RUNNING Creative Strategy Meetings Like a PRO in 2024!

Kyra Richards: All right.

Kyra Richards: So we all came here today to talk about the perfect creative strategy meeting.

Kyra Richards: Um, this is such a fun topic that is so close to my heart. So before running customer success over here at Motion, I worked at both Meta and Tonal where I was meeting with people in the industry and also running creative strategy and performance marketing myself. And meeting structures were always the death of me a little bit of trying to figure out the best way to run it and things to do. Um, so this is a really, really awesome point of time in our industry where if we can nail this like weekly creative strategy meeting that we're doing, it unlocks the rest of the flywheel. So I'm really excited to talk about it with you guys today.

Kyra Richards: So as we get in here of thinking about the creative strategy meeting, we have to first talk a little bit about creative strategy and the flywheel. Um, so anytime we at Motion are talking about creative strategy, we're always thinking about the steps that we have to take to produce these winning ads, right? So we go all the way from research to actually making the content, getting it launched, figuring out what happened. Um, and a lot of times when we're talking about it, we're talking about these individual pieces of what we have to do to be able to ship those winning ads.

Kyra Richards: Um, but today we're actually going to be focused on the collaboration because that's what keeps you moving through the flywheel, right? Um, without collaboration, we can't actually accomplish all these things because there's a lot of different teams and people involved being able to go from that research day to actually launching and analyzing what happens.

Kyra Richards: And so when we think about this collaboration, the problem is that a lot of times it feels like this. And so we want to make sure that this is how people are not leaving your creative strategy meetings.

Kyra Richards: And I think the biggest reason that this happens is because we try to do too much. So we try and focus on the whole flywheel, tackling all these different things when really we should hone in on making sure that we allow the ideation to happen within our creative strategy meeting to set us up for success for the rest of these elements to fall into place async. You don't have to do everything in this meeting. The creative strategy meeting is your place to have alignment and to come up and actually collaborate and talk about what you want to do next.

Kyra Richards: And so when we think about this, the other thing we have to remember is that the meetings are not one size fit all. So we're going to talk through how we can go kind of crawl, walk, run as you're structuring this. And so today, what you guys can take away is different elements that you can play with, different ways you can set this up, and then figure out how it actually works for your organization based on where you are with your creative strategy.

Kyra Richards: So the big four things that we're going to play with here and the levers that you can pull when thinking about your meetings are going to be people, cadence, context, and action. And these are going to be the pillars that we can start to move around to make this really effective.

Kyra Richards: So starting with who should be there. So when we think about this, it's like as few people as possible is always my answer. You want the key players that are going to be able to make sure that you are moving the conversation forward. Um, and that you don't just get caught in the like sharing results and like education where you're talking at people the whole meeting. We want to make sure that this creative strategy meeting is very collaborative and that we're actually using the time to figure out what we're doing next. There is totally the case that we want to make sure everyone has that education and like the results sharing, but I think that can take place in another meeting or it can take place in a more async fashion. So we can share some reports before a meeting or after a meeting. Um, but really we want to protect this creative strategy meeting with making sure you just have the key players that are really going to be there to like make sure that you're actually figuring out what you want to work on, ideating on maybe iterations, things like that. You can also remember that like you can have special guests. So just because someone needs to come to one meeting doesn't mean that they need to come every single week. Um, and they can just come for a specific session if you're going to be talking about something that you know is important to them.

Kyra Richards: The other piece that we need to think about is when we should meet. So I really like there being some type of weekly cadence. Um, I think one hour a week is a great place that you can start um in any organization of giving you that time and space to know what's going on, to start ideating and move the creative strategy process forward. Um, we will talk about how this will evolve over time, um, and what that structure can look like because what you'll probably do is you can start to break out other meetings as they're needed. So you might have a different meeting for performance or prioritization, but to start, you can really just get that first one hour sync on the calendar of like your place of like aligning and just having that accountability of where to start and talk about the creative strategy process.

