Welcome back to Stacking Growth Snacks. I'm Steph Ragnola and I'm here with the VP of Creative for Refine Labs, Triana Mills. Triana, I'm so happy to have you here today because we are really digging into identifying your creative needs, not your creative needs, Triana, but Triana, you will reach out to organizations and figure out where they need to focus their energies, what packages they're looking for, and what's involved in each of those things. So I'm really excited to hear that breakdown and get some clarity here.
Yeah, I'm really excited as well because I feel like this is such an important topic and it's really going to help everyone understand what exactly their needs are and in what areas. So I'm excited about this conversation. Me too. And we are starting with a creative strategy package.
So Triana, can you just kind of kick us off by giving an overview of what creative strategy means? Yeah, so for us, our focus is mainly paid social, right? We do other things, but paying social is the main thing that we work on right for our clients when it comes to creative. And so when it comes to the strategy for paid social, it's very different than any other piece of collateral that you're making, right?
It's very different from your website. It's very different from emails that you're creating. So our strategy is how do we help you identify how you stand out in the feed, right? So one of the things that we'll do is analyze the creative that you've been making in the past, see how well you're doing from both a messaging and design standpoint.
And then also look at your competitors. What are they doing? Is there anything that they're following that you thought may have been great that we're actually identifying as something that maybe you shouldn't follow behind, right? And just how do we make you unique?
How do we make Europe voice unique in the feed? Because like I said, the feed is a totally different beast and you know, you really want to make sure you're standing out in general with the amount of content that's coming through in that area. Okay, so you start with this competitive analysis. You really dig into good examples, maybe less effective examples.
What else is offered in this creative strategy package? That's a great question. So another thing that we focus on is positioning, right? One of the things that we love to look at is your positioning.
So just looking at your ads and from looking at them, summarizing in about a sentence or two, what we perceive your positioning to be and what we think your audience might perceive your positioning to be. This is so great because what we perceive may be totally different from what you want us to perceive, right? Or what you want to put out to your audience. So it's a great exercise.
Another thing that we do is we want to make sure that with the recommendations that we're giving you around this messaging and design, we want to give you examples of how to execute this, right? So we create for design, for example, different style skates, our mild, medium, spicy style skates is what we call it. And basically, it's just a range of different ways we can visually execute your designs within your ads and get an idea of which one you're most comfortable with, right? And then lastly, when it comes to messaging, we do the same.
We're just coming up with different high level campaign ideas that we think would be great for your campaigns, impairing them with a couple of headlines to tell the story a little bit more. I love that. So you are coming up with some tangible examples, but it's not a full ad set? Yes, exactly.
Exactly. So who would benefit? What types of organizations, what stage, what market that they're in, who's going to benefit the most from a creative strategy package? So I would say let's put stage behind, right?
Let's put industry brands behind, right? I look at it as anyone who's having an issue telling a brand story, right? That's what we want to look at. If you have, for example, all of the pieces you've put together this great, great brand guideline that talks about your tone of voice and your visual identity, right?
And when you get to these paid ads or when you get to your website, you just feel like, man, this is not getting across in these materials. That's where we come in to really help you. I feel like our strength is being able to take those things and really bring your voice visually and messaging-wise to life. So it's really someone who needs that objective perspective, someone who's coming in fresh, who doesn't have the history of the brand behind them to say, to break things down and say, this is what we need to fix.
This is how we need to push you forward in your industry. Yes, exactly. That's a great way to put it, Stephanie. So we've decided we need creative strategy package.
What are we looking for in terms of timeline to get this audit and analysis done and then come up with these style escapes and messaging options? Yeah. So basically we're looking on about a week for an onboarding schedule. So basically, having you fill out different materials so that we can understand the ins and outs of your business and then execution-wise, like building that strategy session to present to you, usually takes about a week.
So we're thinking about all together about two weeks to execute on this and present it to our customers. That's so much faster than I would have expected. So I'm really glad we got to talk through that timeline. It feels like something that's so easy to say yes to, right?
