Managing the Creative Engagement Workflow

Your companies bureaucracy is limiting your creator communities performance and killing your bottom line. Most DTC brands only capture 1/3 of the value by only focusing on affiliate revenue. But creator communities drive full funnel performance, support brand goals, and performance goals. When you have 300+ pieces of content being posted monthly from your community: - New TOF channel that is getting your brand in front of new audiences at $2-$5 CPM - 50+ UGC/whitelisting ads you can test to scale paid media - Incremental revenue from affiliates - Halo effect, you'll see a 15% bump in amazon revenue + 70% more revenue thats captured on DTC outside of your last click attribution window. - Improved peak moments/ campaigns by having an army of creators posting about your biggest promos and marketing moments. Is your organizational structure killing your creator ROI? Creator initiatives often underperform when trapped in silos. Affiliate teams focus solely on revenue, brand teams on creative/awareness, and growth teams on conversion. This fragmented approach limits the true potential of creator partnerships. The solution? Reposition creator communities as a cross-functional asset that delivers value across multiple marketing objectives and departments. Our Process: 1. Map community benefits to key stakeholder objectives. Get everyone in a room and educate the team on the cross-functional value they are sitting on. Align creator activities with goals for brand, growth, and performance teams. 2. Establish clear measurement benchmarks. Do deep discovery on what metrics matter most to each team. Ex: New customer revenue, brand lift, CPM, impressions/engagement, and Meta CAC/ROAS. 3. Create cross-functional workflows Develop systems to leverage creator content across channels, from social media, and paid ads. This maximizes the impact of each piece of content. This can be as simple as a spreadsheet that's shared with media buying teams with links to organic creative that can be run as an ad. 4. Report on holistic ROI and share it with all teams. Make each department the hero by providing them a report on performance that supports their goals. By breaking down silos and repositioning creator communities as a value add for the entire business, brands can unlock significantly higher ROI from their partnerships. It's time to stop limiting creators to a single department and start leveraging their full potential across your organization.

Your business shouldn't collapse when someone takes vacation. Yet most creative firms operate exactly this way. While building Essajees Atelier, I took pride in our personal approach. Every project relied on - individual expertise - relationships, and - institutional knowledge in people's minds Then reality hit. When a key team member called in sick or left, projects would stall. Our trusted contractor handled approvals seamlessly, but when he moved on, we realized we had no documentation of his process. It's like being just one resignation away from chaos. That's when we got feedback from one of our clients, which stung, but it was accurate. Our business depended entirely on people being available and engaged. That's not scalable and definitely not sustainable. We went from being people-driven to systems-driven. 1-This meant documenting everything: When that contractor handled approvals, we had to break down every step he took. What documents he reviewed, whom he notified, and which checkpoints he monitored. The level of detail required was exhausting. 2-We started tracking clear metrics at every handoff: This included timelines met, budget variances, client satisfaction scores, and error rates. These numbers showed us whether our process changes actually improved consistency. Because the devil is really in the details. The hardest part isn't building systems. It's enforcing them. People naturally revert to old habits when they've developed their own shortcut.  I had to find a way to keep us all aligned. » Every morning we review which workflows stalled overnight and why. » When someone deviates from documented procedures, we coach them. » This cycle of build, audit, and adjustment became our daily discipline. That's how you scale without sacrificing quality. I discovered that I love designing systems because it's creative problem-solving. Making people follow them requires different skills entirely. You have to make a system so clear and useful that following it becomes an instinct. Now when team members take time off, projects continue smoothly. Our knowledge lives in systems, not just in people's heads. Do you run a people-driven or systems-driven business? #business #systems #operations #entrepreneurship

Most content teams have strong strategies, talented people, and great ideas. And so when growth goals outpace the ability to consistently create high-quality content at scale, the gap is rarely a better strategy or more content—it’s typically a better content system. One that reliably turns great ideas into a steady stream of content aligned to your ICP’s pain points, your brand’s voice, and your growth goals—without you feeling like you're constantly spinning (and dropping) plates. Or as James Clear says: “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” It’s not about effort or ability; the real issues tend to be structural or cultural—the kind that tend to weasel their way into how teams work and become difficult to fix: - Resource & capacity constraints – Demand for content grows faster than headcount, and adding talent internally can’t always keep pace. - Competing priorities – Campaigns, sales enablement, and urgent requests compete for the same creative bandwidth, leading to constant context switching. - Approval bottlenecks – Multiple stakeholder reviews (legal, compliance, execs) create unavoidable pauses that slow the cadence. - Skills & tools gaps – Even high-performing generalist teams can’t always match the speed and specialization of a purpose-built partner. - Perfectionism & brand stewardship – Deep care for the brand can lead to more iteration cycles and tighter scrutiny. - Process inefficiencies – Workflows that evolved organically may not be optimized for high-volume, multi-format output. These are the tells that you need a system that matches your ambition. And when your content system is dialed, it enables you to: - Turn one idea into multiple formats and assets without breaking stride - Scale production up or down with seasonal or campaign needs - Apply AI thoughtfully to handle grunt work so humans can focus on high-value thinking and creativity - Build in feedback loops so you double down on what actually converts - Etc, etc, etc. The result isn’t just more content—it’s content that’s more strategic, more sustainable, and built to match the pace of your goals. This is what we build at Column Five. For 15+ years, we’ve helped B2B marketing leaders turn ambitious growth goals into well-oiled content systems that free up internal teams without sacrificing quality or control—delivering a steady drumbeat of high-quality content that keeps your brand top-of-mind and in-market. If you’ve got the ideas, the talent, and the goals—let’s build the system to match.

