The last few years have seen businesses become much more aware of what they need to do to build long-term success. They have realized that simply having a great product or service at an attractive price point is not enough.
To make your brand stand apart, businesses are looking to hire the top Creative Directors. The importance of engaging and attracting potential and existing customers is not easy. It requires a sustained storytelling effort that helps create a loyal customer base.
With increasing competition and saturation in business niches, the importance of driving recognition and identification is a major challenge. One way of addressing these challenges is to have a strong Creative Strategy for your business.
In this article, we take help from Bennet Schwartz, a leading Creative Director that has helped many businesses turn around their fortunes. Specifically, he lists down seven questions that businesses need to ask Creative Directors before they hire them.
If you are a business, looking to rejig your creative marketing efforts, this article will help you in multiple ways.
List of 7 Questions to ask a Creative Director before you hire them
1. What should be my brand’s story?
You want a creative director to optimize all your brand’s communication to convey your story. The function of a creative director is to make the brand come across as humane and strike identification with audiences. In this regard, business owners need to ask a Creative Director about the possible directions that their brand story should take.
2. What are your past credentials, experiences, and track record?
At the end of the day, you want someone that is experienced and comes with a proven track record for success. This means asking the creative director to showcase past work credentials and take you through how successful they were in their past work. Check the portfolio, go through some case studies and ask for any recommendations that they can provide.
3. What according to you are some goals that we should seek from branding?
You must share some kind of a wavelength with the creative director. One way of finding out more about this is to ask them about some goals that they want to set from the branding activities. See whether it aligns with yours or not. If there is an alignment, it can be considered as a good starting point. The more detailed they are with the goals, the better it is.
4. What are some platforms that we need to look at seriously?
The goal of a creative director is to optimize a brand’s communication on both offline and online mediums. This means you need to look at everything from social media to physical marketing events and activities. Explain your current scenario to the creative director and request them to prioritize your presence on the different platforms. See how they answer this.
5. When can the business start seeing the results of their work and engagement?
No matter how much businesses want to deny this, at the end of the day, every hire is about ensuring ROIs. Do not shy away from seeking timelines and results. Yes, you should not be unrealistic given how creative success and branding cannot be achieved overnight. However, this not is five or seven years. If they are answering for two or three years, that is perfect.
6. How are you going to work with the different verticals in the organization?
A creative director needs to engage with the design and development team, social media team, marketing team, and PR teams. The goal is to coordinate and evolve a uniform communication and creative style between the different touchpoints. The brand’s identification and communication need to be uniform to build recognition and drive identification.
7. What should be the payment model, salary, or fee/commission?
A lot of businesses are looking to hire a Creative Director as a consultant. Others, want to get them on board as full-time employees. Depending on what suits you best, you can go ahead with the appointment. Please understand that experienced Creative Directors are not cheap. If you are looking for quality, experience, and success in past work, you need to invest substantially.
The Bottom Line
Hiring the right creative director just might be the best decision you might take for your business. If they can give your business a sense of purpose and direction, you will see results in the form of more customer engagement and better sales. If you would like us to specifically address any point, please let us know in the comments below. We would be more than happy to help you hire the best Creative Director for your business organization.
