Intro to Creative Strategy
Creative strategy comes from the intersection of data, business goals, and results in specific goal-meeting marketing planning, messaging, and launch. But where do you start?
Creative strategy comes from the intersection of data, business goals and results in specific goal-meeting marketing planning, messaging, and launch. But where do you start?
Write everything down
It might sound basic, but just do it. You’re embarking on a fact seeking mission that arm you in developing something new and wonderful. You want every single thing memorialized in writing for your whole creative team to reference. When it’s all said and done, this will be how you develop your scope of work and/or creative brief.
Start with the end in mind
Goals. Do you have business goals? Sales goals? Target numbers? You need to know what this marketing campaign or ongoing strategy will support.
Action. From there, you need to determine what you want the audience of your marketing message to do. Is it buy online? Buy in a brick and mortar store? Visit a website? Sigh-up for something? Follow you on social? This will, in turn, become your “call to action.”
Customer and behavioral analysis
Data. Now you want to bring up your current data. Who are your current customers or clients? Where do they shop for your product or hire you (e.g. online, referrals, from your email list, Google to your website, social media etc.)? What social media channels do they use? How old are they? Where do they live? Research as much as you can about them.
Competitive analysis
Size them up. Define your competition. Who else is selling the same thing you are your same market-space? This means your direct competitors right now (not who you want to become in 10 years). If you’re craft kombucha company, look at other small-batch beverage producers, not at Coca-Cola or Coors. Likewise, if you sell courses online, who else is in that niche? Harvard does classes online, but unless you are an American ivy league university, they are not your competition. What kind of marketing and advertising is your competition doing to reach your same customer or client you want directly?
Branding integration
Stay true to your brand. Special campaigns do not need to be a strictly branded like an annual report, but they do need to fit your brand in tone both visually and contextually - so that when someone sees the ad, they know it’s you.
Time to create
Now that you get to this point, you probably have a good idea of what you want to say. But how do you say it? This is where you find your gold. This is where you take all of the things you learned above and make a beautiful soup. Revisit your call-to-action, say it as simply and clearly as possible, e.g. “Enjoy Coke.” “Enjoy” is as brilliant an action word as you can get - it is both what Coke wants you to do and what you will be doing after you buy and drink a Coke. It means “buy,” “drink,” “have a wonderful feeling” all at one. When you really look at it, it is a call to action and a brand promise. One word. One.
Make magic
None of these things should be taken lightly. There are endless depths to each task and they are continually in flux. Your understanding of them should be ongoing and consistently deepening. This isn’t something you should be going alone. You need a solid and experienced partner to make the most out of your marketing and integrated creative strategy. Contact Flanagan Silcott to start that partnership.