How to Build Your Successful Creative Team
Are your creative producers generating high-performance, impactful, persuasive materials that customers love to engage with?
Creative content holds a special place in business performance, driving marketing’s goal to to serve and delight prospects and current customers, along with your brand fans. Supporting creators in building your content marketing powerhouse is essential, even in the AI marketing era.
While managers and plans create the org chart and processes, creative people likely see them more as handcuffs. It’s a left-brain vs right-brain thing, and sometimes a rift occurs. That’s when creators might become detached emotionally and functionally and their work quality suffer. Avoiding that is wise.
This is where empathy, understanding and willingness to help them come into play. From remote isolation to problem personalities to low pay and confusion, there’s a lot that might erode your wonderful team.
When left unchecked, your marketing could fall flat, for extended periods with significant revenue losses. When we deal with it proactively, we solve their problems, and in turn, we activate the very people who make our success possible. Without their outstanding efforts, our campaigns will fail.
The problem of low performance often arises from a lack of a unifying spirit – one where creators professional self-esteem is lifted by their contribution and membership in the team. “Working for a great company” is how many workers describe how they feel about themselves – meaning they feel unified, activated, emancipated with the marketing team and plugged into the business vision.
Building A Powerful Vision of Your Unique Travel Business
I’ve never managed a creative team, however I’ve worked with 4 marketing agencies and had to get things accomplished with staff and freelancers. That’s why I know that these people need to be informed properly and committed to the company’s mission.
I’ve endured foot dragging, incompetence, ennui, and even mutiny. In one case, the individual had cost the company tens of thousands of dollars (he blocked search engines from accessing the site). And when you don’t have power over the situation, it is discouraging and drags your own performance down.
Top creators are committed to the company’s business goal and we enjoy contributing in a fashion the owner appreciates. When you hire the right creators, their contribution is natural without resentment, doubt or unwillingness. Their work flows effortlessly because it fits what you need to achieve. It fits because we make it fit.
When the creative team members aren’t committed to the marketing theme and strategy, performance is mediocre. I’ve worked with tech staff who couldn’t care less about marketing and sales. They sometimes live in their own silo.
That results in you having to compensate with big, expensive campaigns, more advertising and promotion, more rework and approvals, and constant micromanagement to make things work. That’s painful.
Creative people like to do their own thing, following their own creative vision and goals. You see that foremost with travel writers. Off they go to foreign lands, to produce stories and experiences relative to their own perspective and values. That doesn’t always translate well to getting your own brand and messages across – and your brand is the priority. Worse, your products/trips could come across as mediocre, irrelevant, insignificant and unable to fulfill the satisfactions the travel writer was presenting in their posts/articles/videos.
Capturing Their Spirit
Creative people need to feel the power of your marketing strategy and buy into it. We can get them to buy in, by expressing ourselves purposefully and clearly – strategy. A weak, unclear marketing strategy can weaken everyone’s commitment because they might think it’s going to fail. A powerful marketing effort, well communicated, calms everyone’s fears.
Thus, in my opinion, we need to motivate, educate, inspire and connect to creator’s self-esteem. I know, deep stuff. It’s a puzzle. When I solve a jigsaw puzzle, I look at the patterns in the image and sort of let the puzzle put itself together. My system comes out of the picture itself not by me forcing pieces to fit.
I know from the creative teams I worked with at 4 different agencies, not to force them to do what I needed, but to join in the spirit of creating something great, which they wanted to. I try to be a navigator and help promote the owner’s vision. I communicated my needs and showed them how it could result in their work being seen by audiences that will love their work.
And “love their work” was a metaphor for an appreciated team member. The more relaxed they are, filled with their own self-esteem and belonging, the greater their creativity and their willingness to produce high quality work.
It’s not always easy. Sometimes, it’s tough to reach some in the company and support them. Some tech, sales and creative people are very detached and unreachable, and won’t talk. These require more effort and possibly intervention from the manager or business owner.
A key question you should ask yourself is “why aren’t my people coming to me with these issues?”
Why Don’t Creators Achieve their Potential?
Below is a brief list about why many creators don’t reach their potential. Knowing these, we can put together a persuasive, feel good, communication strategy for them, so they will be 100% willingly engaged in your travel company’s goals.
Let’s review briefly the big negatives that can undermine creator’s potential.
1. Lack of Audience Awareness
- What you see:
• Generic content that doesn’t interest or move your audience
• “Nice” but forgettable visuals or writing that doesn’t differentiate or captivate
Why do they do that?
They’re making content for themselves or peers, not for your specific travel customers with specific desires and concerns.
What’s the Impact:
→ No emotional connection
→ No demand generated
→ Weak brand memory
Solution:
Help them understand the target audience, profile, interests, preferences and have them describe it in a document.
2. Resistance to Structure
Why do they do that?
• Pushback on briefs, frameworks, or messaging direction
• Lack of confidence, exposing their professional self-esteem
• makes their work seem less valuable
• “It feels too scripted”
What’s really happening:
They equate structure with loss of creative freedom and diminishment of their value.
Impact:
→ Inconsistent quality
→ Too much friction and rework
→ No scalable system
Solution:
Discuss with them about what results when everybody goes off on a different tangent, and about how their individualistic tangent might not be the right direction.
3. Inconsistent Output Quality
Why do they do that?
• One great piece, then three average ones
• They generally feel uninspired – the company’s vision is too weak and not promoted in their minds
• No repeatable standard they can rely on
What’s really happening:
No internalized quality benchmark or creative process that matches what you need.
Impact:
→ Brand inconsistency
→ Weak overall perception
Solution:
Discuss real actual creative you like and its merit so they have something tangible to think about. Talk about consistency and the long term value.