Kyra Richards: So let's talk about some example structures here. Um, so when we're just starting out, a lot of times we're going to have a smaller team. Um, and so you're going to have probably like your marketing leadership, media buyer and the like one or two creative people that are actually working on things. In that initial meeting there, it probably makes sense to have everybody. And that way you can kind of block and tackle and prioritize and hear what's going on. Um, but as you start to get more advanced in your creative strategy, that's when you're probably going to start wanting to separate some things out. And so when we think about going to that next step, it feels a little bit counterintuitive, but that's where typically we'll want to start to pull more of like leadership positions out or people that are just needing to be informed. And we want to keep it more focused on boots on the ground who's going to be making decisions about what actually needs to happen with assets. And sometimes that is leadership positions too. So make the idea of like what you of who you want in the meeting, like that's at your discretion, but really we just want to make sure that everyone that's there are the people that are actually helping move projects forward. And so when we do this, that makes sure that we have kind of that like media buyer and creative team, like we really want the heads being put together. Um, and if we need to pull something out, this is usually the phase where we'll start to have that like growth performance meeting. And I think that there should be a growth performance and a creative strategy meeting and that will keep you from getting too caught up and just like reporting on what's happening within this creative strategy sync. The other thing that will probably start to come up in this phase a little bit is needing some like project-based meetings. So I think it's great when we can do like project kickoffs for big projects or maybe if you do need to do some like feedback rounds or specifically talk about maybe getting all of the production set up for a big production that you're going to be putting on on the content creation side. Don't be afraid to have specific syncs that you need to in addition to your creative strategy meeting that is hosted every week. Then as we get to the most advanced state here, this is where it gets really tricky to find the right people that should be in. And I think where I've seen it be most effective is a lot of times this ends up being your creative strategist and the creatives. So what I've seen work really well for some organizations is having the strategist align with the media teams, a lot of times in that like growth performance marketing meeting, and then carry that over to do a lot of the brainstorming with more of the creative team to get alignment on how we go and action forward. And so this is where you start to have a lot more levers that you can pull with other meetings that are happening. Um, so you might also need to break out prioritization. Um, when I was at Tonal, one thing that really helped us is we had a Monday morning meeting where all of the leaders for our different parts of the org, we were split by like brand and growth. We would all get together and figure out exactly what needed to be worked on and how things were shifting because there was a lot going on with larger campaigns, things like that. Because that conversation happened separately and ahead of time, by the time we were in the creative strategy meeting, we then already had alignment at that high level and we could figure out what we could pull around to actually change priority levels as needed for smaller projects that we wanted to work on and be scrappy with to make movement against.

Kyra Richards: So really anything that you are starting to get stuck on or it's slowing down your creative strategy meeting can always be pulled out to be a different meeting. That way you can really create that space within your creative strategy session.

Kyra Richards: So once we have kind of the cadence of meetings that are happening, all of that, we can focus our creative strategy session into the two areas of setting the context and driving action. So this is the meat of what we're going to be doing here. So really thinking about what does everyone need to know for our ideation phase of this of like what are we going to work on? You have to have some context, right? And it usually falls into four buckets. So the first is like, how is our business or how are the channels trending? You kind of need that like red light, green light of if things are going well, not going well, so that you have an idea of what type of topics you want to prioritize for discussing when it comes to ideating.

Kyra Richards: You'll also want to think about what has changed creatively. So this will be things like what's scaling in the account, maybe what's launched, maybe things that got paused out. Everyone needs to have a good idea of what's happening right now so that you can make those informed decisions about what we want to do next.

Kyra Richards: And then this next one I think is one of the biggest gaps that a lot of people aren't covering as often. And that's about what's shifted in the market, specifically with your competitors. Um, and I think this this information has been harder to access honestly. Um, and so I think that's why we aren't as used to doing it regularly, but I think if you can have a really strong pulse on what your competitors are doing, it really brings a whole another layer to how you think about what you want to do within the space. And what's really fun is that, um, we actually just released a free tool, creative research at Motion, that you can go in and we have a brand intel section where you can literally follow your competitor brands and then you can see exactly what they're launching. Um, so highly recommend checking that out. Like I said, it's free, so why not give it a shot? Um, you can find a link to that in the doc section within the chat over here.

