5 steps to deliver and demonstrate business impact
A playbook for creative professionals
SURVEY SAYS
Proving creative impact is tough
Tying the impact of creative work directly to business outcomes has always been a challenge. But in today’s highly disruptive environment where teams are constantly asked to do more with less, it’s harder than ever.
We recently surveyed 1,242 marketing and creative professionals and discovered that 90% of creatives feel pressure to demonstrate the positive business impact of their work. The same percentage says that doing so is a challenge, while less than 45% believe their organizations perceive them as strategic business partners who understand and contribute to business goals.
What’s more, 20% believe their colleagues view them as a group that simply “fills requests that are assigned to them.” This has left nearly 70% of creatives under the impression that they must showcase their organizational value more than those in other departments or roles.
Now, we’re combining our most insightful and actionable survey findings with decades of experience helping thousands of top creative teams unlock their full potential. This playbook provides five specific steps creatives can take to elevate their business impact and how others perceive their work. Let’s get into it!
marketing and creative professionals surveyed
of creatives feel pressured to prove their work's value
feel seen as strategic partners contributing to company goals
Build a central hub for all creative work
Just 16% of creatives say they can easily access project or campaign information in a single place, according to our survey. The remaining 84% must piece it together across people and tools to get a complete picture. This inefficient process not only slows teams down, but it can also lead to missing information and miscommunications that further prevent timely and effective decision making.
McGraw Hill is just one example of a highly successful brand that experienced this “incredibly painful” issue. It used to take the creative team four hours to search through emails, systems, and spreadsheets to track down creative specs, progress, and feedback. Centralizing all creative work enabled McGraw Hill to shrink this timeline down to just two minutes.
Start by designating a single place to capture all creative requests and project details, including everything from due dates to image dimensions to intended audiences. Then, ensure that all communication surrounding these projects lives there too. This will help keep everyone on the same page regarding work status, shifting priorities, stakeholder feedback, and more.
Can’t get everyone in the company to agree on using a single work management tool? No problem — the best solutions offer integrations that automatically push/pull this type of information to/from all the most popular third-party tools.
Popular work management integrations
Keep your creative processes consistent
Practice makes perfect, so it’s no surprise that 85% of creative survey respondents agree that standardized processes have a positive effect on project and campaign efficiency. Standardization takes the guesswork out of what it takes to get the job done so creatives can work more efficiently. It also allows for incremental refinements that enable teams to consistently deliver their best work.
One element of the creative process that is particularly helpful to standardize is the creative brief or request form. Consistently capturing the right information for each new project — especially data points around associated company objectives and measures of success — enables creatives to more accurately prioritize work, hit the ground running on new requests, and exceed stakeholder expectations.
Eventually, creatives can (and should!) work their way up to templatizing entire projects. While you may start with just the typical tasks it takes to complete a certain type of project, the most sophisticated teams’ templates feature details including assignees, task duration, status reports, and more. This makes it possible to automatically spin up even complex project plans in seconds, which brings us to our next step…
Say goodbye to manual, repetitive work
It may only take a minute or even a few seconds to send a reminder, update a status, or create a new task. But this time adds up and takes creative teams’ attention away from more strategic and impactful work. For example, 41% of creatives lose a minimum of 8 hours per week switching between tools, according to our survey.
In addition to using templates to avoid creating projects from scratch, creatives also benefit from the ability to automatically send asset approval alerts, assign tasks based on role, adjust task dependency timelines, and more. Just over 40% of creatives say they now save a minimum of 10 hours a week using AI.
For example…
This rapidly evolving technology can do things like instantly translate ad copy into dozens of languages, powering productivity while freeing creatives to accomplish more meaningful work.
Make sure your hard work is found and used
Creatives can’t expect colleagues to appreciate work they can’t find, especially if it’s stored in tools they don’t use. Unfortunately, this is usually the case when creative assets are sprawled across Slack, Google Drive, and other channels. Even big, highly successful brands like McLaren Racing have faced challenges in effectively distributing digital content to key stakeholders.
Today, McLaren uses digital asset management (DAM) to centralize and organize all race-related materials, resulting in 7x faster content distribution. Using AI and machine learning, assets are automatically tagged and organized into curated collections. McLaren’s marketing team, partners, and media can then quickly find and publish high-quality race day photos across their digital channels.
Housing all final, approved creative assets in a single place also makes it easier to measure content views, shares, and downloads. These insights can be used to not only showcase the importance of creative teams’ work to the larger organization, but also optimize future branding, resourcing, and prioritization decisions.
Give the gift of 20/20 visibility
Another challenge hampering creative professionals’ ability to demonstrate the value of their work is changing and competing priorities. In fact, nearly three-quarters of creative survey respondents (73%) believe that frequently shifting strategies and priorities are largely to blame for their organizations not realizing the full impact of their work.
Fortunately, overcoming this obstacle is much easier once all creative work is centralized and standardized. From there, ensure your company’s goals or objectives and key results (OKRs) are clearly documented and available for everyone to see.
Then, tie each new creative project or request to a specific strategic goal, all the way down to the individual task level. Last but not least, build a dynamic dashboard that highlights real-time progress against these goals.
The information on this dashboard should change slightly depending on who’s viewing it and what they care about. For example, individual contributors likely don’t care about whether projects are within budget, but management definitely does.
Why this works
Ensures that creative teams are objectively and consistently prioritizing the right work, even as organizational goals change.
Makes it crystal clear to everyone, including executive leadership, how this work ladders up and contributes to larger business objectives.
Highlights any conflicting priorities, forcing cross-functional stakeholders to align around difficult reprioritization decisions.
NEXT STEPS
Your path to strategic business partnership starts with project management
The rise of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has highlighted the complexity, importance, and impact of genuine creativity and innovation. Creative professionals have always understood the unique value they bring to their organizations, but it’s time everyone else does, too.
Today’s creative teams have the advantage of harnessing technology to handle many of the operational aspects of their jobs so they can focus on doing what they do best — creating. And when asked which capability would benefit their organizations most, 64% of our survey respondents chose “project management tools,” making it the number one answer.
Smartsheet empowers organizations through a single platform to manage creative work, content, and people, so they can deliver impactful creative at scale. Creative teams can develop the processes, workflows, and insights needed to move faster with confidence, reduce inefficiencies, and maximize the ROI of their marketing and creative activities.
Want to see why creative teams from top brands like McGraw Hill and McLaren Racing choose Smartsheet?