A principios de febrero John Donahoe, CEO de Nike, platicó en CNBC de los esfuerzos de Nike para volverse más sustentable. “Al consumidor cada vez le importa más la sustentabilidad,” comentó en la entrevista. “Es importante para Nike y sus consumidores… [Los consumidores] están buscando a compañías como Nike para que lideren este esfuerzo.” (Puedes encontrar este artículo en inglés aquí)

La sensación de que debes evolucionar a la par de los cambiantes valores y necesidades de los consumidores es algo familiar para las marcas y sus CMO, quienes han adaptado un mayor sentido de propósito en la forma en que se posicionan en el mundo. Y el propósito de la marca es cada vez más importante para los consumidores actuales: de acuerdo a datos de eMarketer, 59% de los consumidores en EU son más leales a las marcas que apoyan causas que les importan a ellos. Pero a pesar de esto, 61% de los consumidores creen que muchas marcas usan estas causas como estrategias de marketing en su propio beneficio, de acuerdo al mismo estudio.

Al mismo tiempo que las marcas buscan compartir sus valores y contar sus historias, los influencers sirven como un excelente herramienta para hacerlo de manera más auténtica de forma que resuene con los consumidores actuales, haciéndolos un factor importante dentro de la mezcla de marketing que busca crear una conexión genuina con los usuarios. Dada su relevancia para para audiencias de nicho y la participación en comunidades sociales cerradas, asociarse con influencers le da a las marcas la oportunidad de ser congruentes y tener una papel más activo dentro de culturas que representan algo y que guían el cambio, así es cómo.

Capacidades Aumentadas de Storytelling

Los creadores de contenido conocen a sus audiencias mejor que nadie. Han establecido relaciones profundas con sus seguidores y espectadores al crear un flujo de contenido regular de calidad y próximo; es precisamente este contenido y la cercanía con la audiencia lo que les ha ganado seguidores.

Esta habilidad es invaluable para las marcas que buscan hacerse más cercanas; sin embargo, es importante que las marcas entiendan hacia qué tipo de contenido gravitan los consumidores. Primero, las marcas no deberían enfocar toda su atención en el número de seguidores y de likes; Instagram está experimentando en deshacerse de los dos, y además no son una medida realmente exacta de qué tan influyente es un usuario en la plataforma.

Pero no hay que desesperarse; esto no significa que el marketing de influencer sea algo gratuito con poca atribución o en la que no haya forma de investigar socios efectivos. De hecho, datos de nuestro equipo IMA de activación de influencers apuntan a que la calidad es la verdadera medida de valor: lo que importa más que el número de espectadores que pueda traer un influencer a tu contenido, es cuántos de esos espectadores van a interactuar, buscarán y explorarán tu marca. Viendo más allá de los cifras duras y con miras en la calidad y el engagement también permite que haya contenido más genuino y auténtico. 

Contenido Shoppable Irresistible

El contenido shoppable está ganando tracción con los consumidores. El año pasado, según datos de Adobe, el porcentaje de tráfico de referrals de redes sociales a sitios de ecommerce creció de 3.1% en 2016 a 9.1% en 2019. Con el creciente interés de la Generación Z en la compra a través de redes sociales como Instagram, los influencers presentan una excelente oportunidad para que las marcas impulsen esta tendencia generando contenido shoppable o inspiracional que resuene con los consumidores.

¿Qué es el marketing de influencers?

De hecho, la confianza en los influencers es alta: otro estudio de eMarketer señala que el 25% de niños y adolescentes entre 6 y 16 años de edad en Estados Unidos y el Reino Unido, los citan como una de sus principales influencias a la hora de tomar decisiones de compra, poco abajo de los amigos (28%) y arriba de familiares (21%). A pesar de esto, es fundamental que las marcas no traten a los influencers como otra compra de medios; son socios creativos de principio a fin, y deben ser tratados como tales.

“Cuando encuentres influencers que empatan a la perfección con tu marca, debes confiar en que conocen a sus seguidores mejor que tu. Así que cuando estás accediendo a su comunidad, tendrás resultados más sólidos, dándoles libertad creativa para crear contenido creíble ligado a tu marca,” dice Emilie Tabor, Fundador y CMO de IMA. “Por supuesto, siempre le damos un brief muy preciso al influencer y el contenido siempre es aprobado por la marca antes de publicarse.”

