Most marketers believe that creative teams perform best when given freedom but face challenges with structure. However, creativity without structure can result in decreased productivity, prolonged timelines, and ambiguous objectives.

The concept of creative freedom is misleading.

The key to developing highly effective creative teams is to tackle the underlying ambiguity within the creative process.

Remove Ambiguity with SOPs

By implementing SOPs, you can remove ambiguity and provide a clear roadmap for your creative teams, instilling a sense of reassurance and confidence in the process. The most ambiguous stages of the creation process have the most significant impact on performance. When considering your creative production workflow, it’s crucial to address the following points of ambiguity:

1. Research: Who is responsible for conducting competitor research? What are the key identifiers for successful content in the market? How does the team document customer reviews? What are the KPIs for winning performance data? Is it soft stats? Is it hard stats? And how are you utilizing the collected performance data?

2. Roadmap: Does everyone clearly understand the goals and tasks in your creative production pipeline? Or does every new request feel disorganized?

3. Performance: Do your designers understand why the last ad underperformed? Do they truly comprehend the performance data, or is it just stored in a spreadsheet? Are your designers guided by data or just relying on what they think?

It is crucial to formalize the stages of the creative project lifecycle, such as research, execution, review, client submission, and launch, to eliminate ambiguity. These stages should be documented in Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) to ensure smooth creation.

Begin by assigning roles based on your SOPs. It’s crucial to define responsibilities for each stage of the process and assign team members specific roles, tasks and responsibilities. This will promote accountability and ownership, clarify expectations, and establish timelines.

Here’s a breakdown of the process we follow at our agency for client presentations:

We meticulously document every step, including the hours the copywriter spent on research, the necessary designs for the initial creative concepts, the tools used for researching client insights and industry data, and how the designer and copywriter collaborated to create the pitch for the client.

Additionally, we set up an automatic dry run meeting one hour before the pitch to ensure everything runs smoothly. While these may seem like minor details, they significantly reduce the team’s mental load and clarify responsibilities.

Defining clear steps for each stage of the process helps us save time and energy that would otherwise be spent on uncertainty. This prevents unnecessary overthinking, allowing the creative team to focus on deep creative work.

It’s crucial to communicate this process to the entire team so they understand who is responsible for what and the general framework for creating deliverables. Transparency in these details makes project navigation and meeting deadlines much smoother.

Once you’ve created the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) documents, store them in a shared folder and ensure everyone knows where to find them.

‍Remove Ambiguity with a Creative Strategist

Introducing a creative strategist can help remove ambiguity and provide clear direction for your creative teams, making them feel supported and guided in their work. Creative strategists play a crucial role in guiding the creative process. They delve into customer psychology, analyze the competitive landscape, and carefully examine performance data. By identifying strategic issues in ads and outlining the best approach for creative teams to tackle, they provide the creative team with a clear business problem to solve. This strategic guidance helps remove ambiguity and ensures the creative team is aligned with the overall business objectives.

With a creative strategist on board, your growth and creative teams are seamlessly connected, promoting unity and cooperation. This alignment helps in-house teams reduce internal conflicts, distrust, and low productivity, creating an environment conducive to genuine creativity.

You need someone who can be a growth manager and a creative leader. This person must be capable of effectively communicating with both teams while supporting and providing constructive feedback for each.‍

Remove Ambiguity Around Metrics 

By empowering your creative teams with clear metrics, you can eliminate ambiguity and give them a sense of control and empowerment over their work. Empowering your creative teams with clear metrics and access to performance data is crucial for eliminating ambiguity in the creative production process. Instead of overwhelming them with complex tools, provide visual reports and essential metrics to inspire them. The challenge lies not only in making data accessible but also in fostering motivation to utilize metrics in their daily work. Platforms like Motion offer visual performance reports that media buyers and creative teams can easily understand. Analyzing data from TikTok, Meta, and YouTube in a unified platform increases the likelihood of your team effectively utilizing performance data.

What metrics should you focus on?

When evaluating the effectiveness of your creative work, it’s important to focus on your primary KPIs, such as spending, cost per purchase and purchases. These key metrics will give you a good understanding of your campaign’s performance. Additionally, pay attention to what we call ‘storytelling KPIs ‘. These are metrics that reflect how well your ad is engaging and retaining the audience, such as drop-off rates, average video watch time, hook and hold rates, and CTRs. By focusing on these metrics, you can ensure your creative work is not only reaching your audience but also resonating with them.

Only a handful of metrics genuinely matter. Focus on those directly affecting your goals; don’t stay calm by the rest.

Once the data is available, the next step is to get creatives excited and accustomed to utilizing metrics.

Here are my techniques for training creative teams to build data-backed ads.

Design a monthly creative roadmap. Keep the team and processes on track with daily communication that reviews creative reports together. Encourage team members to chime in and provide feedback for minor details that make a difference.

Set up checkpoints with metrics. Use communication channels (we prefer Basecamp) where members can drop high and low-performing creatives and discuss ideas for future creatives based on performance metrics.

Start every brainstorming session with a KPI download. This will get everyone aligned around the business problem you’re trying to solve with creativity. You can start brainstorming with brief competitor research, customer reviews, insights about your brand’s reputation, and past creative performance.

Set up bi-weekly retrospectives for your team to explore diverse ad formats and engage in profound discussions about crucial metrics. Encourage team members to participate by sharing and dissecting their preferred Motion actively reports, which will provide valuable insights into how they analyze creative performance. Additionally, monthly retrospectives should be organized to maintain an unwavering focus on progress.