Providing Feedback to Creative Is 'Mission Critical

I have had to work in three different workplaces. First, I was the owner, and the creative team worked for me. Second, I worked for a large B2B company, and we had in-house creative, and last, still a large B2B but utilize outside creative agencies.

Let me tell you quantitative feedback to creative is Mission-critical at all three workplaces." That's how important it is for creative teams to receive both qualitative and quantitative feedback.

As digital transformation has taken root, Marketing has developed an arsenal of key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure digital efforts. Those include metrics such as engagement, clicks, downloads, and user intent.

More mature marketing departments take the measurement process a step further: They can track and apply attribution techniques right down to the level of pipeline and sales.

So, where's the divide?

It emerges on the creative side of the house. Whether the creative team is an integral part of Marketing or operates as a separate team, talented professionals who visually and conceptually breathe life into marketing efforts are often flying blind.

In fact, 55% of creative content teams say they never receive quantitative feedback on how well an asset performed with customers and prospects, according to an annual survey my team conducts in collaboration with InSource.

In other words, the people CMOs rely on to do much of the heavy lifting—graphic designers and copywriters—never know whether their work is driving the desired outcome.

How to Give Creative Feedback: It Isn't 'I Don't Like Blue

My thesis is that creative work performs best when it's aligned with marketing around business objectives. I believe including them in the measurement feedback loop is a crucial way to achieve that alignment. As a bit of a gut check on the notion, I posed that issue to several senior marketing leaders.

"Given the very nature of how marketing teams are measured—in terms of business outcomes, sales pipeline, and revenue—creative teams should be in the same feedback loop as teams working on-demand generation or product marketing,".

"You need to be able to give feedback that isn't 'I don't like blue”. emphasizes that marketing leaders need to find a way to include creative team members as quantitative measurement improves.

A standard operating picture for measuring outcomes also impacts the organization upstream. It's the key to ensuring the team is working toward the same goals. Creatives need to understand their impact on business results the same way an email marketer does, for example.

However, sometimes easier said than done because quantitative measurement isn't typically something that comes naturally to creative talent.

"Creative is tough because you are pushing them out of their comfort zone with quantitative measurement," "But if creatives look around the organization, and everyone else has concrete numbers, and creatives don't, they can start to feel disconnected."

Five Tips for Including Creatives in the Quantitative Feedback Loop

There's a "direct impact" between "high-quality creative" and digital marketing performance. "The better the creative, the greater the results."

Measurement is the way to capture the data needed to improve creative content outcomes. Here are some tips for building a process to make that happen.

1. Help your team see what you see

Share what you are measuring with creative team members so they see what you see. That might sound obvious, but I'm surprised by how often it's overlooked.

One way to do so is to make metrics accessible to all team members. Require metrics to be presented in every "team stand-up meeting" and a report on overall business performance to link the two.

One way to make metrics accessible is through a collaborative self-service medium. Simple examples include an intranet, portal, or shared spreadsheet.

2. Think differently about teaching measurement to creatives

One of the benefits of having creative talent on your side is that creatives tend to think differently about marketing problems. Similarly, they absorb information and learn differently, too. That's an important consideration when designing a system to bring creatives into the quantitative feedback loop.

Rethinking about how to visualize data best and tapping the creative team for its expertise. For example, creatives help produce presentations about marketing results to the company board. That interaction doubles as a professional development opportunity for the creative team.

"A creative who can visualize data will both be more analytical and become a real talent to hang on to.”

3. Gamify the testing of creative

Involving creative teams in the design of tests—in addition to the act of testing. That drives a shared interest and a sense of ownership and presents a relationship-building opportunity between Creative and Marketing.

Measurement can be made to be fun, too. “Good success with a weekly challenge on A/B testing" for "website and email drip campaigns." Can challenge the teams to come up with a different test of copy or visuals every week. The team that wins the challenge earns a small reward, such as free coffee.

"Making it a challenge and making it playful gets the teams into the spirit of testing and thinking more analytically."

4. Partner with revenue operations

Operations departments—such as Marketing Operations or Revenue Operations—have proven invaluable in many organizations for several reasons.

First, operations professionals bring a technical competency to bear. They are instrumental in procuring and implementing the right technology to measure success.

Second, Revenue Operations is adept at turning "quantitative results into visualizations that tell a story."

Operations also serve as an organizational diplomat of sorts, which helps check "egos at the door." Decision-making must be "balanced between quantitative feedback along with the voice-of-customer qualitative feedback."

"Pride in work is one thing; pride in delivering exceptional creative that drives business results is another."

5. Protect your creative team's time

Creativity doesn't happen with the click of a button. Creatives need space to be creative.

The same is valid for measurement. Creatives need room to measure because, for many, it's a new and additional duty that can initially feel overwhelming.

One way to protect creative teams' time is to provide the right project management tools; Creatives need to be equipped with automation and workflow so they can track projects in detail and easily report on progress to decision-makers.

"Make sure it's something public so they don't get sidetracked by that team that wants a random T-shirt."

Perhaps better still is that those tools can measure creative outputs and help loop performance data back to the creative team.

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In closing, I believe that the more you bring creative into the loop of how well the creative content has performed, the more likely you’ll have a creative team that wants to go the extra mile to have sales beat number.