Mayor Enfoque en la Obsesión del Consumidor

Finalmente, las alianzas con influencers le permiten a tu marca obsesionarse más con el cliente con relativa facilidad. ¿Qué es una marca obsesionada con el consumidor? La obsesión por el cliente viene en varias formas: “Forrester identifica tres expresiones comunes en la obsesión por el cliente: ‘Cuenta con nosotros’ (confiabilidad), ‘A tu servicio’ (servicio), y ‘A tu lado’ (apoyo); dependiendo de la fortaleza de la empresa y de lo que valoran sus clientes,” escribe Shar VanBoskirk, VP y Principal Analyst de Forrester, en el reporte “How To Build Your Company’s Customer Obsession Strategy.”

Los influencers encajan en este modelo al construir una relación cercana con sus audiencias de acuerdo a sus necesidades, por ejemplo, un creador de contenido de belleza que ayuda a sus espectadores a entender qué cosméticos son mejores para ellos, y cómo usarlos. La autoridad y la defensa de la comunidad como fuentes de conocimiento son dos grandes atributos que vemos en acción en este caso.

Wesley ter Haar, Fundador de MediaMonks, señala que “La creatividad diferenciada combina un entendimiento de la cultura con impacto de negocios de gran altura que genera un valor final real.” Para lograr esto, los influencers deben conocer a fondo a sus audiencias; elegir al mejor influencer para llegar a tu público objetivo requiere que también los entiendas a ellos y a sus necesidades.

Esto significa que invertir en social listening y en insights de mercado es un buen lugar para empezar tus esfuerzos de marketing de influencers, vamos a profundidad en todos los datos: analytics, social listening, engagement, percepción, calidad de contenido y la alineación con la marca,” dice Tabor. “¿Quiénes son los followers? ¿Dónde viven? ¿Cuáles son los rangos de edad y sus interes? ¿Han trabajado con tus competidores? Hay mucho más por debajo de la superficie.”

El punto anterior ilustra algunas de las formas en que los influencers pueden ayudar a las marcas a estar siempre a la vanguardia en el marketing de redes sociales. Los influencers pueden beneficiar a las marcas siendo expertos en diferentes áreas, figuras inspiracionales y talento, y además son clave para mejorar y fortalecer sus relaciones con los consumidores.

En un mundo en constante movimiento con equipos repartidos en un sinfín de sociedades (y en todo el mundo), la comunicación efectiva y la colaboración son críticas para el éxito, Para reducir la fricción entre equipos, Firewood Marketing, ahora parte de MediaMonks, lanzó su guía para aprovechar al máximo las campañas digitales comunicando de forma más efectiva: “Talk”. (Puedes encontrar este artículo en inglés aquí)

Dado que la colaboración efectiva es un esfuerzo de grupo que requiere alinear a todos los equipos, pensamos, “¿Qué mejor manera de discutir la colaboración que colaborando en todo MediaMonks y los socios con los que nos hemos fusionado en el último año?” Juntamos a los líderes de varios de nuestros equipos para obtener sus puntos de vista en algunos de los temas y las estrategias que los lectores encontrarán en esta guía.

Desde el inicio, “Talk” identifica varias cosas que los negocios se pierden cuando sus equipos no se comunican tan efectivamente como podrían. ¿Podrías resumir la exigencia para una mejor comunicación?

Kristoffer Belau (VP Digital Media, Firewood): Una falta de comunicación significa que existe el riesgo de cometer errores: la creatividad no está hecha a la medida, la campaña no está enfocada en la audiencia correcta, estás compitiendo con otras áreas de la empresa. A fin de cuentas todos estos son errores, y vienen de esta falta de coordinación por parte de las diferentes partes involucradas. La alineación de los equipos reduce estos riesgos.

“Talk” ofrece una serie de estrategias en diferentes situaciones para establecer colaboraciones más fuertes. ¿Cuál es tu estrategia de arranque?

Mansi Mehta (Business Development & Global Expansion, WhiteBalance): Nosotros no nos esperamos a alinear y reunir equipos. A menudo, las marcas y sus socios enfrentan períodos de gestación largos antes de que se refina el concepto. Esto se da principalmente porque las agencias convencionales no tienen a sus artistas in-house, lo que conlleva el riesgo de causar un juego de “teléfono descompuesto” que resulta en algo diferente a lo que originalmente habían imaginado.