Kyra Richards: Um, and then once we know what's happening within the market and our competitors, it's always good for everyone to be aligned on what is actually slated to be worked on already. So this is going to be kind of like that like project management piece of it.

Kyra Richards: So there are a lot of things that you can cover here. And what happens a lot of times in meetings is that we get stuck in setting the context, so we don't ever make it to actually like ideating and figuring out what we want to prioritize to work on next. So what I want to walk through is crawl, walk, run of how we can start to focus in on the context that we need to share so that we don't get stuck and we're just sharing the stuff that will actually help us set up for success into the next phase. So let's talk about at the kind of like business and like channel level, what we need to know. When you're getting started, it's really just like, are we ahead or behind of our revenue plan at the business level? If you are behind plan, you're probably going to be talking about what quick levers you can pull, right? Do we need to get another offer out? Do we need to do urgency messaging to kind of drive some things? Can we do some like cart abandonment ads to kind of break through in that area? So your conversation's probably going to be very different versus if you're at or ahead of plan, maybe you have a little bit more space to talk about those larger initiatives, big swings that you want to work on. As you start to get more advanced though, that's where you can layer in a little bit more insight there. So as we start to layer on things, we might want to do a little bit more with the channel level insights, right? Of do we focus on maybe more TikTok versus Meta, things like that. It's going to help you to figure out what you're really focused on shipping. And then once we get to the most advanced state with running, I think that's where like you really definitely need that dedicated growth meeting to go deep. And then the creative strategist can pull over top insights from that growth meeting into the creative strategy meeting just to kind of high level remind everyone what's going to be important to focus on. Don't let your creative strategy meeting turn into a growth meeting though. That's my biggest tip and piece of advice is that that is where so many teams get stuck. Um, so we want to make sure that we're keeping that piece pretty quick so that we can focus a lot more on the creative level. And so when we get into the creative level here, the big thing when you are starting out is that we want to just focus on like where we're seeing signs of life and success. Don't worry about focusing on what's not working or fixing things in the early stages. Just kind of see, hey, are the things that we've been shipping starting to take off? Anything we can kind of learn there? If not, cool, let's keep ideating on big swings, things like that that we can do to get more winners going in our account. Once we kind of move forward and we start to have a couple of winners that are in the account, usually when you're in that walk phase, you'll have, I don't know, anywhere from like three to four winners that you'll start to see emerging. We'll also want to start to pay attention to what's happening with those, right? What are they continuing to work really well? Are we starting to see like some performance declines? Maybe we need to spin up some quick iterations of our winners that are working to kind of refresh them and get ahead of creative fatigue. It's going to help you to catch things like that. It's only in the most advanced kind of like run state where you're already doing everything with getting things to scale and like finding winners. Then this is when if you have extra time, you can start to invest in like learning from what is not working in the account. So what things are being paused out, what's declining, what maybe never took off after you launched it. But I would say wait to focus on all of those things until you've already gone in and taken advantage of all the low hanging fruit of the opportunities with things that are working within the account.

Kyra Richards: The next is talking about what's shifted in the market. So when you're getting started with kind of keeping an eye on competitors, the first thing I'm always looking for is like what offers are they launching? Did someone change something that they're doing? They launched a new key message, launched a new offer. This will actually have quite a big impact on what's going on in your world and the revenue you're able to drive. And a lot of times we don't have visibility into that. So revenue might be down and then you're like, why are we not doing as well this week as we wanted to? And then you realize that your competitor launched a like sale or a new way that they're positioning their product that might be working really well for them. We want to keep eyes on that so that we have that context. After you get comfortable with just checking out what offers they're running and seeing that, the next step and the next phase of advancement is really starting to dissect what their testing strategy might be. So you're going to start to see what they're launching. And it's really interesting as you start to check in on this regularly because you'll start to notice the differences of what they are doing in their accounts. So you'll see that maybe they're testing like emotional versus like very functional messaging. Um, maybe they're trying new formats to be able to stand out. Um, and when you look at this, you can start to get an idea of just what they're doing that's going to help you to figure out what you should be doing in the same space. Now, when we get the most advanced with this, I think we kind of do that counterintuitive approach again of we actually want to stand out from our competitors. So we should look at the what we're doing with competitors as our frame of reference of what we need to be able to really differentiate ourselves. So when my the interesting thing about especially Meta and TikTok is when you go and like purchase a product or add something to your cart, if you go back into your Instagram feed, you will see all of the different competitors for that product because Facebook knows that you're about to buy a product in a specific category. And so they are going to want to show you all of the other categories that you could be buying from. And what will happen here is like people, the consumer is going to just get confused about what brand is which, especially when they all look the same. And so what you can think about is not only how do I compete with my competitors, but how do I make sure that when people are getting all of these different ads, they remember that it's your brand that it's coming from and they understand your differentiating, um, value props or things like that and can tie it back to your brand and not get you confused with someone else. So really, really helpful to kind of think about, hey, with the ads we're running, how do those compare to what our competitors are running and could you be able to tell us apart from the competitors that we're running against?

