What makes you consider marketing creative? Is it the artistic approach of the marketer or their level of imagination and their innovative methods? Creativity has gone beyond images in ad campaigns. Creative marketing is a rigorous approach that’s more complex than just images and visuals.
Creative marketing ideas range from customer experience, data analytics to your product design and beyond. So, this means the work of a creative marketer has taken a paradigm shift from the traditional image creator to roles whose purpose is directly linked to the effectiveness of the marketing process.
It is not to say that creative marketing ideas don’t still play around with artistic talents or outstanding visuals. The real substance of creative marketing is in finding a balance between these elements that draw attention and leveraging them to increase sales.
What Is Creative Marketing?
Creative marketing is the process of providing multiple ignitions to your customers’ desires, concerns and aspirations by offering them satisfying experiences and solutions through power-punch executions that have a lasting effect on them. This means as a creative marketer you must thoroughly understand your brand and your audiences’ needs. Then couple that with the best channels you can use to connect to their emotions.
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Types of Creative Marketing
Creative marketing comes in various forms all of which are meant to prove your uniqueness and allure to your customers. For you to build that connection you need to use the following three types of creative marketing that are guaranteed to work:
- Emotional Creative Marketing
- Creative Storytelling
- Authentic Imagery
Emotional Creative Marketing
An effective creative marketing strategy must be able to elicit the right emotion from the targeted audience. There are several emotions that can help prospective customers make the final decision to convert. Emotions such as fear (of missing out), anticipation, trust, joy, excitement, and so on.
Your creative marketing strategy must be able to harness all these emotions as the specific moment will require. Your images and copy text should be able to bring out those smiles or create that anxiety that will encourage your target audience to take the call to action step.
Emotional creative marketing is a strategy that has been proven to increase customer loyalty as well as retention. Because it builds that connection between your brand and your customers, it exhibits your trustworthiness and genuineness. Creativity allows you to communicate your values, benefits, and all your brand’s positive traits to them.
It relates to how you make your potential buyers feel about your brand as they part with their hard-earned money. Do you make them laugh, excited, cry or make them feel good about themselves? Whatever you make them feel, always know that they will remember how you made them feel. Creative marketing is about tapping into how you make your potential buyers feel.
Creative Storytelling
There is something authentic about being honest about how your brand came to be. And creative storytelling is a compelling way to communicate your journey to your audience. The creative aspect of storytelling involves entertaining them with a memorable and inspiring narrative about your business. And knowing when and how to use it at different marketing levels.
It’s about explaining why you’re unique and what makes your brand stand out. Small businesses have a special advantage because they can leverage this as the foundation of their creative marketing.
Marketers use various methods to tell and reinforce their narrative in order for it to be as effective as possible. They use fitting images to illustrate their stories and tap into the emotions mentioned earlier.
For this to be effective you need to have a clear knowledge of:
- what your audience can relate to,
- what is relevant to them,
- which solutions are they looking for,
then use this information to show them what you can offer them while using storytelling of how you as a brand came to this point. And they will find you can relate to and understand them, and this is how a connection is built.
So, how can you present your solutions to them using storytelling?
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You can use your blog. Leverage video and live stream feature on social media. Use Instagram stories, etc. You may have to try a few methods before landing on the one that drives the most engagement.
In telling your story, you can include such issues as how you started, how your product or service is crafted, some behind the scenes to prove that human aspect, your employees, and so forth.
Authentic Creative Imagery
What is a creative strategy in marketing without authentic visuals? Today’s world is more visual than ever. There are over 3.5 million images that are shared every minute and that proves just how powerful images are as a form of communication in marketing. Plus, over 5 billion videos are watched daily on YouTube. all these statistics prove that the rate of visual consumption is very high.
So, in this ocean of imagery, how do you stand out to get noticed? Creative use of imagery in marketing is the answer.
The answer is not in high-quality perfect imagery, everyone has that, and they no longer mean much. The answer lies in their authenticity.
You have seen images and visuals so perfect and meticulously polished that they stop being real. If you can do that, then that’s ok, but what sells is not the images and visuals themselves, rather it’s the candid and un-retouched moments that have been captured. This is what authentic imagery in creative marketing is all about.
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People are tired of the deception and dishonesty that are often sold to them in ads all over. But the shift that was brought about by social media, meant that real people including celebrities and other influential people can share their real lives. And real moments. This believable approach to marketing is what makes your brand believable, genuine and authentic.
A creative marketing organization must find a way to make use of this imperfect yet real, normal, and natural aspect in their imagery in order to reach and engage their prospective audience.
The use of authentic imagery in creative marketing means incorporating all media such as live streams, reels, stories, flyers, in your website and blog, and pretty much wherever your content goes.
What’s the Importance of Creative Marketing?
Creative Marketing simply cuts through the noise. Remember there are more people using social media sites to buy products each day. Meaning most marketers are also selling through these platforms and this also means that electronic device use is steadily going high. This amplified use of technology means more exposure to millions of ads.
As such, it calls for creative marketing techniques that will enable your brand’s voice to be heard above all the others that are after your target customer’s attention. An approach effective for both big and small brands.
Creative marketing is important because it will guide you in creating the exact kind of content that will be relevant, needed, and remembered by your audience.
Creative marketing focuses on all types of content from written to imagery and visual concepts. And uses them to tell compelling and inspirational stories that will help your brand stand out from the rest of the competition. Creative marketing adds originality, evokes the right emotions, establishes your brand identity, and is a much cheaper and more effective marketing method.
Creative Marketing Strategies That Are Effective
A good creative marketing strategy delivers tangible value to both the brand and the customer. Here are some simple creative strategies you can incorporate into your marketing strategy.
