3 Keys to Creative You Love

Over the years, our creative team has partnered with hundreds of clients ranging from nonprofits to personal brands, and we’ve found the leading indicator of great creative is a positive agency-client relationship. But how do you build that relationship throughout the process? It all comes down to three key elements:

1. Ideas

We love working with our clients. We research and brainstorm before, during and after our meetings. But as hard as we try, we will never understand your organization quite as well as you do. Regardless of whether you think of yourself as creative, you have ideas about your organization, and we want to hear them.

Consider bringing to the table logos or websites of other companies you like, moods and emotions you want your ad to evoke or the type of copywriting voice you want to emulate. One way to do this is to start a Pinterest board or folder on your desktop containing screenshots of things you’ve found that inspire you or that your team likes. These ideas become guardrails for the design team to work within and allow them to be more creative within those boundaries, which ultimately gives you the best end result.

When we’re working on creative projects with our clients, we’ll often begin with collecting the ideas they’ve gathered on their own and ask a lot of questions about those elements to get a better understanding of what success looks like for the project. Both the process and the end result are always better when we work together, and that begins with us listening to what you bring us.

2. Perspective

You have a unique vantage point in your organization, and it’s essential to great creative. We’ve already established the amount of work that goes into ideas, but your perspective helps ensure success as the ideas transition into reality. No matter how much research we do, there are intricacies within your brand we will never know unless you tell us. These go beyond colors and logo usage to the core emotions and feelings the creative should evoke. Sometimes this is a “gut” feeling without much explanation. That’s okay, as long as you’re willing to engage with us to figure out what your “gut” is trying to say. Without your perspective, our creative is bound to come up short.

3. Collaboration

By now you may have intuited the biggest key to success is collaboration. It’s in everything we do. We want to partner with you to create great work; we don’t want to do it alone. We want to deeply understand your brand and be a source of new ideas and expertise that can view the project objectively. In the end, we want to work together to provide the best solutions. We have found this approach often takes us (agency and clients) on a journey of discovery, resulting in something we would have never imagined before. If we can stay open and engaged in the journey, an agency can serve as a guide to exciting new creative destinations.

Keeping these three elements central to your relationship with an agency will result in a productive and positive partnership, greatly increasing the likelihood of success for everyone involved. By openly collaborating with your creative team as partners, you’re much more likely to turn out creative you not only love aesthetically, but that accomplishes your marketing goals and moves your audience to action.