5 Tips for How to Support Your Creative Team

WRITTEN BY: ALEXIS HUREWITZ

Creative teams don’t scale on talent alone. As work ramps up—more channels, more stakeholders, more complexity—creative teams need more than great ideas. They need operational support: tight processes, clear roles, and space to do the work without constant interruptions. Below are 5 key tips for how to support your creative team through high-growth phases for the business.

This isn’t about squeezing more output from the team, but rather,  about recognizing that good creative work requires smart creative operations. When workflows are clear, timelines make sense, and feedback is structured, designers and copywriters can focus on what they do best.

If you sit in marketing, business ops, or anywhere adjacent to creative production, here are a few ways you can actually help scale creative work, without slowing it down.

Start with a Solid Brief

If the brief is vague, everything downstream gets harder—creative reviews drag, rounds multiply, and timelines slip. A strong creative brief is one of the most effective tools a marketing team can bring to the table.

A Good Brief Includes: 

• The real objective (not just the output)
• Audience insight (who it’s for, what they care about)
• Tone, context, constraints—and where there’s room to play
• A single decision-maker (and clear stakeholders)

Bonus tip: Ensure all briefs are approved by the necessary stakeholders, before submitting to the Marketing Ops and Creative team. Alignment is critical to avoid delays in the process. All too often, there is a miscommunication around the brief and the creative execution, leading to many delays and problems when it is too late. 

Protect Time for Creative Work

Creative teams thrive on time to think, write, design, and iterate. But stacked calendars and constant pings kill momentum.

How Marketing Ops Can Help:

• Block “no meeting” windows for creative teams during heavy lift weeks
• Consolidate feedback sessions to reduce interruptions
• Push back on last-minute requests when it impacts focus (avoiding the “can you just…” questions) 
• Allocate the appropriate time for checking in with the creative leads in a way that does not overwhelm them. 

If you need to increase the volume of assets you’re producing, you should try to avoid pushing the team to its limits and rather support them in the prioritization of their tasks.  

Streamline Feedback Loops

Unstructured feedback is one of the biggest time-suck in creative work. It’s confusing, often contradictory, and frequently comes too late.

To Foster Better Creative Reviews:

• Consolidate feedback before it gets to the creative team
• Empower one clear approver (not four people with “small tweaks”)
• Confirm feedback and approvals in real-time to hold stakeholders accountable for any changes and final approvals. 

The creative process allows time for feedback and rounds of revisions, but what slows it down are unclear, shifting and delayed inputs. 

Balance Structure With Creative Freedom

Templates, guidelines, and design systems are great—until they become rigid rules that push away innovation. It is totally possible to scale creative production, without accidentally creating assets that always look the same.  

Check-in With the Team:

• Institute quarterly meetings to review what is working, what is not working, and what the team needs support with
• Use best practices, but also allow for flexibility based upon the team and organization itself
• Encourage the team to continuously review and revise creative templates to keep assets fresh 
• Make sure all guidelines are updated and optimized for the latest changes to digital marketing platforms 

Celebrate the Creative Work and Wins 

Creative teams are often doing much of the heavy lifting for the Marketing team, but not celebrated enough. Highlighting their work builds morale, invites collaboration, and reinforces the value of strong, unified team. 

Simple ways to do this:

• Shout-out the Creative team members and the great work they’re doing during creative reviews and recap meetings 
• Celebrate not just results, but smart process choices or creative risks
• Mention challenges that have come up and how the individual team member handled/resolved that situation 

Marketing Operations Makes Creative Work Better

Supporting creative teams isn’t about managing creativity—it’s about removing obstacles. The more we can simplify processes, clarify roles, and give creative talent the space to do what they do best, the stronger the work (and the team) becomes.

Looking for guidance on how to deepen your marketing operations muscles? Schedule time with Alexis to build your bridge between strategy and execution.