Vera Cvetkovic (Managing Director, BizTech): A través de los años, trabajando con varios clientes en diferentes verticales, aprendimos la importancia de hacer las preguntas correctas, poner expectativas claras y guiar a nuestros clientes como asesores de confianza. Tener grandes habilidades de escuchar es también muy importante antes de encontrar la mejor solución a prueba del futuro que esté alineada con requerimientos específicos del cliente. Dada la complejidad de lo que hacemos, que abarca silos de negocios de clientes, IT y marketing, tenemos que ir más allá para que nuestra comunicación sea totalmente transparente en el contexto de la audiencia. Cada uno de los silos de los clientes posiblemente tendrá un ángulo diferente del mismo problema y de la solución potencial, así que es nuestro trabajo juntarlos todos y ser los “traductores” que unan a la estrategia común y a la ejecución. 

La guía también señala a los silos internos como uno de los grandes desafíos que enfrentan muchas organizaciones. ¿Cuáles son algunas estrategias o beneficios de encontrarles a todos un lugar en la mesa?

Lieseloth Wisbraun (Brand Partnership Manager, IMA): Organizamos workshops con todos los equipos para juntar a todos en una misma habitación. A partir de ahí, buscamos ser claros, amables y compartir conocimiento.

Louise Martens (Global Head of Embedded Production, MediaMonks): Cualquier preocupación acerca de los silos puede ser cortada de raíz al establecer una arquitectura de equipo. Cuando el equipo está parcialmente in-house, por ejemplo, las líneas se difuminan naturalmente, impactando positivamente la naturaleza de la colaboración. Entregar el poder es menos aterrador porque se siente como un equipo unificado.

Manejar expectativas es la verdadera prueba de una comunicación efectiva. ¿Cómo establecer expectativas desde el principio?

Jason Prohaska (Managing Director, MediaMonks NY): Entender a través de la educación es una de las mejores formas de generar una gran colaboración juntos y de parte del cliente, y esto no es algo que tratemos como un evento único. Todos se benefician cuando podemos tratar, probar y aprender juntos con oportunidades para dialogar abiertamente durante un proyecto. Las establecemos desde el principio como una parte obligatoria del alcance, lo que nos permite revisitar frecuentemente el entendimiento mutuo en el arco de la colaboración.

Martens: soy una gran fan de las alianzas en las que ser más eficientes es uno de los KPIs. Esto desbloquea un tipo de conversación totalmente diferente, y ambas partes se benefician de mejores flujos de trabajo y facilidad para trabajar. Cuando estos esfuerzos ganan velocidad, una gran relación fluye con naturalidad. Nuestro primer paso para alcanzarlo es adentrarnos a la marca. Establecimos embajadores de marca que realmente vivan y respiren la marca.

Belau: Nos esforzamos ofrecer una visión muy clara de cómo se podría ver la experiencia cuando todos se unen, buscando hacer el proceso de llegar hasta allá tan cómodo como sea posible para el cliente. De nuestro lado, esto significa dejarlo todo listo y organizado sin ninguna incertidumbre, para que el cliente se siga sintiendo en control de la situación.

Hay mucho más de qué hablar.

In early February, Nike CEO John Donahoe discussed with CNBC Nike’s efforts to become more sustainable. “The consumer increasingly cares about sustainability,” he told CNBC in an interview. “It matters to Nike and to consumers. … [Consumers] are looking to companies like Nike to lead.”

The feeling that one must evolve in accordance with consumers’ shifting values and needs is a familiar one for brands and their CMOs, who have adopted a greater sense of purpose in how they position themselves within the world. And brand purpose is increasingly important to today’s consumers: according to data from eMarketer, 59% of US consumers are more loyal toward brands that support the causes they care about. But despite this, 61% of consumers believe that too many brands use these issues as marketing ploys for their own gain, according to the same survey.

As brands strive to share their values and tell their stories, influencers serve as an excellent way to do so more authentically in a way that resonates with today’s consumers—making them an important factor within any marketing mix that aims to forge a genuine connection with consumers.  Given their relevance to niche audiences and participation in close social communities, partnering with influencers gives brands the opportunity to put their money where their mouth is and take a more active part within cultures that stand for something and drive change—here’s how.

