Creative members of a team are as important as the technologically sound ones. They should be taken into the team early on as a part of new technology implementation.
Many creative team members are either included too late or are often left out of the decision-making process that includes technology. The problems with this might not be detectable at once, but they will be evident when it’s too late, as they may not adopt novel technology in the long run. Including them ensures that several issues are addressed early on and solutions are provided sooner.
Testing the product and allowing the creative team members to ask questions can significantly impact the results. Cross-departmental leads and their collective buy-ins ensure the adoption of new tools and a fair amount of success during implementation. These members are adept at providing monetary and technical feasibility for assessing specialized products and related finances.
When we reflect on these evaluations concerning a variety of digital marketing platforms, including SMS, email, and social, it has been found that the involvement of these creatives is very crucial. Creative work and marketing have been hand and glove in the day-to-day marketing operations, but that should also be the case with the new marketing technology.
Digital marketing is the balanced contrast of MarTech, and each marketer should appoint a decision-maker or a creative consultant in the decision-making of MarTech. Here’s why the innovative team holds much more importance in this:
1) Marketers cannot perform without an alliance with creative partners. Marketing calendars and campaigns are planned with a creative team’s cooperation, even when they are not the end-users of an ESP. They are responsible for bringing marketing ideas to life through the customer-facing assets they produce. A business decision for new technology that involves marketing impacts how these assets are presented to the customer.
2) They become more vital partners and contributors as soon as they understand your business’s “why” and criticality. Results and numbers drive marketers. The creative partners can also push those numbers in a different way to support the initiative. It always helps if you share which brands have adopted a new digital marketing tool while exploring. Creative people look into the creative execution part. They even know how email templates can be made without compromising the brand’s visual elements, like a particular font or image.
3) They ask the most creative questions like kerning and typeset, image layering capabilities, and other essential design features, which are valuable in understanding potential impacts and adjustments to branding within assets. The technical teams usually only ask about API capabilities, while marketers emphasize functionality to execute and measure results.
4) The creative team needs time to prepare for adjustments, and they are not familiar with the same marketing lingo as the marketers. You should ensure that the creative team gets acquainted with the timeline and changes to new capabilities that can increase that portion of migration. It is wise to request a creatively focused demo with the vendors leaning towards the evaluation process. This will help them learn about capabilities and channel their creative energy towards understanding potential limitations such as personalized text over images and more.
Things like these require preparation time and some strategic thinking. Hence, you may ask the vendor about allowing access to a sandbox account, so the marketing and creative teams can experiment with new concepts.
5) They may not trust the tool and hence would not use its full capabilities. A digital asset management system that is implemented can also be ignored for months due to challenges that affect the creative process, which was not considered on the front end. It is a significant risk, which may further affect cross-functional buy-in. The choice of a digital asset management tool can also be stalled because of download and upload times of image files or bugs. However, if all stakeholders had input on requirements, it has prevented so many hours of wasted efforts.
6) The creative mind sees and goes about things differently, so much so that it can win good results. Data and technology should be used for creating a personalized experience for customers. Although personalized emails are designed using modules, a creative team can produce dynamic and innovative templates for the same purpose without much ado.
Testing new templates created by the creative team is an enjoyable experience, and it encourages collaboration between teams and fosters trust between people. However, personalized product recommendations into email design can limit some design elements like placement or crop, which are essential for the overall design. Collaboration between the creative and marketing team makes a solid strategy and provide an exhilarating experience to the client.
Marketers must start involving creative teams in marketing tool evaluations. They are more confident in assessing time and resources and the organization’s availability and investment.
