4 Steps to Improving Teamwork Between Your Marketers and Creative Staffing

February 24, 2016
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Marketers and creatives have one of the most classic love-hate corporate love-hate relationships. We’ve seen time and again as a retained creative marketing executive search firm that the tension and sometimes adversarial relationship between creative staffing talent and their marketing counterparts can easily make the difference between success and failure. That’s we why love this handy advice for improving communication and collaboration.

The data from a recent survey by Visually shows that more than 60% of content marketers and creatives say the key issues that hinder optimal collaboration include…

  1. Poor communication
  2. A lack of timely and consistent feedback
  3. Ill-defined and executed creative briefs
  4. A shortage of creative team staffing
The word most frequently used by both marketers and creatives to describe their relationship was “frustrating.”

Related: Why You Can’t Afford to Ignore Creative, Even in a Data-Dominated Marketing World

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Though our survey highlighted the tensions between some marketers and creatives, it also found that 37% of marketers are either extremely satisfied or very satisfied with their creative teams.

So what separates the 37% from the 63%? Here are some things “satisfied” marketers do to have better relationships with their creative marketing staffing.

1. A Well Developed Creative Brief Strategy Under Leadership from a Retained Creative Marketing Executive Search Firm

As a marketer, you may think you’re sending your creatives adequate creative briefs, but you aren’t. You haven’t taken the time to learn what a creative brief really is. Too often, marketers just describe the end product they desire to creatives and think that’s sufficient direction. But a real creative brief is so much more.

2. Use Sufficient Creative Staffing to Keep Your Projects Running On Time

Only 24% of marketers feel that the creative teams they work with are staffed adequately. This lack of proper staffing creates a bottleneck when project managers stack work on large piles of work for a single designer or copywriter.

More on the Importance of Creative Collaboration

video from TEDx Talks

3. Commit to Reasonable Schedules and Deadlines Early in the Process

About 26% of professionals working for creative staffing needs said they often start projects without an agreed-upon timeline. That can quickly create tension between a creative who thought she had an entire month to finish a project and a marketer who suddenly informs her that the project is due tomorrow.

4. Foster an Environment of Constructive Feedback

A creative team often delivers several phases of work between when the project begins and ends (if the project is a large one). Yet 32% of creatives said they receive poor feedback during these phases; less than 29% said that marketers provide feedback that’s consistent or given in a timely manner.

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