Enhanced Storytelling Capabilities

Content creators know their audience better than anyone else. They’ve established deep relationships with followers and viewers by creating a regular stream of quality, relatable content; it’s precisely this content and closeness to the audience that has gained them a following in the first place.

This skill is invaluable to brands that seek to make themselves more relatable, though it’s important that brands understand what kind of content consumers gravitate toward. First, brands shouldn’t focus all their attention on follower counts and likes—both of which Instagram is experimenting with getting rid of, and do little to measure exactly how influential any user on the platform is.

But don’t despair; this doesn’t mean influencer marketing is a free-for-all with little attribution or no way to vet effective partners. In fact, data from our influencer activation team IMA notes that quality is the true benchmark of value: what matters more than the number of viewers an influencer brings to your content is how many of those viewers will engage, seek out and explore your brand. Looking beyond hard numbers and toward quality and engagement also enables more genuine and authentic content.

Irresistible Shoppable Content

Shoppable content is gaining steam with consumers. Last year, US social referral share of total traffic to ecommerce sites grew from 3.1% in 2016 to 9.1% in 2019, according to data from Adobe, and has become the fastest-growing driver of referrals. With Gen Z’s increased interest in shopping on social channels like Instagram, influencers present an excellent opportunity for brands to support this trend by generating shoppable or inspirational content that resonates with consumers.

What’s influencing influencer marketing?

In fact, trust in influencers is strong: another eMarketer survey states that 25% of US/UK children and teens aged 6-16 cite them as leading influences on purchasing decisions, sandwiched between friends (28%) and family members (21%). Despite this, it’s critical brands don’t treat influencers as another media buy; they’re creative partners through and through, and should be treated as such.

“When you find influencers who match your brand perfectly, you should trust that they know their following best. So when you are tapping into their community, you’ll have a stronger outcome by giving them the creative freedom to create credible content linking to your brand,” says Emilie Tabor,  Founder & CMO of IMA. “Of course, we always brief the influencer closely and the content is always approved by the brand before it goes live.”

Greater Focus on Customer Obsession

Finally, influencer partnerships enable your brand to become more customer obsessed with relative ease. What is a customer-obsessed brand? Customer obsession takes a handful for forms: “Forrester sees three common expressions of customer obsession—‘Count on us’ (reliability), ‘At your service’ (service), and ‘On your side’ (advocacy)—depending on a company’s strengths and what its customers value,” writes Forrester VP and Principal Analyst Shar VanBoskirk in the report, “How To Build Your Company’s Customer Obsession Strategy.”

Influencers fit this model by building a close relationship with audiences based on their needs—for example, a beauty content creator who helps viewers understand which cosmetics are best for them, and how to apply them. Community advocacy and authority as a knowledgeable resource are two key influencer attributes at work here.

MediaMonks Founder Wesley ter Haar notes that “Differentiated creative combines an understanding of culture with heavy-lifting business impact that drives real bottom line value.” In achieving this, influencers must be knowledgeable about their audiences; selecting the best influencer to reach your target audience requires you understand them and their needs, too.

This means a good place to begin your influencer marketing efforts is investing in social listening and market insights. “In selecting influencers for clients, we dig deep into all data: analytics, social listening, engagement, sentiment, quality of content and overall brand match,” says Tabor. “Who are their followers? Where are they based? Age groups, interests? Have they worked with competitors? There’s so much more beyond the surface.”

The points above points illustrate a handful of ways that influencers can help brands stay ahead of the game in social media marketing. Serving as knowledge experts, inspirational figures and talent, influencers offer several benefits to the brands that partner with them and are key to enhancing and strengthening the relationships they have with consumers.

Many brands worry about how to produce top-quality, scalable content at an ever-quickening pace. The challenge in achieving this is two-fold. First, brands require the ability to produce a staggering volume of content to tailor their messaging to specific segments of their audience. Second, producing this content often requires navigating through several parties and vendors across markets—each with their own particular requirements or nuanced understanding of their audience.

In my time at MediaMonks, we’ve helped clients plug into the resources and talent they need to remain relevant. But every so often a unique situation comes along that challenges all stakeholders involved, pushing us to go further in finding ways to achieve better creative, faster.

Identifying an Opportunity for Efficiency

Recently, we worked with a global automotive brand and their dedicated agency to develop and animate dynamic banner ads across three of their markets. The brief was simple enough on paper: animate banners with 15 variations, which would scale up with each successive phase of the campaign. We put our nose to the grind and sent the deliverables off for review.

