What a creative process should look like
One of the parts of being head of ecommerce that I have had the most challenging is to build a creative process that works & scales.
I wish I had emphasized that having more shots on goal will likely improve your scoring chances. My main challenge for the past years has been that there are a lot of things that I want to do but have not been able to do because I have been unable to build effective processes that combine good ideas and quantity of creatives. I did not create a performance team that with a well-functioning process before I accepted another job, I find this to be my most costly mistake.
I’ll be honest and say that it sucks to get to a point where I see what to do and then have to leave. Luckily, I got another opportunity to implement this way of working.
At the same time, starting from scratch is a great way to optimize a process. I will now outline how this optimal process would look like as I embark on new adventures.
Step 1: Know the work
Be extremely clear on the process's deliverables, knowing what you need to do and who needs to be involved. In the creative process to optimize performance marketing there are roles to be filled. Some employees can and must fill several of these roles, but they are all a crucial part of effectively producing a successful outcome.
Story-creation
Creating / sourcing content
Landing page building
Ad-creative
Media buying and analysis
These are the different roles that needs to be filled in. My belief is that the optimal headcount is 3 for the process as a starting point. I get that you can do a lot more, but if you wish to get started, putting together a performance group of 3 should be enough to have a mean, lean content machine.
Step 2: The meeting(s)
If you wish to create well-oiled machinery, you, as the team leader, need to be able to delegate, follow up, and plan so that your team always has the toolbox they need to create a content machine. You need to meet up and talk to ensure they always have what they need to achieve the best possible outcomes.
The optimal process depends on the resources you have available for you. Every formal meeting needs to have an agenda, but I suggest you have a weekly performance meeting, but you change the topic every other week. It would look like this:
Even week agenda: Process, 30 minutes
What are we working on?
What do we need from each other to unplug bottlenecks?
What can I do to help you?
Odd week agenda: Optimizing, 1 hour
What did we do?
Updates on results & experiments
Learnings + What worked / what didn’t
New ideas
You can choose to have the optimizing section included in one weekly meeting, but my experience is that media buyers are impatient, and being forced to present results every week will only make that process more painful and less accurate.
Step 3: Work
Simple - get shit done. Create the creatives that you need, but make sure you do not take shortcuts. If you try to sell an angle with a landing page that does not strengthen that angle, you’re setting up the ad to fail unless you optimize for clicks, which would be crazy.
Step 4: Testing & scaling
This is the easiest thing. I will not be the one teaching Media buying because the context of how you work with testing & scaling largely depends on the size of your budget, with “scaling” being very different from business to business. People talk about media buying as the “make it or break it”-thing, and I acknowledge that good media buying can make a significant impact, but there are so many knowledgeable people out there to learn from. With a large dose of curiosity, anyone can do media buying right.
Repeat