Like you're investing two weeks, you're investing budget into this that has massive, massive results to improve your strategy. Yeah. And I mean, it's just such a great exercise to do because I feel like so many great lessons come out of it for both us and our customers, right? Things that they probably don't even have the time to sit down and think about in the day-to-day because it's so busy, come up in these creative strategy sessions.
And it's like a breath of fresh air because they're like, wow, I get to finally talk about this and talk about it with other experts that have the time and dedication and skill set to do this with me. I love that. We're flipping the coin and we're talking about a creative execution package. So, Triana, will you give us a little bit of an overview of what that means?
Yeah. So when I think about a creative execution package, I think about a brand who has their storytelling downpacked, right? Their branding is in a good place, their that comes with their visual identity, their tone of voice. All of that is packaged up well, but the issue is they may not have a team with the skill set to execute on those things, right?
And so that may mean you have a very junior team and they don't have the skill set to design things in the way you want or write things in the way you want. And I feel like that's a great opportunity for our team to come in, right? And produce these amazing ads or websites or motion graphics, right? Our team does it all.
And then give you the tools to take this back in house to give to this maybe more junior team or maybe you don't have a team of creatives, right? To execute these things for you. I feel like that's more of the reason why you would want an execution package. You have the strategy.
You just need the team with the skill sets to produce this strategy. Yeah. And that feels like something for for a company hiring full time creatives feels like a really heavy lift when you could hire an agency to do that for you. So what are some of the benefits of having that external team coming in and working on these ads?
So what I've seen is that number one, let's go back to that team that's a little bit junior, right? Let's say designers, for example, I've seen one of the clients that we've worked with, their team was so happy when our creative team came in. And they just had that mentorship from us that they were missing, right? Because they also didn't have a creative director, which is also hard on someone who may be a junior designer.
So just having us come in and mentor their team and take the weight off of them, not knowing how to produce this and also still having the ability to learn from us was just this great experience for them and a great experience for us because we're able to give back to this client and help them move on and be able to do this on their own eventually. That's so wholesome and inspiring because you're not trying to say we're the only ones who can do it. Having that mentorship approach is such a great way to really just boost creative across the board. You're coming in, you're teaching, you're helping other folks work on their own skills and rise up to that.
So I think that's really wonderful. In addition to that mentorship, what is included in this package? Yeah, so like I said, we do all types of creative, right? So let's say that you have motion graphing needs, maybe you need a 30 second animation or maybe you need our team to create paid social.
Again, a lot of times I find that that's a department where there's not a lot of focus or there's not a lot of time to produce those things. We can produce that as well. Basically, you tell us what you need and more than likely we can produce it. So it sounds like there's a lot of flexibility in this package in particular, whereas the creative strategy is a little bit more of one structure.
This has a million different opportunities for what y'all can do. Yes, because I would say this one is more project focused. I guess that's a great way to put it. There might be different projects you need to focus on, like the ones I just mentioned.
Whereas the strategy session, a lot of times our clients are coming in specifically for that paid social expertise. So in addition to someone without a team or with a more junior team, who else would benefit from a creative execution package? I would definitely say marketers in general, right? I find a lot of times another reason executions don't happen the way a team would want them to is because they're not able to explain to the design or copywriters exactly what they want.
They don't have the words to express it. A lot of times I'll see comments like, this isn't working, but I don't really understand how to say why, right? But we do, right? And in seeing how we respond to these different feedback messages, you get to learn how to now talk to your team within this process as well.
So you're not just mentoring designers, but you're mentoring marketers to be able to work with their designers more efficiently? Yes, yes. Great, which kind of makes us that's our differentiator, right? A lot of agencies will create these beautiful graphics for you, these huge campaigns, and you're wowed by them.
But then when it's done, you're like, how do I recreate this? But we're teaching you how to recreate these things. Like that's the goal, right? We want to see you continue to win with us and even outside of us when you're done working with us.
Incredible. That's really wonderful. I love hearing it put so succinctly like that. Jana, thank you so much for that explanation.
Thank you all for watching and we'll see y'all next time. See you next time.