Building Your First Creative Team Part 1

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Branded Storytelling: Building Your First Creative TeamBranding today is all about storytelling. And there's no better way to tell your story than through video. And with that, a lot of companies are realizing Hey, I can start building my own internal creative team, I don't always have to have an agency do my work. And if I have an internal team where they can start to know my product better, we can get more content out more cost-effectively.

The name of the game in storytelling is not to put out one video and be all excited because that one video is out there. With social media, with things like LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Tik Tok and more, you want to be putting out content every single day, maybe multiple times per day per platform.

That content might be video, might be photography, it might be audio, it could be a podcast, it could be a graphic, but you want to start a cadence where every single day you're putting out content via your social feeds and your website. Especially if you're a consumer product, your social media feeds better be full of new content daily to keep that audience coming back and staying engaged with your brand.

If you've never built a creative team before and you're planning to start one, I have a few pieces of advice.

First, start with two, don't hire one. Especially if you're planning to include video in your social plan (and you really should). Why? Actually filming the videos can often be simple, with just a single camera or a smartphone. Especially with talking head or simply talking directly to the camera, you film dozens of videos in just a few hours. But filming is not the end of the story.

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Then there's editing, graphics, sound mixing, color enhancement, transcriptions, captions, and outputting the video in the proper frame size and format for the various services. A simple video like a 2-minute talking head could take two to three hours to complete all the post-production tasks to output it to all the social channels. Transcriptions and Captions often take some time, and you really want to include them in your videos because they raise engagement as much as 75%. Many people watch videos silently on social, so having captions there allows them to follow along.

Let's say you shoot 20 quick videos today. At two to three hours each, I'm going to be able to get maybe four done on a normal day. That's five days of work for me to take these very simple videos and get them processed and ready to go out onto all the social media feeds. Now, if there are other things that you want me to do over the next couple of days, well, that means I can't be editing those videos. I have to be filming the new material. So now those 20 videos are going to be delayed in their delivery.

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There's a great efficiency in hiring two people right off the bat. One can be filming, one can be doing graphics and editing. They can split the duties so instead of five days, they get it done in two and a half days. When you have a one-man band, that is one person who literally does everything, it seems like it saves you money in salary, but it really cripples you in content output. With so many channels of social media giving you so many options in storytelling, you can't really release new content across all channels with just one person. The more content you try to create with one person, the more they will just keep getting further and further behind because you want to keep telling more stories about your company. But they can't finish the ones already filmed.

So, for maximum efficiency, especially if video is going to be an important part of your storytelling strategy, find the budget to hire two people. That will allow you to get a really good storytelling cadence going across all social and marketing channels.

Setting Up Your Creative Infrastructure

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Building out an internal creative team just makes sense today. The tools are reasonably priced, what used to cost millions of dollars to get the right equipment and the right people now costs thousands of dollars. So the growing trend has been for companies large and small to bring creative teams inside. This allows them to create more content, keep it on brand, and it's much more cost-effective. As I mentioned earlier, you should start with at least two people on your creative team. But from an infrastructure side, what are you getting yourself into? What equipment and software would you need to supply to your team?

There are so many variables that go into setting up a creative team, so for the purposes of this article, I'm going to create the smallest, bare minimum configuration to output a team of two.

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Let's start with computers. You can't go cheap by heading down to Best Buy and picking up the cheapest laptop or the cheapest computer you can find. No, they're going to need something a bit more substantial. Because your team will be processing video, creating animation, creating graphics, processing high-end photography and audio. If you go cheap, the computers will be a bottleneck and slow down your entire content creation process.

The cheap computer can literally take two or three hours to process something that a high-end computer or laptop can process in 10 or 15 minutes. It&#

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