Making the decision to hire a creative team to take the lead in your advertising and marketing campaigns is a smart one, but sometimes communication can be a bit challenging. As the client, it’s helpful to know the most effective ways to communicate with your creative team so that you end up with the quality of work you were hoping for.
Trust Your Creative Team’s Expertise
You hired them for a reason—remember that. Most agencies will have a variety of work examples on their website, so you can see what they are actually capable of and feel confident that they can accomplish amazing things like that for you and your project or campaign, too.
Give Direction, but Leave Space for Creativity
You want to be clear on the direction that you want your project to go, but don’t go overboard with a bunch of specific details right off the bat. Try to have more of an open dialogue with your creative team and give them space to develop their own creative ideas. Collaboration can be the key to coming up with a really unique and memorable solution to the problem that you hired them to solve.
Don’t Give Unreasonable Deadlines
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and your campaign won’t be either. Deadlines are a balancing act between giving your creative team time to develop their ideas and not letting rounds of revisions spin out of control. Also, if the revisions do start coming in hot, you might have to move your deadline back a bit to accommodate your creative team. No creative is a stranger to working late nights on a project, but it’s still nice to give them the proper amount of time to meet your expectations.
Be Clear on What Story You Want to Tell
It will be very helpful to your creative team to let them know the “feeling” of your project. Try to express how you want your audience to feel once they see or experience the project or campaign that is being developed for you. Creatives are natural born “storytellers,” so the more you can communicate the kinds of emotions you are hoping to induce, the more likely you will get the results you are looking for.
Work Together as a Team
The less you think of your relationship with your creative team as “us vs. them,” the more enjoyable your working relationship will be. Remember you are both in the same corner working toward the same goal. There will be moments of frustration just like in any team environment, but overcoming those challenges will make you even closer and help you to understand each other even better.
Allow the Project to Move Forward
It’s important to keep a forward momentum with your creative team. Once an approval is made on your (the client’s) side, trust yourself and trust the team working with you that that was the correct decision, and move on to the next task at hand. (Remind your creative team of this too, if necessary.) There is no better feeling than a final product that not only exceeds your expectations, but is also done in a timely manner.
Understand Each Other’s Process
Everyone has a different style of communicating, and it’s easy for tone and intention to get misunderstood—especially through digital communication like emails or leaving comments in Google Docs. If you process information in a more systematic way, you might get confused about the approach that creatives take to process information. Just stay patient, stay enthusiastic, and you will both have a very positive experience working together that will form the building blocks of a long creative partnership.
To see some of the work we have created for our amazing clients, head over to our website and check us out. See our work samples, meet our team, and see what clients we have built lasting relationships with.