Kyra Richards: And then the final thing that we'll want for context is this project management piece of what's slated to be worked on. So at the beginning stage, this is probably just a calendar, marketing calendar of like key campaigns that you're doing. And then you might have a project list of kind of those evergreen projects and things that you want to spit up. It might even live in someone's head at this point, um, at this like beginning phase because you're going to be such a scrappy team that is moving quickly and just kind of like block and tackling, how can we get this stuff shipped out the door? You don't have a lot of people that you're aligning in these earlier phases. And so this is a really good one where it's fine, don't overprocess yourself early on. Once you start to have more people involved though, you're going to want that layer of like light project management. And this is where you'll probably just have some kind of very basic project management with a little bit of like prioritization. So like is this high urgency, low urgency, maybe some like size of project. I really like the like extra small, small, medium, large type sizing that you can do there. Um, and then like some status of like, is it in progress? Is it backlogged? Things like that. Just going to help to give you something where you guys can look at that together, be like, cool, these are the things that are on our list. Do we all feel good about where they're prioritized right now? And then as you get advanced, you're going to have way more creative players. You're probably working with probably some agencies or some different content creators that you're pulling things in from. You're going to have a lot of different projects going at once. And so this is where you're probably going to need that like more robust project management, um, that is going to have all of your briefs, lots of templates involved, things like that. So it will build over time, but I would say keep it as simple as you can for as long as you can and that's going to help you to move faster and to just keep things simplified. I think in our industry, we are sometimes bad about overcomplicating things when we don't need to yet. Um, so my tip is to keep it as simple as you can until you no longer are able to do it effectively and then from there you can start to add things in.

Kyra Richards: So once we've set all of this context, that allows us to now go into the ideation phase where we can ideate and prioritize. And I think these two things have to happen together. So when you're in this session and you have the context of what's happening, we can now start to ask ourselves the question, okay, what are we going to do next? And so it will be a lot of this ideation around, do we want to do quick iterations? Um, can we double down on some winners, brainstorm big swings, all of that. You're going to have a lot of ideas and topics that start to come up. And so what I found to be helpful in keeping the conversation moving forward is for each idea that you guys are talking about, have the prioritization conversation before you close that idea. So I might, for example, talk about like, I want to do a quick iteration on an asset that is scaling within my account. And so let's change the hook on that. Cool. Who has bandwidth to actually work on changing that hook and do they have the direction that they need to be able to do that? If they don't, then it might be cool, creative strategist is going to need to do a quick brief on that and pass it over to the creative person to do it. You should not spend your meeting going in and building that brief if you have a lot of other things to talk about and having that alignment there. Take that conversation out, you can do it async. And that way everyone's aligned on cool, we need to like do a hook iteration for this asset and Kyra is going to take that, get the brief built, make sure the content team can work on it, but we're not going to have to do that hand holding within the meeting. So now we can talk about the next idea of actually prepping the work that needs to happen for our next big swing concept that we're working on. So as much as you can, take those action items, assign them to people within the meeting, and then make sure things move forward after in an async fashion. That's going to make sure that you can have more time to actually collaborate within the meeting itself. And that's what keeps us feeling good and refreshed coming out of meetings that we're not just going down these like deep tangents and rabbit holes. Um, again, we have to remember that like what we decide to work on is not just the content creation. That's the other thing we're bad about. Is sometimes we get into these meetings and it's like, oh, it's just all about what the creative team is going to be making and all of that. No, no, no, we also have briefing, we have what's getting launched. There's a lot of different players that are going to come into this. So I think we should think about all of those different steps whenever you guys are thinking about ideas of what actually needs to happen to move these things over the finish line.

