What are the best ways to build a Creative Strategy team from scratch?

1 Define your vision and objectives

Before you hire anyone, you need to have a clear idea of what you want your Creative Strategy team to do and how you want them to do it. What are your core values, mission, and vision as a creative leader? What are the specific goals and challenges that you want your team to tackle? How will you measure and evaluate their performance and impact? Having a well-defined vision and objectives will help you attract and retain the right talent, align your team with your business strategy, and communicate your expectations and feedback.

2 Identify your core roles and skills

When it comes to building a Creative Strategy team, the size and scope of your projects will determine the roles and skills you need. Commonly, a Creative Director is responsible for setting the tone, style, and standards for the team, managing the budget, timeline, and resources. Copywriters create catchy headlines, slogans, scripts, and body copy that fit the brand voice and tone as well as the media and platform. Art Directors design visual elements that complement the copy and enhance the message. Strategists research and analyze the market, audience, competitors, and trends to develop insights that inform and inspire creative work. Additionally, depending on your needs and resources, you may require other roles such as project managers, account managers, web developers, video producers, social media managers etc.

4 Provide training and development

Once you have hired your Creative Strategy team, you want to provide them with the training and development they need to succeed and grow in their roles. This means equipping them with the tools, resources, and guidance to perform their tasks, as well as offering opportunities for improvement and recognition. You can provide training and development through onboarding, coaching, mentoring, learning, and evaluation. Onboarding introduces new hires to the team, projects, clients, policies, procedures, and culture of the organization. Coaching provides ongoing support and advice to team members. Mentoring pairs experienced and junior team members who can share knowledge and experiences. Learning enables team members to acquire new knowledge through courses, workshops, webinars, books, podcasts etc. Evaluation assesses performance and provides feedback, praise, and rewards.

5 Foster collaboration and innovation

Fostering a culture of collaboration and innovation in your Creative Strategy team can be extremely beneficial, as it can boost creativity, productivity, and satisfaction. To foster collaboration, you should encourage and facilitate team members to work together, share ideas, give feedback, and support each other. To foster innovation, you should encourage and facilitate the team to experiment, explore, and try new things. Team building activities, brainstorming techniques such as mind mapping or word association, co-creation methods such as surveys and interviews, and experimentation techniques such as A/B testing can all help to foster collaboration and innovation.