Systemizing Creativity!?
I'll tell you why it's important to systemize creativity, everything you do when creating content originates from an idea, an idea can be data interpreted a certain way, or it's just coming up with creative solutions.
I'll give you a quick answer on this title, the answer is no, no you can not systemize creativity.
But what you can do is systemize everything around the idea so that a creative doesn't have to make as many decisions so that the important decisions that they have to make, are well thought through. Makes sense?
Disclaimer: There is a lot to take in, use it as a guide and inspiration to optimize whatever you are doing with your channel and team.
Roles and their system
Building a successful YouTube channel involves a lot of tasks and roles.
I'll break down what roles and tasks we have at Playstack to run a dozen YouTube channels successfully and how we systemize them so that the people who fulfill these roles can spend most time on the most important task: ideas and strategy.
Channel Manager
I'll go from top to bottom in our team tree.
Channel manager has the most responsibility and I've thought about splitting this role up into Strategist and account manager but decided against it because of "more people in a team" reason.
Responsibilities:
The channel manager is the main person between the client and the team. They make sure everything is perfect operationally to fulfill the strategy that they are also responsible for. In our case, we have multiple strategists for even better results. More brains and eyes have better insights.
The main responsibility is achieving success of the YouTube channel, whether that's growth, awareness, leads, traffic, ...
As an individual channel like yourself, it might look more like the overall manager and lead the charge of strategy and fulfillment.
Tasks:
This is almost endless, that's why I thought about splitting this role up.
- Market Analysis and Research
- Channel audit - identifying points of improvement on the channel
- Communication with client and team
- YouTube strategy (includes coming up with video ideas)
- Oversee all development of the process
- Final Quality control
- Uploading and optimizing videos on the channel
- ...
You get the idea, that they manage all the processes and make sure they are quality control. Our managers handle multiple clients so it seems a lot but that's why I implemented a Creative Director as well.
For a single channel, this person can handle a lot of tasks except for things that take a lot of time and creative thinking like video editing and script writing. I see often they also design the thumbnails as it's easier for them to put that creative thinking of packaging a video into realization.
Systems:
We wrote SOPs (standard operating procedures) for everything for this role, there are so many things to overview from communicating with the client to assigning tasks.
Currently, we've set up our whole task assignment and system in notion but will be changing that to Asana, having a clear overview and automation system is very important.
The reason you want everything to be systemized so that most energy can be focused on strategy, video ideas and video packaging. These are the things that will move the needle the most on a YouTube channel.
Creative Director
I introduced this role for exactly what it says, the director of the creative. Strategy is a big part of a YouTube channel but the creative part is more in the details and consistency of things.
Responsibility:
One of the main reasons I introduced this role was to quality control all the videos that we do. And these are dozens at any given moment. The CD works closely with our video editors, trains them and makes sure the creative direction and branding are consistent.
CD works closely with the Channel manager and the creative team of video editors, thumbnail designers and scriptwriters.
Tasks:
- Quality control of all creative assets
- Creative direction of brand and channel
- Turn strategy into a creative direction and brief team
- Talent development, training of writers and editors
- Ensure consistency across all assets
For smaller channels, this can also be the channel manager or your lead video editor.
Systems:
This role is probably the hardest to systemize, yet again it's all about SOPs and identifying where they can input their creativity to achieve the biggest moves.
The one task that will move the needle the most is the video editing brief, this is where they add all their creativity into a video. Note, that they will not be editing them but adding notes to every part. The video editor then brings it to life.
Here is the SOP for the video editing creative brief, let me know if you want more details on this and I can make a video for it.
Video editors
This is pretty straightforward, for us, we have in-house and work with contractors (freelancers).
Responsibility:
Very easy: follow creative directions to achieve the end results of the video.
When they are more advanced we are open to suggestions in the edit.
Tasks:
- Edit the videos
- Follow creative direction
- Deliver on time
This is the part that can be systemized a lot, the reason being that you want consistency when multiple editors work on the same channel.
Having to make too many technical decisions during an edit can make you sloppy in creative decision-making, so we created a system for this, it's a layered approach rather than a progression approach.
Systems:
I spoke to some of our in-house and freelancers about what takes the most time and energy. And the energy part is important here, as creatives need energy to be creative. When tired, following a system is still doable.
The answer is coming up with creative ideas, that's why we implemented the video editing creative brief as mentioned above.
Thumbnail Designer
Responsibility:
Also very straightforward: Create the video thumbnails by following creative direction from the channel manager.
The really good ones can suggest ideas as well.
Tasks:
- Create Thumbnail
- Follow Creative direction
- Deliver on time
Creative direction comes from the channel manager as part of their packaging of the video task.
Systems:
The thumbnail briefs are assigned by the channel manager who gets the ideas from research. To make that research easier, we created a YouTube video Idea Bank, that shows us proven thumbnails. We combine that with tools like 1of10 and ViewstatsPro to find outliers.
Scriptwriter
This role is not always so straightforward as each client has different preferences of how to deliver a script.
Responsibilities:
Final delivery is a script that the client can put in front of them and deliver the video with. Some like word-by-word scripts, others just the structure with bullet points and others some smaller paragraphs.
Important here is to stick to the YouTube script structure for educational videos and add enough personal touch of the client.
Tasks:
- Write script
- Follow creative direction
- Keep client preference in mind
- Research content
- Deliver on time
Here a lot of creativity needs to be used to understand the audience and the client. The idea is the most important part of a YouTube video, second is the script. The way you deliver content makes or breaks the video.
Systems:
This process is time-consuming and Ai hasn't gotten far enough to write us full scripts yet. We developed a prompting library for Claude.ai to help us with ideas and structure of script writing.
What makes a good script is the personalization, so having as much context as possible from the client, will improve the script and outcome of the video.
We also use our script structure as a basis for every educational video.
There is a lot to unpack here and I can go in so much more detail for everything, reply to this email if there are any parts of the YouTube channel growth that you are struggling with.