4. Weak Emotional Impact
What you see:
• Content that informs but doesn’t move people
• Lacks excitement, desire, urgency
• Doesn’t power up the travelers dream through to booking
What’s really happening:
Creators try to describe travel rather than using image/words to build rich experiences.
Impact:
→ People don’t feel compelled to act nor book with your agency
→ we’re not capturing their full emotional intent to travel
Solution:
Have a meeting specifically on the target customer and have everyone describe the wants, needs, experiences, desires and preferences of that audience. Create a customer profile document, and create a name for your audience (for clarity and focus).
5. Over-Focus on Aesthetics (Style Over Substance)
What you see:
• Beautiful visuals, nice structure by no clear, emotion activating message
• Cinematic videos that don’t convert
What’s really happening:
Creators prioritize what looks good over what actually engages and persuades, which is the complete content experience.
Impact:
→ High effort, low ROI, shallow brand reputation
Solution:
Show appreciation for beautiful, brand friendly design, but clarify that design can’t sell by itself. It’s a container that makes all other creative look that much better.
6. Slow Production / Perfectionism
What you see:
• Missed deadlines
• Endless revisions
• “It’s not ready yet”
• Lack of confidence against very high standards/expectations
• Burnout and overwhelm, low motivation
What’s really happening:
Fear of judgment, unclear expectations, and an inability to make their work contribute to a strategy/campaign.
Impact:
→ bottlenecks
→ frustration for team members and content strategist
→ missed market timing
Solution:
Discuss creative challenges with the team, and how self-judgment is usually negative. Help them work through personal blocks that are causing them to overcompensate through perfectionism. Always emphasize appreciation, and the spirit of getting to the big picture essence of what they provide (images, stories, videos, campaigns, etc.). Burnout and motivation issues are real, given AI is raising demands while pushing creators into different tools and creative styles.
7. Poor Understanding of Engagement and Sales Conversion
What you see:
• No clear calls-to-action – paved path is ineffective
• Traveler’s path to fulfillment fails – no bookings
• Content ends with no direction – traveler feels last minute doubts and decides to finish their booking on a competitors website.
What’s really happening:
Your creators aren’t seeing and appreciating their role in influencing booking decisions and creating joy for travelers.
Impact:
→ Engagement without bookings, low repeat sales
Solution:
Discuss the customer profile and how content reaches, captures attention, impacts, engages and persuades your prospects. Dive into analytics reports that show issues and success. Know what the problem is or they won’t know either.
8. Feedback Sensitivity / Ego Protection
What you see:
• Defensive reactions to edits
• Withdrawal or disengagement
• Lower work quality
What’s really happening:
Their professional identity and self-esteem is threatened.
Impact:
→ Slower improvement
→ Tension in the team
→ reduced spirit and misunderstanding of what they’re being asked to do
Solution:
Consistently express and show how they’re valued, identify progress they’ve made, and highlight those members who are good, supportive team members. Make self-esteem building a subtle priority in all communications and team meetings. Self-esteem boosting creates more value than anything – because it activates the potential they have.
Just as for your travel customers, you’re activating their emotional intent.
9. Lack of Business Context
What you see:
• Content that doesn’t align with branding priorities, promotional offers, pricing, or content strategy
• Random ideas weakly tied to campaigns dilutes their power
What’s really happening:
They haven’t been educated about how the business actually makes money or how it creates and keeps customers.
Impact:
→ Misaligned output
→ Wasted effort
→ Brand erosion
Solution:
Hold a meeting that creates transparency about the company, how it makes money, what its expenses and liabilities entail, role of departments, investor expectations, competition, product design, and advisor challenges. Then discuss failed campaigns you’ve run, and how other companies are aligning their content to make their campaigns successful.
10. Creative Silos (Low Collaboration with Manager/team)
What you see:
• Writers, videographers, designers working without reference to the company, brand and the other creative team members
• Not getting important ideas and tips from other team members
• Disjointed campaigns that don’t impact prospects and customers
What’s really happening:
No shared vision or cross-functional communication
Impact:
→ Fragmented brand experience
→ Lost compounding effect from increasing audience awareness
Solution:
Hold a team meeting for all staff on the topic of how a business works as one, with all of its various inputs and communications. Emphasize good, clear communications and how bottlenecks, secrecy, and individualism bring the company down. Once properly oriented and educated, more cross functional communication and sharing can happen without worry about confusion.
The Big Picture View: Orchestration
From all of this, you may draw different conclusions about what is wrong with your creative producers.
My belief is that, assuming you have the right creators for your business, you haven’t communicated or oriented well enough. Orientation and inspiration is more than a first-day introduction and creative briefs.
It’s consistency every day in talking about the brand, marketplace, competition, opportunities, the company’s revenue goals, what the business’s purpose is, discussing creative and strategic ideas, to get them engaged in improving their own contribution. They need to feel they understand and are part of the business mission and what makes it successful. Executives are notorious for keeping this to themselves. When creators/staff feel genuinely included within the company picture and inspired to create the best contribution, it fires up the company’s marketing effort.
If a company’s future is its marketing, then your creators are your most vital asset. They deserve to be managed well and think well of themselves.
Whether it’s words, photos, videos or live events they deliver, you need a communications strategy that wires them all together, so they appreciate each other, like themselves, and want to contribute to your marketing strategy. And it makes them appreciate and respect you more.
Self-esteem is the root factor, so in managing them, a smart manager knows how to keep their professional self-evaluation high and healthy, keeping their work confidence high.
In a world where AI threatens to end their careers, it might be up to you to calm the waters.
Let’s explore further why building your own demand generation engine protects your business from the changes taking place in the travel business and avoiding reliance on ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google search. Simplify, streamline and focus on the core foundational components of your travel marketing. Ask about a customized travel marketing strategy.
Image credits: Freepik.com
