Creative marketing campaigns are the essence of your success. Without them, you lack the means to reach and engage with your audience. But what is creative marketing and how should your analytics strategy work in this regard?
It can be a massive challenge, and not everyone is up to it. It requires turning objective data into a story format that appeals to each consumer’s subjective viewpoint. You have to put information through the filter of creativity to develop stories, emotion, and an entire campaign for your brand.
Quite often, it is something that is an afterthought, despite representing 80% of your campaign’s success.
1. What kind of objective marketing data is there?
There are some obvious ones, including your market demographics and customer satisfaction information. However, there is much more to it than that. Not only are there various types of objective marketing data, but there are multiple dimensions that must be understood and focused on. For example, the length of video watched is an important metric, but you also need to focus on other dimensions, such as the version of the creative in question and the context of the creative itself.
The challenge is that too often, creative collateral is looked at as being one dimensional when the truth is that they have multiple dimensions that go far beyond mere “clicks.” A single video has storylines, characters, story arcs, reveals, reversals, CTAs, sound and produces emotions. All of these parameters affect and also hinge on the emotional state of the viewer. Discover present and future solutions for automating successful campaigns:
2. What is creative marketing?
A good creative marketing campaign can communicate an organization’s message to potential customers in a novel way that overcomes barriers and ensures engagement, helping that organization stand out from the competition for the right reasons.
The key is to create the right user experience to pull out the insights or actions you want to achieve. It is, ultimately, all about the user.
Turning hard data into a flourishing, creative marketing initiative may seem like an oblique process from the outside. However, there are concrete steps that every creative marketing campaign needs to fulfill.
3. Collect your data
The first such step is to collect your data. This will form the bedrock on which all other decisions and actions are predicated. What sort of data must you have in hand? Who is your audience? What does your ideal customer want? How will they consume the creative information? The end product should be an executive brief that clearly outlines your business goals along with the gaps you currently have in getting there.
4. Develop a brand story
All creative marketing campaigns ultimately boil down to storytelling. You cannot do that if you lack a brand story. It’s essential that your business has a compelling story that speaks to why you do what you do and what sets you apart from competitors. Without one, you encounter numerous issues that will ultimately derail your efforts.
Without a compelling brand story, the strategy becomes derailed by so-called expert recommendations, new tools, and capabilities that may not bear at all on your goals, resulting in analytics strategies that have nothing to do with reality.
5. A multiple mediums brand story
Your brand story should flow smoothly across all mediums, from blog posts to social media interactions to video storytelling.
This flies in the face of the age-old advice to choose a medium and stick with it. True, some mediums may not offer value to you. However, that is not the case for all of them. A good creative strategy takes into account the various platforms that work for your organization, as well as your audience, and then builds across them all at once.
Why not start small? Simply put, when you’re building out a customer journey, your audience will require multiple touchpoints. It is best to create your story all at once, rather than piece by piece and wait to see if it works.
6. Execute
Once you have a great idea, you must bring it to life. Make sure that you’re budgeting for the creative talent that you need to execute your creative marketing campaign. For many creative writing campaigns, a production specialist, such as a video marketing expert or creative concept team, can be brought in to help bring your dream to life.