But there was a snag: one market required a legal disclaimer on the banners, which hadn’t been mentioned beforehand. This is a common situation for global brands in particular, whose regional offices have their own guidelines and unique legal requirements. Still, they must meet global brand standards. This careful balancing act between local market relevance and global brand consistency often makes it difficult to gather everyone on the same page, just as it had with this project.

We successfully reworked the deliverables, but the miscommunication resulted in a longer time to delivery—not an ideal solution for the agency or their client. And this situation arose just from 15 variations! Seeing the potential of dynamic creative, the client decided to ramp up to… over 65,000 variations, across 8 markets and languages. It became obvious that we needed to make a change to accommodate such a massive jump.

This scenario may sound all too familiar to many brands, especially given the increasingly fractured partner landscape. In this case, the primary problem wasn’t our clients, but the communication and delivery methods through which each stakeholder collaborated. This inspired us to instead develop a dedicated CMS platform that would empower the client to create, review and approve banners by themselves, working more efficiently in the process.

Balancing Stakeholder Goals for Healthier Collaboration

Didn’t this move make our role in the project obsolete? Not really—even as vendors, the promise of partnership isn’t lip service that we tell clients in sales meetings; it’s a concept that helps us produce work better quality of work, faster. In implementing the CMS, we achieved this by effectively trading in our banner-builder hat for a platform-building one, giving control of production back to our clients.

In developing the new platform, our rich media team continued supporting the client’s ongoing requests, while the platforms team worked out the asset requirements and designing the best flow for their delivery. Throughout our involvement with their campaigns, we gained a clear understanding of how the client worked, and could apply those insights to build a frictionless user experience on the platform. The traditional production process involved close collaboration among all stakeholders: the banner creators, review from the client and the media agency. Our platform sought to streamline these steps into a series of low-complexity tasks that were not only faster, but cost-effective.

A New Partner Landscape Enables Better Production Methods

To meet the critical need for diverse and always-on content, the right partner must be able to adapt to production problems the moment they arise by implementing creative solutions. Without being able to draw upon extensive experience in designing and executing platforms, we likely wouldn’t have been as successful in making such a pivot.

It’s important that brands have the tools and resources they need to retain greater control over creative production—especially when so many brands seek to take their creative in-house as efficiently as possible. The old adage of “If you teach a man to fish…” certainly applies here, and this platform serves as one small step within a greater initiative for our client to build up their  capabilities in-house.

Grown organically from a specific client need, our platform is tailor-made to support the client’s unique workflow. For example, we’re working toward adding commenting and tagging features to augment the way we communicate to the team in banner creation. It goes to show how a nimble partner can provide brands with the tools they need to shift gears and get their network of vendors on the same page.  Stumbling upon an unexpected need that challenges habitual ways of working can become a daunting task—but with the right talent and tools, brands can activate new solutions with ease.

One of the greatest challenges that brands face today is the need to cut time and cost without cutting corners. According to the 2019 SoDA Global Digital Outlook Report, 63% of client-side marketers cite producing and publishing targeted digital content is a major business priority, but thanks to a quickening pace of digital media consumption and growing consumer demand for always-on (and relevant) content, many struggle to produce the content they require in a timely manner—until now, that is.

The integrated production partnership is a unique setup that speaks to the challenges above by augmenting organizations’ existing teams with a global, multi-discipline talent studio. Unlike a typical outsourcing model, integrated production partnerships provide teams that truly belong to the brand, dedicated to their success and designed strictly for their specific needs through a consultative discovery phase. The result is a more efficient, partially in-house production workflow that empowers brands to optimize and scale up at a moment’s notice, or easily pivot as soon as priorities change.

Every organization is different, and they each have a lot to consider when choosing a partner. Responding to the challenges that brands face, we’ve crafted a guide that explains the diverse benefits that integrated production partnerships offer, including key takeaways to consider when planning a partnership. These include: optimizing production while balancing global consistency with local relevance; how to scale up production with rapid turnaround times; discovering different models to achieve different goals; and what to consider before jumping into a production partnership.

Equipped with this knowledge, your organization will be ready to take back control, identify opportunities for efficiency and enhance its production capabilities.

Learn how an integrated production partnership can solve your brand’s production challenges.

