content for the best user experience. Defining responsibilities should remove any duplication of efforts and improve content production time.
One brief example is image usage. Will marketing source images? Or creative? If creative is the provider, what information do they need from marketers? Outlining rules like this can make workflows much smoother.
Create Content Workflows for Better Collaboration and Distribution of Tasks
Creative and marketing teams must work together in the content production process. Content production workflows should be consistent and visible to all parties. Almost every type of content needs creative associated with it, from imagery in blog posts to digital assets like ebooks.
Streamlined content workflows account for all the steps necessary to go from idea to publication to promotion. A content marketing platform makes this easy, and you can customize them for every piece of content. These workflows also calculate due dates for each step. Pay close attention to if creatives have enough time to produce the creative. The volume of work is a big challenge for creatives, so you must give them time.
You can also measure production and timelines with a content marketing solution that measures internal metrics. It can help you understand where the bottlenecks are so you can respond to them. Most of these will probably be in the review process. Those can be long and arduous. Setting up SLAs (service level agreements) with reviewers can be a remedy. You can also cut some review time if the asset in review is an approved template.
Reduce Admin Tasks with Content Automation Features
As noted in the study cited above, creatives spend too much time on admin tasks. You can give them back time with the right technology tools that enable content automation. Automation that will serve your marketing and creative teams includes:
- Production workflows
- Content calendar updates, rescheduling, and change notifications
- New task assignment notifications
With a robust technology stack, you can reduce the time spent on admin tasks. Any creative will be happy to move this off their plate. It could end up being so significant that your production time decreases.
Provide Feedback to Creatives
Feedback is vital in every working environment. Your creative team may have little insight into how assets are performing. You have lots of content analytics you can share on the types of content audiences find most engaging.
In addition to performance data, you can also share internal responses to projects with them. Creating a constant feedback loop will help creative teams understand what’s resonating and not.
For example, interactive content is in demand. Creative teams are very involved in these projects. After publication, you’ll be closely watching how people are engaging, where they are clicking, their bounce rate, and conversions. All these components of performance link to design. Getting granular on this with your creative team can be of great value for the next one you publish.
Meet Creative Marketing Team Goals with Processes and Technology
Creative and marketing teams that have alignment are typically more successful. The more friction you can remove from workflows, the better. The key to doing this is establishing processes and employing the right technology. DivvyHQ can help with both. Request a demo today to see how it can support meeting your goals.