No matter whether they’re designers, copywriters or videographers, your content creators are definitely not mind readers. The clearer your brief is, the smoother the collaboration will be, and the more chance you all have of getting things right first time, or with minimal amends.

Make sure the brief includes information about the target audience, and the objectives you want to achieve through this communication. Clear guidance on the tone of voice, messaging and the look and feel of the visuals is also important. It can be very helpful to share examples if you have something specific in mind. 

Try creating a moodboard in Behance to gather, organise and share inspiration. Moodboards can provide a seamless and collaborative way to gather reference material and inspiration for projects, and to show content creators the kind of look you’re going for.

If you have any kind of rules or brand and tone of voice guidelines that your content creators need to follow, make sure you share them upfront. If you’re using Creative Cloud for teams, Creative Cloud Libraries are a great way of making sure everyone has access to the right fonts, images, logos and colour palettes.

Sharing common assets like graphics, colours and character styles in a team library makes it easy to collaborate and maintain consistency across projects. You can also re-use assets across desktop and mobile projects without worrying that you’ll grab the wrong version, and use keywords or visual search to save images from Adobe Stock to your libraries in a single click.

Unless feedback is managed carefully, mistakes can start to creep in and timelines can unravel. To avoid confusion, collect and collate feedback in one place before passing it on to the content creators. It’s a good idea to make sure you have a visual reference like a marked up PDF for everyone to collaborate on, rather than relying on an email chain for amends. 

Forget printing, marking up and scanning in, with Adobe Acrobat you can review and add comments on a PDF with any device and from wherever you are. You can even keep track of who’s opened and reviewed your documents, and simplify the review process by collecting and managing all your feedback in one place.

This make life easier for everyone, especially the content creators, who can be confident they have received the comments and suggestions of every reviewer.

When you’re asked to review something, it’s not always easy to know how you should be doing it. Good feedback is specific. ‘Make it pop’ or even ‘I don’t like it’ aren’t precise enough to be useful. Try to identify the element that’s bothering you. Is it the tone of the copy or the accuracy of a fact? Is it the balance of colours? The layout? The style of an image?

Your feedback should be based on the objectives you outlined in the brief. And the work your content creators have produced should always be judged on how well it meets these objectives, rather than whether or not you personally like it.

Try to give feedback that outlines a problem rather than giving a solution. Don’t try and fix it yourself, just explain exactly what’s not working and why. Then your content creators can find the right solution, and they will feel trusted and empowered to do so.

If you’re using Creative Cloud for teams, your content creators will all have access to Creative Cloud Libraries even when they’re working in Microsoft Office. Adobe Creative Cloud Add-in for Word and PowerPoint makes the core design assets for your brand available to you from within Microsoft Word and PowerPoint.

This makes it much easier to keep things consistent, as content creators will be able to use your brand designs and imagery in presentations, reports, brochures, marketing collateral and social posts.