What are some effective ways to ensure that your creative team is producing on-brand content?

A neat way of helping teams interpret traditional brand guidelines more effectively is to wrap up values, style, tone and personality into a brand character. Bit like a method actor will get into character to bring the role to life. This introduces the brands motivation as well as the more traditional attributes in a concise and far more relatable format. The more your team understands the character the more chance you have of creating content that reflects it, both in terms of messaging as well as visually. A strong character is at the heart of every good story.

Brand Guidelines are the bread and butter of staying focussed across channels. They must be clear, succinct and easily found, shared and updated. Once that’s established we can’t stress enough the need for ongoing and engaging peer review of content as its being developed. No gatekeepers slowing down the process, just fresh eyes from fellow brand stewards keeping one another honest and on point. Follow that up with a quarterly reflection - everything published from your recent sprints, up on a wall or in a shared folder - that both internal and external creator teams can discuss, build upon and course correct from if need be. Continuous learning is continuous improvement.

One thing I've found helpful is to immerse the creative team in the world of our audience. By creating personas and narratives around our target viewers, we fostered a deep understanding of who we were speaking to. This wasn't just about demographics but getting to the heart of their aspirations and challenges. As a result, the content we created didn't just speak to the audience; it spoke about them, reflecting their stories in a way that built a powerful, authentic connection.

After setting your brand goals and knowing your audience, you need to also understand your brand’s direction and communicate it through relatable stories. All companies/organisations want to make profit and run successful campaigns with great ROI but to convert a passive viewer to an engaged potential customer you need to connect with the them through your story, so that when they need your products, your brand will standout because it stimulated some emotion/connection.

At Square in the Air we have a tight-knit team, and we use that to our advantage to ensure all work is up to standard before it's delivered. We do this by regularly getting together to share our recent projects with each other and talking openly about all aspects including suggesting new methods, techniques and ideas to enhance our work. I believe each member of the team feels confident when sharing their work, knowing that the unique skillset's among our small team will better their work and we can share our knowledge and all improve as a group rather than individually.

Feedback helps in refining ideas, aligning content more closely with brand standards, and elevating overall quality. Recognition, on the other hand, boosts morale, fosters a positive working environment, and acknowledges the hard work and creativity of the team. This combination nurtures a culture of continuous improvement and collaboration, driving the team to excel and consistently deliver content that not only aligns with our brand but also resonates with our audience and achieves our strategic goals. Regularly engaging in this practice ensures we maintain a high standard of work that truly represents our brand.

We often think about branding through an external lens. Aligning an organization from within can inspire pretty strong advocates and have a great impact. One of the tools I have found useful are value boards staff can turn to when facing decisions making moments, creating content, questioning how to treat situations with external parties, or just being at a crossroad. I'm calling it a value board but it's really just a tool that is derived from your Mission, Vision, and Values created by your leadership team which are phrases or north stars. Maybe it's a list with 5 statements that guide your team, for example, "We are people fist." Using Values exercises can help determine what your organization is guided by.

Templates are important for both general employees and our design staff. For design staff, it makes assembly fast and easy for all media types. For general employees, it allows them to create documents and presentations that look good and align with the brand standards. It's critical that you protect the brand, and by using ready-made, Print, presentation, and video templates in multiple sizes and aspect ratios.

From an agency strategist POV, here are a few things that we can do to help creatives deliver great work 1) Simplify. Reframe the client brief into a business problem and how you collectively solve it. 2) Inspire. Find insights, either from data or good old observation (yes!) that they can tap into so that the work feels fresh. 3) Know your place. Angles are not strategy. You can add them as "proofs of concepts" of how strategy can evolve into creativity but never ask creatives to "execute" your angles 4)Constraint. Creativity needs constraints. Look at how creative the Beatles had to be to overcome the 60s technical limitations.Be transparent about the constraints (budget, context ...) and secretly hope they find a way around them :)

Creating a safe and free space, creatives do their best work when they are free to take risks without the fear of consequences, learning as they go and evolving. Encouraging creatives to explore beyond the walls of a studio/office for greater inspiration - take a walk, visit a museum - have some fun, inspiration can come from anyone and anywhere

I disagree with the placement of this step. Alignment should come FIRST, not SIXTH. What happens after you've developed allllllllll of the stuff above, and then find out that it doesn't all really line up. Not with the brand, and maybe not even with the audience? Start over and hope it works out better next time? Placing the alignment of brand strategy, goals, and audience sixth is asking clients to cut off their fingers so they'll fit in the gloves. Not cool. By the time you're this far into the process, all questions should be answering themselves and all refinements should be microscopic at best.

Agree alignment needs at least to be considered earlier. That said, an ongoing check on this later should be a simple mantra (or short series of them) that are easy to use as a lighthouse, often. Brand Strategy: What is our big "why"? Content: Does it reinforce our "why"? Or at least cannot undermine it. Audience: Why do they care (about the content we're producing)? Simple guidelines = strong guidelines.

An important aspect to keep things fresh and interesting, is to also break the cycle of repetition. “Content creation” demands such an intense stream of ideas, that methods and tactics that streamline the output are often leveraged. I find that pointing out opoortunities for differentiation and breakthrough ideas is essential. And very often not addressed or put sideways by client / content teams, at ease with the workflow.

Creatives staying brand-aligned doesn't come from following a 'thou shalt' brand guidelines doc. Understanding the reason behind the positioning and contexualising the rules is the key. It can turn creatives from adherents into evangelists. At worst it'll make everything make more sense.