Brand Management

Two Question Survey to Measure Success of Creative Projects

December 1, 2022 6 minute read

It’s time for in-house creative teams to use more than cost and volume as measurements of success. Use this two-question survey to get started.

When you’re reporting on your creative team’s work, what do you share? The quantity of content created, hours scheduled versus hours spent, and total cost of a project all frame up your creative team as a cost. So, if that’s all you’re reporting, you’re not positioning your team as the value-creating operation it is. Cost is only part of the story. You need to get at the root of how creative work makes an impact.

Understanding what matters

The quality of your content matters. Every brand is clamoring for attention. It’s the creative team’s job to make the brand message stand out and create an emotional connection with audiences. Content quality isn’t an easy thing to measure. Channel metrics are one option, but those include many variables and can be hard to get from the marketing team.

The effectiveness of your creative team matters. A team’s ability to communicate and coordinate impacts the quality of the content and the process of producing it. While volume and cost capture some of the effectiveness of your creative team, it doesn’t show the full picture.

If you’re ready to get at the true contributions your creative team is making and elevate it beyond being another cost, it’s time to start measuring the quality of your team’s process and work. To do that in the simplest way, we propose a two-question survey.

Why survey your teams?

While there are different ways to gather feedback from your team, often the quickest way is to just ask them. A survey offers the chance to collect immediate, detailed responses from your team. And if you opt for non-anonymous feedback, you can have follow-up conversations to get even more information. But there’s more you learn from surveys.

Gain insights from those working in the channels

It’s not always realistic to connect the content’s success directly to channel metrics because there are multiple variables involved, but you should be able to gain some insights from them. If the distribution channel is digital, your marketing team should have instant feedback on the success or failure of the content efforts.

You’ll also gain insight from your clients’ understanding of audience expectations and what’s successful overall.

Track your clients’ satisfaction

Keep that in-house work coming by taking care of your closest customers: your internal teams. By surveying your clients, you’ll have documentation on how projects with your internal stakeholders are going.

Another benefit here is that, over time, you can begin correlating well-received content with specific creative techniques or methods.

The two questions

Why only two questions? Well, a two-question survey is easy to set up and maintain, and gives some benchmarks to help you identify trends. And the results of the survey can lead to further conversation and investigation.

From a survey-taker perspective, two questions is also relatively painless and an easy commitment. SurveyMonkey found that a two-question survey takes an average of about two minutes to complete. And when you tell your teams that two minutes of their time can help improve the content and creation process, they should be more than willing to help out.

We recommend these two questions to better understand the impact of your creative work.

Question 1: How was your experience with this content?

Some teams view successful content in a binary view. That is, if the content was produced on time, it was successful. If it wasn’t produced on time, it wasn’t successful. This perspective doesn’t allow for evaluating the content for quality, which ultimately affects the campaign’s success.

Other teams get feedback on the quality of the content, but only in the form of verbal communication in passing. This ambiguous and undocumented feedback can feel good in the moment, but it doesn’t provide quantifiable data to support new techniques, methods, and levels of effort.

To understand the overall impact, ask teams about their experience with the content. That can include the final output, the types of deliverables received, where it was used, and if it was able to be used across multiple channels or projects. Providing a little context around the question will help spark ideas for feedback.

Question 2. How was this process?

Get feedback on the process of getting work done, from the project request through review and approval. While a successful end product is the goal, the process can impact the time and money invested into the work. By collecting feedback from your clients on how the process went, you’ll be able to see how changes you make in the creative process impact your clients. And understanding how the process was perceived versus how it was executed can help your creative team set better expectations at the beginning of a project, too.

How to start using this two-question survey

Since there are only two questions, it’s pretty easy to get started. There are just a few more things to consider and you’ll be off and running.

Work with your team to identify who you’ll survey and at what point in the process you’ll survey them.
Select the platform where you’ll collect the data and set up the survey. We use SurveyMonkey and Typeform.
Start collecting data!
Set up recurring time to review responses to identify trends.

We hope this simple two-question survey can help your creative team start measuring their success. As you gather more data and it leads to more conversations, you’ll be able to evolve your questions, your process, and your measures of success over time based on your organizational needs.

If your survey results show that you could use help optimizing your creative workflows, you might want to consider a digital asset management (DAM) solution. Creative teams around the world use a DAM system to improve content operations, drive workflow efficiencies, and promote brand management.