Kyra Richards: Um, and then have a backlog of somewhere you can push other ideas. There are going to be a lot of good things that come up in your mind that maybe it's not the right time to work on immediately right now. Have somewhere that those can go and have one person that's responsible for kind of checking back in and elevating those back up. Usually your creative strategist, but if you don't have a creative strategist, totally fine. Whoever's wearing that hat, maybe a media buyer or someone on the creative team, they can be responsible for skimming that list every now and then, every other week is usually fine, and just see if there's anything that we need to pull back out of it.

Kyra Richards: Okay. So once we've set all of this context, this allows us to now go into the ideation phase where we can ideate and prioritize. And I think these two things have to happen together. So when you're in this session and you have the context of what's happening, we can now start to ask ourselves the question, okay, what are we going to do next? And so it will be a lot of this ideation around, do we want to do quick iterations? Um, can we double down on some winners, brainstorm big swings, all of that. You're going to have a lot of ideas and topics that start to come up. And so what I found to be helpful in keeping the conversation moving forward is for each idea that you guys are talking about, have the prioritization conversation before you close that idea. So I might, for example, talk about like, I want to do a quick iteration on an asset that is scaling within my account. And so let's change the hook on that. Cool. Who has bandwidth to actually work on changing that hook and do they have the direction that they need to be able to do that? If they don't, then it might be cool, creative strategist is going to need to do a quick brief on that and pass it over to the creative person to do it. You should not spend your meeting going in and building that brief if you have a lot of other things to talk about and having that alignment there. Take that conversation out, you can do it async. And that way everyone's aligned on cool, we need to like do a hook iteration for this asset and Kyra is going to take that, get the brief built, make sure the content team can work on it, but we're not going to have to do that hand holding within the meeting. So now we can talk about the next idea of actually prepping the work that needs to happen for our next big swing concept that we're working on. So as much as you can, take those action items, assign them to people within the meeting, and then make sure things move forward after in an async fashion. That's going to make sure that you can have more time to actually collaborate within the meeting itself. And that's what keeps us feeling good and refreshed coming out of meetings that we're not just going down these like deep tangents and rabbit holes. Um, again, we have to remember that like what we decide to work on is not just the content creation. That's the other thing we're bad about. Is sometimes we get into these meetings and it's like, oh, it's just all about what the creative team is going to be making and all of that. No, no, no, we also have briefing, we have what's getting launched. There's a lot of different players that are going to come into this. So I think we should think about all of those different steps whenever you guys are thinking about ideas of what actually needs to happen to move these things over the finish line.

Kyra Richards: Um, and then have a backlog of somewhere you can push other ideas. There are going to be a lot of good things that come up in your mind that maybe it's not the right time to work on immediately right now. Have somewhere that those can go and have one person that's responsible for kind of checking back in and elevating those back up. Usually your creative strategist, but if you don't have a creative strategist, totally fine. Whoever's wearing that hat, maybe a media buyer or someone on the creative team, they can be responsible for skimming that list every now and then, every other week is usually fine, and just see if there's anything that we need to pull back out of it.

