Let’s face it, no matter how your team members may be hard working and talented individuals, key to success in marketing department is creativity and one simple spark of brilliance can single handedly diminish all the fruitless overtime hours in a second, there is no other way around it. But, how exactly can you empower members of your marketing team and boost their creativity, so they are able to produce that awe-inspiring spark? It’s rather simple; just listen to these few advices.
Help Your Team to Reach Better Understanding of Your Brand
In order to do this, you will, before anyone else have to bear in mind that your brand has to be treated like a person with distinctive image and personality. So, work with your team on creating that persona and help them answer questions such as “What does he stands for?”, “What does he want to achieve?”, “What is demographic he wants to appeal to?”, “Does he transmits more of a punk vibe, or is he a friendly neighbour?” Working on these questions will provide very fertile ground for your marketing team to lay their ideas to.
Debate!
Every opinion matters and even if sometimes it doesn’t land as good as it was meant, it can certainly provoke some other ideas, that will be step in the right direction. That’s why you need to encourage freedom of speech and brainstorming. Things should go in completely opposite way too. Sometimes there are ideas that sound great upon hearing, at least until someone says: “Hey, wait a second.” Honest critique can be as valuable as good idea, and dissent invigorates creative thinking, even if it may be little difficult to bear for someone.
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Coach Team Members Individually
Although their job is to function as a coherent unit, every single of your team members is an individual, so he or she demands individual approach and no matter how old it may see occasional pep-talk during hard periods can make wonders for them. Getting to know what kind of persons they and what are their aspirations before storm arises will help you tremendously. Hanging with them outside the job will not only raise the chance to motivate them properly, but also to provoke their creative thinking. So, if one of them is a movie buff, for example, push his thinking in the direction where he excels and navigate him into using trending ideas from that area.
Avoid Blocking Their Creativity
It is out of the question that you have to ground some rules for team members and expect nothing less than success from them, but that should be the end result not the very means. If you are expecting that every move they make and every idea they spill should be a game changer, you are running a risk of pushing them in the hell of mediocrity and there is no worse result marketing department can provide you with than “meh” one. Consider every slow step towards the end as a success and encourage team to build further upon it.
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Include Role-playing
When every other option fails, it would be interesting to switch some places in your team to refresh things a little bit and kickstart your project again. You can go even further. Team members should be encouraged to think, not only as another person from same team or even your company, but as the end consumer and abandon corporate perspective, as well as charts and numbers completely. Ask them to pitch you an idea how they would sell your product to neighbours if they never worked for you.
As we can see, in order to get the best possible results out of your marketing team, you don’t have to push them too hard, because creativity is not born out of fruitless labour. Handle them properly, understand how they function as individuals and encourage democracy and debate throughout team and you will be provided with something much more satisfying.
