How To Succeed At Creative
Project Management
Agencies working in marketing, public relations and branding often need to undertake highly creative work. These agencies are commissioned to use their knowledge and skills to create content that taps into their target audiences’ desires and expectations while specifically enhancing the identity of the client business.
Agency leaders need to be able to manage creative projects effectively and efficiently. They need to be able to bring together teams of creative workers – guiding them and allowing them to focus on the completion of projects that go beyond the expectations of the client. The management of creative projects is immensely challenging. Here are some tips designed to help creative agency leaders get the most out of their teams – and give the most to their valued clients.
Be Strategy Driven
A creative strategy should underpin all actions taken in the completion of a project. Two creative strategies needed to be considered: the strategic aims of the agency and the strategic aims of the client. Consultation with the client needs to focus on the assertation of their strategic aims so that the aims of the agency can be geared towards helping them achieve those aims.
A clear strategic timeline should be developed, with clear Key Performance Indicators defined. Creative agencies should pick and choose their commissions based on how likely they are to help them achieve their own strategic victories. Take on commissions that allow the agency to continuously define a brand identity. If your aims align with those of your clients, you are going to be able to pursue both sets of strategic aims with more efficiency. Stay on track!
Communicate Effectively
Communication is key. It is also often a complex aspect of creative project management. Communicating with clients and creative agency workers is important. If all the people working on content for a project are not on the same page, they will not be able to complete a cohesive whole. Luckily, modern project management software has made the creative manager’s job a little bit easier. These programs bring together a great many reporting and communication tools and enable them to be controlled from a central hub. Communicative clarity might be easier to achieve these days, but that does not mean that it is a walk in the park.
Communicating with creatives has historically been seen as a rather different challenge to communicating with other workers. With that being said, creative workers are much like other workers in terms of their need for clarity, sense, and reciprocal discussion.
Consult Stakeholders
Communication with stakeholders should be regular. It should not stop after the consultation period has ended and the project has gotten underway. Clients can be famously difficult to communicate with. They can change their minds about project aims, budgets, and just about everything else without warning. To prevent this kind of confusing breakdown – which can really stall a project – communication needs to be clear and regular.
Use Proofing Tools
In the past, creative project managers regularly encountered issues with approving or requesting edits to creative works being produced by multiple parties. These days, proofing tools like Ziflow and Pageproof allow project managers to swiftly administer the proofing of work. They enable managers to get a sense of ‘the big picture’ by viewing works together and often enable integration with creative programs like Adobe Photoshop.
The best proofing tools allow managers to review and approve works by creatives working in multiple fields. They enable creative managers to get an accurate overview without opening multiple programs.
Market Research Is Important
Market research is important in just about any business context. When completing a creative project, an agency will be expected to conduct its own market research as well as being able to tap into some research completed by the client that hired them. Some client companies will be surprisingly protective over the data that they have gathered – even going so far as to shield it from the creative agencies that they hire. Creative agencies need to keep their fingers on the cultural pulse of the target audiences they intend to create content for.
Insights gleaned from market research can have a massively positive effect on the value of a creative project. One way in which good market research can improve the creation of marketing content is by helping to ascertain a ‘benefit ranking’. By ranking the perceived benefits of a product or service based on public reaction, creative agencies can work out which benefits to emphasize in their content.