Kyra Richards: Okay. So when we're going through this, if we can focus and get everything to the ideation phase and prioritize, then we're coming out of the meeting and everyone can handle things async. But I think there's a couple areas where people tend to get stuck. One is prep time becomes a huge commitment for whoever is putting on this meeting. So all of that context that we talked through, you could probably spend one or two days putting together this like beautiful deck that goes through every little element of context that people could need to know. Um, while that makes you feel really good and like maybe you're making progress on a deck, a lot of times that can like distract us from actually like creating the next round of iterations or big swings and assets and things that we need to do. So what I would say is try and find that like happy medium balance of how much time you're investing into like prepping for a meeting versus like the value that you're getting out of it. Um, and I think this is where I get really excited about Motion because I think we can help you to really speed up getting ready for meetings. So that creative research tool of keeping an eye on brands, you can have like folders within your Motion account of what's been happening previously of like the reports that you want to check in on every week. There's a lot of stuff that we can do to make this easier and to be able to move quicker when we're in the prep phase. Um, I also really like when I'm thinking about prepping for meetings, this kind of like cumulative approach where the prep that you do one week builds on top for the next one. So that's where it's really nice like if you're thinking about project management tools, for example, if you can make sure that when you're prepping, it's updating things in the project management tool versus like retyping everything out on a slide. And then maybe you just grab a screenshot of the project management tool. Like there's no reason to duplicate that work when like it's living in your ClickUp board or Asana board at the end of the day. Um, and so that can really help you to not re-waste all of the time that you're doing pulling things over. The other is that we don't want to get bogged down in context here. So move quickly when it comes to context and that way we can really focus on the ideation and next steps. Um, if you're getting bogged down somewhere, see if you can pull that out and table it and put that on as another discussion or send a loom after. I think feedback is a place a lot of people will get stuck too when doing context. They're like, oh yeah, we have like this asset that's ready. Like what's everyone's thoughts on this? I would say try and focus conversations in your creative strategy meeting to be a little bit more future focused about what you're doing next, what you're shipping and like Loom is great for giving feedback async so that you can keep those conversations moving. Also, what I found is like for feedback specifically on assets, gives everyone a voice when you put it in a loom, gives them time to digest things like that. So much better place to do that instead of just um having everyone kind of in the meeting, in the creative strategy meeting, go through every single asset and start to give feedback in that way. Um, and again, we can break things out of this meeting, right? So this meeting is going to evolve over time. Um, and I think when you have a creative strategy session, if it's getting stuck and you leave the meeting and you feel like you didn't accomplish what you wanted to with figuring out what you want to do next, then that's when you can reflect on it and be like, cool, we got stuck and talked about what we wanted to prioritize the whole entire time and we like never made it to actually talking about like new ideas that we might need to throw up to make progress. That's usually the sign that you need to break out and have a different meeting talking about prioritization or if you're just talking about performance the whole time and you get stuck with questions there, great like yellow flag to make that a meeting of its own. So this one can really be focused on what are we actually going to do next and how do we need to change what we're doing based on things that are happening.

Kyra Richards: Awesome. Okay. So first question here is from Courtney.

Kyra Richards: Who should be the owner of the creative strategy meetings? Creative team, client service strategist, marketing, shared by all? This is a fantastic question. Um, so I think it will change a little bit over time. If you have a creative strategist, that is the person that should own the meeting. Um, if you don't have a creative strategist on your team, that's where it gets a little bit trickier of who should own this. Um, my suggestion would probably be the person that is closest to doing the creative strategy of kind of keeping up with the project management and like the ideas of what are what are going on. Um, usually someone that is internal to the brand is going to be the best person to own it as well. So if you are working with external agencies, I'd probably have someone on the brand side that's kind of the main point of contact that is responsible for aligning all of the pieces. So that will be the way that they can kind of set it up and then they can invite the agency to come in to share what's going on, things like that.

Kyra Richards: Next question is from Alyssa. What tools do you recommend for tracking projects? Yes, this is a tricky one. Um, I think ClickUp, a lot of people really love ClickUp and getting that set up for managing their projects. Um, if you want to check out a really great session from the Creative Strategy Summit, um, Shabaz from Venture Beyond goes through kind of the way that they set up their project management and the things that they track within it. And I think that's like a really good one that I've gotten some nice inspiration of like how to set up a project management tool. Um, really any of them can work. So it's whatever you're probably already using or what your creative team is using. If you can mirror what they're using, it's usually a little bit easier than trying to introduce a new tool. Um, but ClickUp, Asana, Trello even I've seen work for people. Notion is another popular one. Um, so those are some good ones to explore.

