Working Creatively Under Brand Restrictions
If you’re an innovator, marketer, or mass communicator at your company, you’re likely cultivating an artist within you. People drawn to careers that require creativity often have artistic passions that influenced their professional journeys. This may be reflected in your hobbies and background—perhaps you worked on your college literary magazine or performed in your high school play, or maybe you’re currently active in your community’s art scene. While we don’t always have full-time jobs directly linked to our creative inclinations, we may find ourselves consciously or unconsciously searching for ways to connect the two.
So if your day job involves promoting a product or brand, charting company strategy, or communicating to hundreds of employees, you probably aim to do so as creatively as you can. Devising new and thought-provoking ways to engage audiences can help persuade them to adopt your cause and take any actions you request of them. That’s why top-performing executives strive to make their work stand out and avoid using tired formulas—in short, creativity can sell.
Introducing groundbreaking strategy may feel like a tall order at large organizations—especially those with a defined corporate structure and established processes. Employees may be expected to “play by the rules” when launching initiatives and fit criteria set by leadership. These types of guardrails are usually intended to protect brand integrity, avoid liability, and maximize resources—so while they can feel like creative barriers, they serve a greater purpose and exist for a good reason.
The key to being an effective creator at a large company is creating safely—doing things differently while still ensuring all stakeholder requirements are met. While this may be a challenge, succeeding in the effort can boost your career and help establish yourself as a trailblazer at your company.
Effective collaboration is important for creating safely and ensuring that your work fits your brand’s larger vision and goals. Squarespace Enterprise’s page drafts feature helps you collaborate seamlessly with stakeholders at your company to iterate upon communications and fast-track their approval.
The following are even more tips for exercising increased creative control in your professional role while being smart, responsible, and respectful of your company policies.
1. Protect your intellectual property
Whether you’re building an external marketing campaign or polishing internal employee outreach plans, stakeholders will want to see a proof of concept for evaluation. Landing pages are a convenient way to demonstrate the breadth of your creative vision with all its multimedia attributes, and they can offer greater design flexibility than documents or slide decks. Since you’re presenting sensitive information before release, you’ll want to ensure your landing page access is limited to its intended audience.
Squarespace Enterprise integrates with your OAuth2 SSO provider to prevent your content from being discoverable outside your organization. Stakeholders can view your websites using familiar login tools and note your proactiveness in protecting them. Should you wish to further restrict access within your organization, you can password-protect your websites until they’re ready for launch.
2. Standardize and simplify production
Before embarking on a new creative endeavor, show leadership that you’ve considered the process for replicating it efficiently, if successful. To further convince them of its merit, you’ll want to prove the repeatability of your website design and its potential to cost-effectively scale throughout your organization. Producing approved creative templates that your colleagues can access and modify as needed can help you accomplish this.
Building landing pages on Squarespace Enterprise gives you freedom to create templates exclusive for your organization’s use with all the formatting, style, and content specs you need. Since your team may be required to use certain fonts, color palettes, and images in their communications, pre-loading them all into editable templates reduces prep time and maintains everything in one place for convenient use. Before sharing custom templates with your team, you can align with stakeholders to ensure they have an approved appearance and flow.
3. Make creative expression efficient
To impress audiences and command attention, it’s important to deliver messages that are both powerful and visually appealing. It takes effort to produce polished outreach campaigns, and half the battle is crafting messages that strike the right tone and communicate your goals. Without a vehicle to present those messages attractively, you risk sacrificing impact and losing consumers’ attention to more eye-catching content. Once you’ve cleared the hurdle of producing effective language, you’ll want to promptly package it in a way that’s captivating and easy to share.
Squarespace’s Fluid Engine content editor helps your messages stand out online with fresh designs that can dazzle viewers and emphasize key points you want to highlight. Even if you lack design experience, you can quickly deploy the likes of scrolling blocks and shape blocks to draw viewers’ eyelines to main concepts. This can not only assist with faster content consumption, but it makes your campaigns feel modern by dressing them in the latest web design technology.
With a bit of precautionary planning, you can bring creative ideas to life at your company while convincing stakeholders of their feasibility. Squarespace Enterprise is built for team website project management and helps you scale beautiful online campaigns responsibly and securely with the support of your colleagues.