Creativity, productivity and organization are inseparable elements for the success of your creative agency.
Once you have recruited skilled and experienced employees, and you have started to get clients, it’s important to make sure that the processes in place in your agency are effective.
Indeed, having great ideas and providing professional quality service is not enough if you are incapable of delivering your projects on time. Your brand’s image will suffer and you risk losing customers.
Here is how to improve different processes within your creative agency so that it is efficient, productive and prosperous.
Know the customer
A successful agency is an agency who knows its clients well and has perfectly identified their expectations, demands and needs. To facilitate this process, create a standard questionnaire that allows you to collect all of the information you and your team need.
Carefully fill in this document with the client and store it so that the whole team can easily consult it at any moment during the project. This questionnaire should be used as a basis when you and your team have doubts about the objectives of the project. This will prevent you from returning unnecessarily to the customer to ask them the same questions.
Organization
“Method and organization encourage efficiency and help reaching objectives.” Anonymous.
How can you perform well if you spend your time looking for a folder on your desk or on your computer? Organization promotes productivity. A successful agency is an agency organized on all levels. Working in an organised environment will help you to better concentrate on the tasks in hand and be more effective in reaching objectives. This will give you more time for the creative aspect of your projects.
Organise and prioritise your tasks. Adopt a project management software to organise your work. You can also follow an Agile methodology to simplify your project management and continually improve the way you work.
Communication
Vital to the success of your projects, communication must be constant within your teams, between the various departments of your agency, with your external partners, and of course, with the client. Everyone concerned must be informed of the project’s progression and the latest modifications in order to avoid any confusion or errors through a secure chat platform.
Have a quick daily meeting to take stock of the progress of the project, video call with the client to implement these amendments, send instant messages to exchange with members of the group etc., define a process to be followed precisely at each stage and put some tools in place which encourage communication with the different stakeholders of the project.
Priority Management
Your to-do list doesn’t stop growing while the deadlines seem to get shorter. The problem is that you are incapable of establishing which tasks should take priority. How should you differentiate the important tasks from the urgent tasks? Use the Eisenhower matrix to see more clearly and don’t hesitate to ask your staff for advice. Next, organize your day by priorities and keep track of the time spent on each task. Organised in this way, you will be more productive, and you will feel less overwhelmed by the volume of tasks at hand.
Delegation
Managing creative projects is not a one-man job. Rely on your team to be more productive and to deliver the project on time, and even in advance.
You have surrounded yourself with skilled and experienced colleagues, so trust them and don’t hesitate to delegate.
Please note, for this to work, it is imperative that each employee knows their role, responsibilities and what is expected from them. Formally assign tasks to each member of your team, set deadlines and carefully monitor the progress of each task using a suitable tool.
If your team is overloaded with work, you can either recruit or call on an external service provider to assist you in a project or on a task.
Validation
Whether the project you are working on is a website, marketing campaign or event, there is always a large number of documents to be validated by the project manager, certain members of the team and especially the client.
It is essential to put an effective validation process in place which determines:
- how to check each document,
- how to provide constructive feedback,
- how to implement the requested changes,
- the person or persons responsible for each of these stages.
In this way, you greatly facilitate this essential, but often tedious, process. Don’t hesitate to adapt to the different stages of the process according to your projects.
Relationship with the client
When the creative agency sends its work to the client for validation, the team often finds itself waiting for the client to reply to continue moving forward with the project. And since the client has other projects on the go, yours isn’t necessarily a priority.
To avoid lengthy validation times, set rules with the client so this process takes place the most quickly and efficiently as possible. Make sure the client knows exactly what to expect from them and by what time frame. Don’t hesitate to chase him up regularly as it depends on the success of the project, on meeting deadlines and therefore on its satisfaction.
Conclusion
By following these tips, you will improve the processes already in place in your creative agency and thus make it more productive. Make sure that each process is carefully followed to guarantee the success of your projects.
Finally, note that no process is firm and final. If a project isn’t working out as planned, don’t hesitate to modify the processes in place and adapt them to the situation.