Kyra Richards: All right, and then we've got a question from Miguel. What are the best practices for creative briefs from a media buyer who is also tapping creative strategy? Ooh, good question. So briefing, I think again, there's not a one size fits all brief. Um, I think there are different types of briefs and I would say you have to kind of figure out the right brief for what you're wanting to accomplish. I think for iterations and things like that on a briefing standpoint, I love to use like motion snapshots, things like that where you can just share like specific data points and what you want to happen with an asset. Um, versus if you're briefing like a creator, um, to get them to make new content for you, your brief's going to look different because you're going to need a lot of like the context of like, make sure you have good lighting. Um, talk about these key value props. Maybe you brief a specific script that they want, like you want them to like read through. Um, and then you're probably going to have a different type of brief that you would use for like your internal team of if they're making new assets. So I would say it's going to be a different, different brief for different people. The biggest thing that I think is important when you are designing your briefs is that you provide the context. I think a lot of times we don't provide the right context in the briefs of why this asset is being made. Um, and a lot of times that is what helps the people who are actually making the content do a better job because then they know why they're doing it. Um, so I would make sure you have that filled in. And then as long as people have context, they can ask questions, things like that coming off of the briefs.

Kyra Richards: Charlotte asks, do you ask the creative team to come prepared with ideas for ideation? Weekly is quite often to have creative juices flow off the cuff or perhaps I'm not creative enough. Charlotte, I'm sure you are creative enough. Um, so a lot of times what will happen is this is the beauty of setting the context within the meeting is that a lot of times as you're talking through that context, it will actually spark a lot of new ideas. So you'll see what new things are scaling in the account or you'll see what competitors are doing, things like that. So I wouldn't make it a hard requirement for the creative team to come prepared with ideas. Um, but I think it's a great space to share ideas if you do have them. Um, so things will naturally come up. You might see something out in the wild as you're scrolling Instagram or you might have that like random shower thought idea that pops in your head of like, oh my gosh, this is such a great idea of like a way that we can bring this campaign to life. This is a great meeting for people to have the space to bring those up when they do have it. Um, but I think like I've never run into the problem of people not having ideas or like things that they want to talk about. If you run into that, ping me. I would love to like talk about it with you to see like where the gap is, but hopefully the context that you can set of what's going on both in the business and the space will get people's ideas flowing and then the conversation is more about what we want to prioritize to talk about to actually figure out what we're going to work on out of those ideas.

Kyra Richards: Dima with another question on best combinations of roles for certain meetings. Um, yeah, going to depend on the meeting to be honest of who you want in there. But I think there will be meetings that are like know the goal of your meeting. If it's a prioritization meeting, you probably need all the people that are going to have to have a vote into what's being prioritized. If it's a growth performance meeting, it's all the people that need to be informed on what's happening with revenue numbers, media buying, channel performance, things like that. If you get into the creative strategy meeting, I'm like, who all do we really need there? Like, can you get away with just a creative strategist and like the creative team that's executing? Great. Do you really need the media buyer to be in there? If you do to have them close gaps and answer questions, have them come too. But I think like my goal for meetings is like have it be as few people as possible because that's going to really help you to limit down tangents or like kind of like getting the meeting off track.

Kyra Richards: Okay, and then Emily has a great question here on what would be a good first step for a company that has a small marketing and creative department? One hour weekly meeting. Start there. Get that on the calendar, invite the people that need to come and then you can optimize as you all grow. Um, get that meeting on there, focus on things that are working, how you can double down on that. It's going to be a lot of like new ideas. You're probably going to spend a lot of time in tools like Motion's creative research tool to think about like what's going on with competitors or even just like get new ideas. Um, we have some cool things called collections that we've had some industry leaders put together examples of some of their favorite ads that have been really effective for them. So maybe it's like you're scanning through those and kind of figuring out what things you haven't done with your strategy yet. Um, I think when you're small and you're getting started, it's all about like making the most of the team and capacity that you have. Um, I think statics are honestly a great place to invest some time of that like quick testing, see what works from like a messaging standpoint, things like that. Then you can double down on video, um, with those specific messages, stuff like that. But yeah, your one hour weekly meeting, don't overcomplicate it. Use that time to kind of figure out all the things that you need to do. Um, and then come out of it and just like really hit the ground running of moving quick, shipping things so that you can start to find some things that are working and scaling within your account.

