Creativity by the Numbers
Over lunch at a recent conference, a marketer complained about her design team. Their revamped web site was very well designed – perhaps too well. Highly interactive, thoughtfully scripted and artfully presented, the team relied heavily on Flash to achieve what was, to their eyes, a compelling online experience.
The marketer was concerned that the site’s usability was now impaired, that revenue from organic traffic would suffer. Meanwhile, her efforts to voice these concerns were falling on ears that cherished their own creative ideas over the input from other stakeholders. Lacking a clearly defined common understanding of the website goals, people were measuring success with different rulers.
In her case, the creative team was an outsourced agency, although this scenario can play out just as easily between inhouse departments. In either case, bringing all team members to a shared set of goals is the only way to ensure that everyone is pushing in the same direction. Clearly defined KPIs have a lot of value here.
Once the site’s key metrics are defined, communicated, discussed and reviewed, every member of the team needs to be able to understand how their work has an impact on these goals. The diversity of training, background and responsibility that comprises most working ecommerce groups brings with it the potential for a variety of perspectives on how these goals should be measured. But by distributing relevant analytics data to all members of the team, and providing everyone with the tools to objectively measure the results of their own efforts against the larger site goals, you’ll see your group begin to function with greater cohesiveness.
As goals, concepts, strategies, successes and stumbles are shared across silos, the feedback loops grow successively richer and more valuable. Copywriters start identifying the elements of a consistently strong subject line. Designers can quickly test whether a hyperlink style revision works as good as it looks. In fact, given access to good analytic data, many creative teams become downright obsessive on multivariate testing.
Just as creativity is a requisite skill in any successful marketer, you’ll find keen analytical minds in your creative department. By giving everyone an opportunity to assess their work objectively, the creativity that should run rampant throughout your team is more easily focused on the bottom line.
Posted: April 7th, 2009 under analytics, creative, marketing.
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