What Does It Actually Take To Build a Top-Performing Creative Team?

What Does It Actually Take To Build a Top-Performing Creative Team?

As new platforms arise, consumers’ preferences change, and companies try to scale, high-quality content is imperative. Getting fresh creatives on a consistent basis is a challenge that companies (across industries) are working through.

But getting content is easy. Anyone can do it… Right? Shoot, you can use the phone you’re reading this on to make a video. You can get a video done with stock footage.

The hard part is getting content that looks native to the platform, captures attention, and converts. So what does it take to have a rockstar creative team? Let’s break it down…

1. Creators (of course)

Even if people on your team have the time, patience, and comfortability to be on camera, you will, at some point, want to show different faces in your #socialmediaads to prevent fatigue and reach your different buyer personas.

Make sure the creators you work with have a good understanding of #TikTok trends, styles, best practices, and aesthetics (like quality, angles, lighting, and settings). This means more than just experience making short, TikTok, “influencer-style” videos that lack voiceover, any speaking on camera, or direct response marketing.

Creators might have experience with direct response marketing and can handle writing incredible briefs and scripts. If that’s not the case, we’d recommend having someone who’s dedicated to writing video briefs. But whether the creators do it or someone on your team does, this is where most of the magic happens.

We’ve found that videos don’t meet expectations or need rounds of revisions when there’s too much ambiguity. An extremely detailed brief nips that in the bud.

2. Project manager

It can get very disorganized and overwhelming very very quickly if you’re working with multiple creators on different platforms who are all on different timelines. Someone on your team needs to handle vetting, sourcing, and managing creators from start to finish.

Are they briefed properly?

If they’re writing a script, is it approved or does it need edits?

Did you ship out product yet? Where does it go?

What’s the expected turnaround time?

Are they clear on the brief and what needs to happen?

Where does their job start and end? Are they responsible for editing or is your team going to handle it? And speaking of editing…

3. Editor

A creative team needs someone who is responsible for editing and piecing everything together to create the final product. They need to make sure the final video follows the brief and also be mindful of the details that make a video look native to the app. The transitions, text captions, colors, and pacing should all be done in the style of TikTok (or IG if that’s your style).

The editor also needs to stay on top of organizing clips (which ended up being way more important than we ever anticipated).

You can 100% build your own creative team, or piece something together in a hybrid approach. Sounds like a whole lot of coordinating, bottlenecking, and potentially, expenses (like salary and benefits if you’re going the in-house route)… But maybe we’re biased?

If you’re ready to get fresh TikTok creatives delivered to your inbox every week, we’re glad you’re here. Tell us more? 

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