Every creative project begins with a brief that explains why, when and how the project will be executed. Coming straight from a client or written in collaboration between client and agency, writing a creative brief is no simple endeavor; first, it requires your organization to deeply reflect on what it hopes to achieve through a creative project. Second, it must excite creative partners to do their best work—from the mundane projects to those that seek to provide exhilarating new experiences.

That said, everyone has different ideas on how to write a creative brief that informs and inspires, including us. Coming from the perspective of a creative and production partner that not only executes ideas but often fulfills a consulting and educational role helping clients make the most effective use of emerging technologies, we’ve put together some of our own key tips for writing better, more effective creative briefs.

Include Everything You Know (And Everything You Don’t)

The easiest briefs to work with are those that list out all the details partners need to understand, plan and begin working on your project. This includes easy-to-forget points like specific tools you’re using, platforms you’re working with, project limitations and a list of every deliverable expected or needed.

But gaps are likely to occur when briefing for projects utilizing emerging tech, which requires added market awareness or understanding to use effectively. “We might get a brief asking for a WebAR project, when WebGL would lead to a better user experience,” says Michael Leen, Vice President of Growth at MediaMonks.

Emerging tech platforms can accomplish a variety of goals, which can make it difficult to pinpoint the best one for your need: appealing to a new audience, measuring brand alignment and optimizing budgets are just a few of the goals brands seek to achieve with tech at hand. Our global team consists of experts specialized in different tech disciplines, allowing us to provide a broad yet deep understanding of whichever platform interests our clients. Working closely with those clients, we can carve out a path to successfully meet their objectives.

Creative Briefs Don’t Need to be Brief

“Brief” is a bit of a misnomer—while some might suggest your best bet is to stay concise, your best bet is to be as thorough and detailed as possible. Otherwise, you run the risk of omitting crucial details as noted in the tip above. “I’ve never met a creative who has called a brief too long,” says Leen. While a brief should list out key details for a project, it should also inspire the creative team that will ultimately bring your idea to life.

One way to inspire potential partners is to provide background or insight behind your brand and its mission, as well as the purpose of the product or service you aim to promote through the project. These details might seem fluffy or superfluous, but it’s a great exercise for ensuring your project aligns with your brand strategy or purpose. For example, a brand seeking to bring people together can highlight an AR project’s potential to provide tools for self-expression, while an organization dedicated to humanitarian aid can highlight the real-world impact of an animated series project that raises awareness of a crisis.

Don’t Forget Your Budget

It’s not uncommon for brands to send out briefs without budgets listed. “Brands might be afraid to include a budget because they think we’ll charge more than they’re asking,” says Leen. “But we build to suit the budgets provided, which means brands that include them get a more detailed response best fitting the budget.” In fact, we aim to over-deliver whenever possible by proposing clever production frameworks that stretch budgets far, ensuring clients get the best value in their investment.

But what should you do if you’re unable to commit to a hard number? Leen suggests offering a budget range or ballpark estimate to help zero in on solutions. “Knowing at least the budget tier, we can suggest different options or technologies to deliver upon a brand’s need,” says Leen.

Keep Focus on Audience Impact

Results are important for any project, though you shouldn’t solely focus on statistics and numbers. When writing any creative brief, focus your vision on the effect your project should have on your audience or the world around them. “Start with the emotional output,” advises Leen. “This approach puts your attention toward the customer perspective and helps us better understand their needs.”

Recognizing the real, tangible impact from a project also helps to inspire partners to get excited and give it their all. Do you want to delight your audience through a unique and unparalleled experience, or tear at their heartstrings through a culturally significant work of art? Do you seek to empower them with resources and information that will profoundly improve their quality of life? Whatever you hope to achieve with your project, highlight the goal for producing high-quality engagement and  why your brand is uniquely positioned to achieve it.

Define Keys to Success

 While emotional impact is key, the success of your campaign will be measured in terms of hard numbers. Include any keys to success or specific metrics to ensure both you and your partners are on the same page in your goals—for example, lowering cost per acquisition or optimizing click-through rates. Establishing this early enables partners to begin envisioning a strategy or path to accomplish those goals, baking them into the creative process from step one. Over time, your creative partner can even tweak and optimize long-term projects for better effectiveness, and the KPIs you define now can help them highlight opportunities to drive those results.