Creative work doesn't have to mean chaos. I built a system that lets me get more done (and still have energy for life). My step-by-step breakdown: 1. Weekly Creative Cycle: Structured days for input, ideation, planning, creation, and review. 2. Time-blocking: Dedicated slots for deep work and creative tasks. 3. Tool stack: Using Notion, Trello, and mind-mapping tools to organise ideas and content. 4. 3Es Framework: Creating content that Educates, Entertains, or Empowers. 5. Templates: Pre-designed formats for posts and emails to save time. 6. Scheduled rest: One day for content scheduling and unplugging. This system saved me from burnout when juggling multiple high-stakes projects. It transformed my workflow from chaotic to controlled, allowing for better quality output and more personal time. Remember, creativity thrives on structure. Give your ideas a framework to flourish. #Creativeframework #creativity

The marketing curse 😂 The fix: Dara Denney's 5 step framework that brings data and creatives team together, battle tested with over $100M of ad spend. Dara's take: Creative freedom is a myth. “You need to attack the sources of ambiguity within the creative process. This is the secret to building high performing creative teams" 1. Remove ambiguity with SOPs "The most ambiguous parts of the creating process have the biggest impact on performance" Think of all the ambiguity that exists in your creative production workflow: Research: Who is conducting competitor research? Where is the team documenting customer reviews, and how are you using the performance data you’ve collected? Roadmap: Is everyone clear about the goals and tasks in your creative production pipeline? Or does every new request feel chaotic? Performance: Does your designer know why the last ad bombed? Is data on performance understood or locked in some spreadsheet? To remove ambiguity, Dara suggests formalizing the creative project lifecycle stages research, execution, review, client submission, and launch—for streamlined creation. She calls these stages Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). 2. Hire a dedicated Creative Strategist Creative strategists remove ambiguity from the creative process by doing the hard work of understanding customer psychology, the competitor landscape, deep s of performance data, and uncovering the strategic problems that ads need to solve. Without a creative strategist, your growth and creative teams become disconnected. For in house teams, this leads to internal politics, mistrust between teams, and low output. 3. Make data accessible AND exciting Not sure which metrics to narrow down on? Focus on your primary KPIs, such as spend, purchases, and cost per lead. These metrics will give you a good understanding of your campaign's performance. Additionally, look at storytelling KPIs, like drop off rates, average video watch time, hook and hold rates, and CTRs. Use a visual analytics platforms to make the data accessible and interesting for your creatives (that's what Motion (Creative Analytics) does btw) 4. Roll out a sprint structure Here's a simple structure you can start with: - Monthly roadmaps, metric checkpoints, bi-weekly retros - Keep the process on track with daily stand-ups Regularly analyze ad formats and metrics as a team during your live sessions and set up a Slack channel for sharing high and low performing ads where you can chat async on what you're seeing 5. Build a data driven creative culture You need to embed Creative Strategy into your org culture. Start all brainstorms with a data download. Ex: share CI research, customer insights, past performance but make sure you start from data or bring it into how you operate. To keep momentum up, create a "win" Slack channel to celebrate learnings and top performing ads and conduct monthly retros to keep the team aligned and engaged with data.

The Project Managers had become the gatekeepers of the entire creative system. HUGE red flag… I just wrapped up a contract with a huge restaurant/retail brand, and one of the biggest issues I fixed had nothing to do with tools, headcount, or quality. I fixed who was allowed to touch the work. When I stepped in, the creative operation looked functional on the surface. Projects were moving. Timelines were tracked. Meetings were full. Everyone was busy. But it didn’t take long to see the real issue. PM’s weren’t just managing flow. They were initiating work, interpreting stakeholder needs, prioritizing requests, offering creative critique, and in some cases even making final approvals! Everyone went along with it. It had been that way for so long that it felt normal. The cost of that setup wasn’t obvious at first, but it showed up everywhere. The creative team was disconnected. Stakeholder intent got filtered through multiple layers. Revision stretched longer than necessary. Over time, leadership started to see the work as sub-par. That perception mattered. When creatives aren’t clearly owning thinking and outcomes, they start to look interchangeable. When budgets tighten, those are the roles that get questioned first. Not due to lack of talent, but due to lack of visible value. The fix wasn’t dramatic. They didn’t like it at first. It didn’t require restructuring the whole department. We just clarified roles. I implemented a framework for defining who’s involved based on the type of work we were doing. Project management returned to facilitating instead of deciding. Creatives were reconnected directly to intent and expectations. Ownership moved closer to the work. The shift was immediate. Decisions happened faster. Feedback got cleaner. Trust started to rebuild. Most importantly, the creative team stopped looking like a low quality cost and started looking like a capability again. This pattern is more common than people realize. It doesn’t come from bad intent. It comes from systems slowly drifting out of balance. If creatives are being seen as dispensable inside an organization, it’s worth asking a hard question first. Who actually owns the work?