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Creative teams. They’re the heart of your brand. They design the assets, logos and collateral your audience recognizes as your brand. It’s important to make sure what your customers see is consistent and an accurate representation of the message and imagery that your creative team works so hard to put out there.
Data reveals that brand consistency can increase revenue by 33% and 46% of consumers would pay more for brands they trust. In today’s highly competitive market, you need rock-solid, creative and original branding.
Because consistent branding is so important, your creative teams have their work cut out for them. Managing to stay inspired and creative while still meeting your organization’s dynamic and complex needs is no small undertaking. Fortunately, there are ways to support your creative teams and streamline their workflows so they keep producing their best work and never miss a deadline.
In this article, we’ll discuss the importance of creative operations and how to reshape your teams’ workflows to minimize time waste, streamline processes and improve collaboration.
Sound good? Keep reading for all you need to know.
What Are Creative Operations Workflows?
To start, what exactly are creative operations workflows, and why can they make such a big difference for high-performing creative teams? Creative operations workflows are the processes, systems and tools used to accomplish their jobs. And for high-functioning creative teams, these workflows are incredibly important because of their crucial and complex work.
Think about it: A creative team executes your brand’s vision by creating branded assets. They also have to work quickly and accurately while handling back-office tasks.
This can lead to complex communications, ever-changing needs and rapid-fire creative production. Ultimately, creative operations workflows are how your creative teams get work done, impacting how well they can complete their jobs.
There are many different ways that creative teams can approach their creative operations workflows and every organization does things their own way. That said, creative teams across the board are taking a closer look at their creative operations workflows and looking for ways that digital tools, resources and refined processes can improve them.
Creative operations workflows are not to be confused with creative operations (or creative ops), which is a fast-growing role supporting creative professionals' work.
Creative operations workflows are also not to be confused with project management. To clarify, project management is creating a process to achieve a specific business result while creative operations is specific to creative professionals and includes best practices that support them in producing their best work. While similar in some respects, creative ops differ from project management and might involve project intake, the creative brief, project management and client communication.
What Does Reshaping Creative Workflows Look Like?
Reshaping creative workflows is looking for steps in the process that can be optimized or improved, keeping in mind the various trends transforming creative operations as we know them today.
While old habits can be tempting to hang onto, elevating creative operations workflows will, in turn, elevate your brand. When teams can deliver assets more quickly, seamlessly ensure the correct versions are being used, and easily keep a pulse on digital rights management, that means better collaboration for all.
With that in mind, let’s dive into what reshaping creative operations workflows might look like at your organization and how it might benefit your creative teams.
Reduced Creative Requests
Creative teams can spend hours a week on simple tasks (like finding and resizing images) when they could do far more valuable things. This can drain resources and leave them inundated with repetitive requests that use up their critical time (which can lead to common creative roadblocks).
Instead, you can create a single source of brand truth that makes it easier to field and address these types of requests within a digital asset management platform. For example, with Brandfolder, designers can quickly find approved assets and download the size and format that fits the project needs while freeing up time to do what they do best: Create.
Improved Collaboration
Collaboration can be challenging and not just internally. Your team also needs to seamlessly communicate and collaborate quickly with clients, distributors, agencies, contractors and account managers.
Managing all these communications and ensuring everyone is on the same page can sometimes get tricky.
But improving your creative operations workflows with a DAM solution in place through streamlined asset management, understanding insights into how each asset is performing and automatic asset updates when a new version is created can provide seamless collaborations from the start. When optimized, creative teams can work from a central source of truth and ensure assets aren’t lost in email, duplicated, miscommunicated or relayed without final approval.
Optimized Content Production
Creative teams often need to lean on marketing to complete various tasks, monitor progress and ultimately, get assets approved as quickly as possible. When workflows are not optimized between teams, it can create roadblocks in content production causing your projects to drag on and on. Who wants that?
A digital asset management solution can help reshape your creative workflows by getting your brand assets in gear so that all team members have access to the right assets and resources, all in one place. With Brandfolder, teams can use workspaces to issue tasks and monitor progress until you’re left with an optimized piece of content, ready to go to market.
Better Approval and Versioning Processes
If you’ve ever spent time combing through a shared drive, trying to figure out which version of an asset is the most recent, you’re not alone. There’s nothing worse than combing through multiple versions of the same asset to figure out which one is current and approved for use .
But when you streamline these creative workflow processes to include asset approval already baked into the process, approved and final assets are easy to find.
For example, Brandfolder allows users to identify approved assets for whom, when and for how long. Brandfolder also keeps a complete history of every asset and its attachments and allows users to upload new iterations, eliminating any doubt about which one is up to date.
Streamlined Asset Use Everywhere
Switching between creative tools can be taxing and can even be disruptive. The good news is, you can streamline this process by connecting with your other software to support your current workflows.
By reshaping creative operations workflows with DAM integrations, your creative team can use integrative tools to edit, access and publish assets in one place. For example, you can connect Brandfolder with Adobe Creative Suite and instantly work on edits within the DAM software to refresh assets or make minor tweaks. Other tools you can connect to include design tools like Adobe, Figma or RapidCompact3D and push content directly to Brandfolder.
Guaranteed Use of Assets
When creative operations workflows are not optimized, communication can become redundant and challenging through all the means of communication marketing teams have nowadays. When your creative team is getting chased down for assets or inundated with duplicate requests, your creative team gets frustrated and nobody wins. Nobody likes reworking or producing needless assets that get forgotten about and take up valuable storage space.
In fact, a recent Brandfolder study found that nearly half of the marketers surveyed said they waste time searching for and creating assets that eventually go unused. Implementing a DAM platform can help creative teams ensure they use approved assets that took up valuable time to create (instead of letting them get lost never to be seen again!).
Data-Backed Insights
Is your team keeping track of which creative efforts are working and which ones could be optimized? Are certain assets performing better than others? Having a centralized digital asset management platform with a native reporting dashboard gives your team insights into top-performing content so you know what to create more of – and what to create less of.
No one likes working in the dark. Using data-backed insights to understand asset performance allows your team to keep an eye on what users are doing with your brand collateral to guide future projects. Also, this information is extremely valuable for future content production and promotion.
Key Concepts to Boost Company Success Through Reshaping Creative Operation Workflows
Creative operations workflows are central to how creative teams work and get through their day-to-day. By optimizing and reshaping these workflows, you can reduce the amount of time your creative team spends on certain tasks, improve how they communicate and clarify the rights and versioning of assets and even uncover data-backed insights into how content is performing.
Asset production will be tighter and faster, the proofing and reviewing process will be centralized and clear and teams will be able to use collaborative workspaces to work together better.
And when you can publish content and assets more quickly, you can launch your best and most exciting campaigns far more rapidly.
But to truly reshape creative operations workflows, creative teams need a digital asset management solution to support these processes. And that’s where Brandfolder comes into play.
Brandfolder is the #1 rated DAM based on user reviews specifically designed to streamline creative processes. Your team's creative impact can soar when you have insight into using creative resources and eliminating repetitive tasks and workflow bottlenecks.
Find out why our partners experience a 273% ROI after implementing Brandfolder and learn more about how Brandfolder assists with creative workflows today.