Don’t Create for the Customer, Create with the Customer
This goes beyond being customer-centric. Creative marketing is more than just targeting your campaign to the customer. It’s about involving them as you develop your content or brand ideas. It’s about experiencing their pains along with them and joining together to come up with solutions that will satisfy their needs.
An approach that will help you stay relevant, and they will end up being your brand ambassadors.
Get Everyone to Advocate for You
Make everyone your brand ambassador, this is cheaper and more effective (authenticity) than using the old paid media and public relations. Regular people make for a great free channel to amplify your impact on your users. Ask your content strategists to be creative and think out of the box to reach this goal.
How you get them to advocate for you is by inspiring creativity in them. Remember the first step is to involve them in your solution creation process. Here you can make them feel like an extension of your brand. Include your employees, customers, and partners in this process so that they will automatically turn into your advocates.
Give End-to-End Experience
Most marketers only focus on the customer experience that’s under their domain, this mostly being how the customer experiences the brand during the purchase stage.
But creative marketing strategies consider the customers’ experience from the start to the end.
They think about the customer during the creation or production stage. The buying process experience is considered, plus the after-sale service or support. And the entire relationship with the customer even after, as a way to retain them.
Another thing to pay attention to is a well-designed website that makes the buying process seamless. Especially if your buyers can begin tasting your efficiency even before they get to your home page.
Use spectacular graphic designs and a mobile-friendly web design that helps your site stand out. Use striking visuals to capture their attention then retain it with a stellar copy.
This end-to-end experience helps in building customer loyalty and advocacy for your brand. All for free.
Giveaways
Few things capture the attention of people the way giveaways and contests do. This is another creative marketing strategy that’s most effective when it’s focused on the process of getting people to participate, then on the giveaway itself.
Giveaways are excellent at driving engagement and traffic to your pages and can be a great lead to sales when done right. The critical bit is to gain more than you’re giving away, e.g. a long-running engagement that lasts beyond the contest.
When using giveaways and contests as a creative marketing strategy, avoid giving your audience too much work to do in order to stand a chance to win. As it will put them off way before they try. The prize that you give them should also be relevant to them, it should align with the purpose and value that you’re offering them.
Always Measure Your Creative Strategies
The digital age has really made things simple even for creative marketing. When trying your creative strategy, you should ensure to measure and test the new methods to see how effective they are. So you don’t keep pouring money and time into dead ends. It also means you can keep improving the methods that are working in order to gain maximum benefits from your campaigns.
It’s very easy to measure data in real-time with a chance to quickly tweak whenever needed. This can be done across various digital platforms such as social media or emails or specific pieces of content and so on. Your creative marketing strategy should be specific, measurable, attainable, and time-based.
Use Startup Techniques
Changes in consumer behavior that are being fueled by digital technology and media are seriously affecting how a creative marketer thinks and operates. Like entrepreneurs that are constantly adjusting their game to better fit into the market.
For example, the rise of microcontent. Think about Instagram Reels or TikTok. These have changed the way consumers digest content. Creative marketers must therefore adapt to new ways to get their brands in front of this audience in an infotainment manner.
Today the success of marketing is no longer measured by how much you do to attract your customers. Be it great campaigns or ads or the content you create, it’s measured by how much engagement, revenue, or loyalty you gain from the marketing efforts you use.
For this reason, you need to look at the overall picture and see things from your customer’s perspectives. Give them the kind of experience they would value. Keep measuring for effectiveness and use the ever-present data when making decisions.
What KPIs Are Measured in Creative Marketing?
What are marketing creative KPIs?
There would be no point in any kind of marketing if there was no return on investment. So, how can you know whether your creative marketing efforts are bearing any fruit? The strategies mentioned above are able to deliver great results but they must also be guided by your brand goals and objectives.
Then you should be aware of what key performance indicators to look out for. These are what you will use to measure the success of your creative marketing efforts. Hence, what are your KPIs? They must be quantifiable and measurable.
Here are the relevant KPIs in creative marketing:
- Social media engagement and reach Did any of your content go viral or at least get a reaction from your target audience? Did you get people talking?
- Revenue Did you get a return on your investment?
- Organic search and site visits Was there an increase in organic traffic?
- Shares Were there more shares or fewer?
- Conversions Did your creative marketing campaign lead to more conversions?
There may be other KPIs you can look into. They will likely vary from business to business.
How to Run an Effective and Successful Creative Marketing
Which of the following is true of building a creative marketing organization? All of it is true!
A few elements must be in place to effectively use creative marketing. These elements will definitely vary from business to business. But here are a few basic ones:
Creative Marketing Brief
What is a creative brief in marketing?
This is simply an outline that will guide the creative team on the approach and manner of delivery of the creative marketing campaigns. A brief will connect each creative approach to the broader goal of your business by listing out each strategy of the campaign. It will be used by the whole team working on the campaign, whether they are an internal team or an outsourced team.
A Team with a Structure
Having a structure is key to attaining your creative marketing goals. There must be a smooth liaison creative marketing structure with team members that have the right skills for the right task. Without it, you run the risk of confusion and failure.
Leverage on Tech Tools
Your team can utilize the countless digital tools available to help them bring out the best. Inspire their creative juices and present their most original work in the trendiest manner in order to reach the right target audience. Using tech tools also means utilizing data to easily adapt or tweak as may be necessary. Tech simply streamlines your entire creative marketing process and ensures efficiency.
Conclusion
Creative marketing is not a re-invention of the wheel. It’s a practice of divergent thinking that’s necessary with the changing markets. It’s the ability to come up with many approaches to solving one problem and then pick the best out of all of those.
Creative marketing ideas are about finding the most authentic ways to reach your target audience with the best solutions that get to them via the easiest process. How does this translate to your brand?