Kyra Richards: All right. We'll do a couple more here. So Boris has a question about their brand is in a market space where our competitors can be anything from premium chocolate to bath products, basically anything that's an affordable gift. Do you skip the phase focusing on competitors or try digging deep anyway? Okay, so Boris, I'm betting maybe that means that you don't actually have a direct competitor and so you're more just in like a new kind of space that's being created. Um, so if you're in that, I think like what I would probably do is like, I think I would probably just still keep an eye on some of, um, the people that, actually, you know what, better advice. This is what I would do. I would go and I would add your products to cart and then I would go get on Instagram and I would see what other brands are getting that you're getting targeted with with similar messaging or similar products. So that way you can figure out what Facebook thinks are your direct competitors and those are the brands that I would tackle. Um, and like keep a close eye on. I would also have a couple people on your team do that same exercise because there might be slight variations in brands that pop up. Um, so I would do that to kind of figure out who Facebook sees as your direct competitor set. You could do the same thing on TikTok too. So usually that add to cart gives the signal that you're interested and you'll start to see the right brands pop up and then I would keep track of them. Um, and over time you can keep doing that exercise to kind of see what changes and who you who else you might need to track or other people that fall off as your, um, competitive space gets more competitive too.

Kyra Richards: Okay, and then let's do this one. This is for a little bit more for our agency friends because we haven't done that many for our agency friends that are with us. How do you build client trust during strategy meetings? You may see certain trends you want to go after, but the client is hesitant. How are you approaching this during the meeting? Um, getting buy in to work on ideas can be really, really tough. Um, and I really love the way this question is framed because it is, it's all about building the trust, right? I think trust comes over time as you get buy in to work on the things you want and they work and do well. Um, but I think what you can do until you kind of have that track record is helping explain why you want to work on things. I think if you're in a meeting and you're like, hey, our competitors are doing this, this is what's happening in the market. So I want to like have more urgency messaging or I want to focus on messaging this way. Having them understand the context of why you want to work on something will help bring them along with you instead of just being like, hey, I want to work on this idea. Um, and then them kind of being like, well, I don't like that doesn't sound good to me. Like bring them on that journey with you so that they're more bought in to why you want to move in that direction. Um, and I think like a lot of times what you'll do is like as you start doing this meeting consistently, you'll be able to see when things are working and so you're going to build that trust. So you guys are going to be in it together of like, cool, we're going to work on these ideas. Okay, we're going to ship them. What happened with them? Okay, cool, like these are starting to work and it was this methodology of being able to know the context of other things of like iterating on assets that have shown signs of success or maybe it's that we see better movement with like big swings that we're working on. You guys will start to figure out the approach that's giving you the most winners. And I think if you guys are doing that together, it's going to build a really strong relationship. So you guys can come to those meetings with the ideas and you can be more collaborative versus that like normal client versus agency state of like kind of like butting heads to get to an answer. Like we're all working towards the same thing. We want your brand to grow. Um, so I think if you can keep that in mind and just really try and collaborate with your client partners, like that's going to help everyone to move forward.

Kyra Richards: Okay, that is all that we have for today. Friends, thank you so much for joining. Thank you for being a part of this community. I think I always get so excited when I get to come hang out with you guys because we have just such a positive, cool, smart community that's all here with us. So really appreciate the time. Again, we are going to be getting this recording out to you guys. It will hit our YouTube channel first, so make sure you subscribe there. Um, and if you want to check out Motion, if you're not using it right now, definitely take a look because it might speed up your weekly meetings a lot and help you. Um, so you can check out the free creative research tool and then, um, I would highly recommend talking to our team about our analytics product as well so that you can really start digging in to understand what's working and why within your account. But that's all I've got for you guys today. So thank you so much for joining. Have a wonderful end to your week and we will see you guys soon.

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