While any creative brief should provide all details necessary to bring a project to life, the key is that it inspires and builds excitement for everyone involved—including both the brand and the creative and production team. Fulfilling both these purposes ensures your project will get off on the right foot with minimal friction at the outset. From there, both you and your partner can collaborate to develop a unique, valuable experience for your audience.

An RFP shouldn’t read like a mail-in order. Instead, the most successful ones strive to foster strategic communication between clients and their prospects.

You finished writing your RFP and you’re ready to find the partner who can tick all the boxes on your list of deliverables. But rather than simply list out needs, an RFP designed for success should foster communication and collaboration between client and partner. Before you send out yours, try to include the details below to ensure your partner clearly understands your goals—and can provide some extra help in realizing them if need be.

Get a sense of the entire scope of project deliverables.

When envisioning your project and drafting up the RFP, don’t focus so much on the big things that you forget the little ones, too. A strong campaign includes several different materials, which can include social media assets, gifs/video, copywriting and more, so take some time to list out all the ones you’ll want from production. Otherwise, you might find yourself scrambling to make up for missing campaign materials later. On a related note, you might include a list of deliverables that are excluded from the scope of your project (for example, concept art) for extra clarity.

If you don’t have a handle on all the deliverables or a roadmap to your goal, that’s fine; that’s what partners are for, and they can help you find your answers. If you’re eyeing some partners already, see if any offer workshops to help clients strategize and realize their goals. This can also aid you in making a case for your brand and project in your RFP’s value proposition.

Include details on life after launch.

Something your RFP shouldn’t overlook is some detail on the life of your project post-launch. This goes beyond a simple warranty agreement, which focuses on fixing technical bugs or issues for a period past launch. If the project will need continuous updates into the future, ensure your prospective partner is open to collaborating a handoff procedure, which might impose technical limitations on them or require they draft up additional documentation for your team.

It’s also useful to detail if, and how, your campaign fits within an overall strategy. While a high-profile campaign is certainly nice for causing a stir and generating lots of excitement, a “one-and-done” approach no longer fits the bill for today’s media landscape. “The big idea is great and necessary,” says Joe Olsen, SVP of Growth at MediaMonks, “but the ability to deliver a personalized experience across different channels is both the challenge and opportunity that brands face today.”

If your project serves as catalyst for a larger overall campaign, include that strategy within your RFP. A good partner will help you ensure your messaging aligns across projects and will help you realize those goals.

Don’t be afraid to ask for advice.

Some businesses bite off more than they can chew when developing campaign goals, resulting in systems or platforms that aren’t actually sustainable. Eager agencies will deliver on whatever the client asks for regardless of whether the solution fits the client’s size or track record. For example, they might provide a state-of-the-art CRM for a client who seeks one, only for the client to discover it’s too complex for them to use efficiently.

Ideally, your chosen partner will be able to offer their point of view to help you find the best-fit solution—even if that means helping you grow your ecosystem over time. In fact, partners are experts in their field, so if you need help with a specific industry, technology or platform, don’t hesitate to ask for their professional opinion on how to approach something.

When clients write their need in an RFP with greater transparency, it helps prospects understand their needs and limitations. Such a proactive approach helps clients get much more value out of the relationship. And speaking of communication…

Have a communication plan to deal with unexpected issues.

The chance of your project going off-track isn’t too high, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be proactive in lowering the risk. One of the most common issues that clients and their partners run into is an unexpected holiday that puts things to a halt—although this is easily avoided by including a detailed calendar in your RFP.

Team turnover is sometimes an issue with longer-term projects, whether it be a manager switching roles or a developer moving onto another project. But this isn’t much of an issue for larger companies who have resources to spare, so it’s useful to request team or organization size.

Setting up a clear communications plan is a great way to avoid issues over the course of a long-term project, and an RFP is the perfect place to lay out any and all your needs. By keeping the four points above in mind, you can add a level of detail to your RFP’s that better show partners what you need—and will make it easier for you to assess who’s fit for the job.

With brands speaking directly to audiences in the same channels where they socialize with friends, the pressure is on for brands to speak more transparently and authentically to their audiences. But while “be authentic” sounds like it should be the easiest advice to take to heart, it’s anything but—especially for brands wading into a new market or showcasing a product without high market awareness.

The good news is that authentic messaging typically boils down to providing an honest portrayal of what consumers should expect from your brand, products or services. A Forrester report on customer experience highlights the importance of keeping your promises with what it calls the customer experience (CX) vision: “The CX vision should be an honest representation of the promises that a company makes through its brand image and messaging,” in terms of its values or its role in people’s lives.

A trendy solution for brands seeking a more authentic relationship with consumers is to forge partnerships with influencers: influencers showcase their relationship with the brand and its products, thereby providing an authentic CX vision to their audience who’s often heavily engaged on digital channels. While this method is effective, it may leave brands feeling wary about entrusting others with their brand image.

Ensure CX Vision is Accurate with Production Guidelines

L’Oreal faced a unique challenge when it sought to integrate influencers into its omnichannel campaign celebrating the launch of its Unbelieva’brow line of makeup in Italy. With no substantial eyebrow market in the region, the team used this white space to their advantage by focusing on regular, everyday interactions between consumers and the product.  While the overall campaign leveraged L’Oreal’s international reputation, the inclusion of influencers helped localize the content across the Italian market and provide viewers with a way to relate to the brand.

The four influencers—who each portrayed a different lifestyle like beauty guru, fitness expert or travel enthusiast—were given creative control over the scenes they would shoot themselves. Because portraying the eyebrow makeup was key, there were a lot of ways this could go wrong, like using improper lighting or putting the brows out of focus. That’s why we implemented a series of specific guidelines to ensure deliverables would remain authentic yet fit seamlessly into the overall campaign.

Guidelines were both general (stick to a neutral color palette to match the international campaign assets) and specific (shoot on an iPhone X to maintain the look and feel of a social media video, avoid artificial light which makes the makeup hard to distinguish). Content-wise, the influencers had relatively free rein outside of needing to shoot a horizontal and vertical video demonstrating each of the product “proofs”: that it’s waterproof, smudge-proof, transfer-proof and workout-proof.

From there, we were able to put on the finishing touches to optimize each deliverable for each channel, offering different glimpses of an overall narrative. “It was like a reverse-project,” says Willemijn Jongbloed, Project Manager at MediaMonks Amsterdam. “Usually you get the assets first and do the design after, but this time we produced while we were still getting the footage. Creative was never ‘done,’ it was a very intertwined process.”

Because of the guidelines in place, the influencer-produced work could be implemented with little rework and fast turnaround time. “It would have felt staged to ask them to reshoot,” says Madina Paulig, Creative at MediaMonks Amsterdam, “so we just focused on minor tweaking to keep that authentic feel.” The process, which required smart coordination between designers and editors, resulted in a relateable and eyebrow-raising campaign that clearly focused on the product value.

Provide Controlled Flexibility with Content Frameworks

The Unbelieva’brow campaign used an unorthodox approach, but it worked: “In order to get the full concept across in a manner that speaks best to our audience, we gave our influencers the freedom to communicate this in their own, authentic way using their personalities to resonate with our audience,” says Paulig. This is the crux of what organizations must tussle with in the social-infused, influencer-dominated environment that’s transforming the customer-brand relationship.

While the process outlined above worked well for a single campaign, a longer-term need for assets likewise requires a new creative framework. Inspired by the rise of direct-to-consumer brands’ leveraging of social, Avon (the direct-sale business) saw a need to empower its representatives to tweak and optimize digital content while safeguarding a consistent brand image and style.

“What we’ve got on the other hand is the advantage of 133 years of history and more than five million people’s worth of scale and therefore we’re trying to learn to move at the same kind of pace as those insurgent companies, while recognizing we’re a very scaled business,” James Thomspon, Chief Brand and Beauty Officer at Avon, told Marketing Week.

Partnering with Avon, we’re working with them to develop an always-on content studio that will deliver feed-ready assets on a weekly basis, amounting to over 12,000 a year. With the need for localized content at front-of-mind, deliverables will be available in multiple languages and tailored for specific channels, with space available for reps to customize the messaging to their local audience. This last point is key for ensuring that representatives can engage with their audiences authentically while maintaining a centralized design process.

Leveraging an online community of representatives or hiring influencers are just two ways to enhance marketing with authenticity. By rethinking creative and production processes, brands can safeguard themselves while placing greater trust in influencers and partners to accurately represent their CX vision to consumers. A well-defined process ensures that everyone involved can have fun with the freedom to express the brand’s relevance in their lives—and what more authentic message is there than that?