Create a Steller Creative Strategy with These 10 Real-Life Examples

Create a Steller Creative Strategy with These 10 Reals As marketers, we constantly feel the pressure from our stakeholders, bosses, maybe even managers, to be creative. Not too creative to the point that your idea will get shut down, but creative enough that you are different (and better) than your competition. It sometimes can feel like they are asking you to mix oil and water. Ya feel me? Oh and don’t forget, your creative strategy has to work. To the point that you are confident in what you’re doing, you can prove the ROI, and figure out how to plan and execute the entire strategy. Take a deep breath because after reading this, instead of feeling like this†¦ You’ll feel like this. In this post you’ll learn everything you need to know about creative strategies, from how-to-write one, to successful, real-life examples that you can implement in your own workplace. Let’s get started! The Importance of a Creative Strategy You know creative strategies are important, probably because you were asked to make one, but you might not understand why  they are important. Creative strategies assist the company in reaching marketing goals, prove their ROI, and support business growth through a strategic and well-executed approach. Basically, your creative strategy is what, how, and why, you’re going to reach your marketing goals and business objectives. Without one, you risk losing sight of your projects, going over budget, and ticking off your stakeholders. 😠¨ How To Write The Best #Creative Strategy with @.How to Write the Best Creative Strategy Writing an entire creative strategy can be pretty intimidating, but don’t worry. I’ve broken it down step-by-step so it seems a little less daunting (hopefully). 1. Marketing Goals Before you come up with your creative strategy, you need to know what you’re trying to achieve by setting a marketing goal. Don’t worry about the how, that comes later... You’ll want your marketing goal to be S.M.A.R.T.😉 S.M.A.R.T. stands for specific, measurable, aspirational, realistic, and time-bound. Here’s an example of a S.M.A.R.T. goal: â€Å"I want to increase my conversion rate by 2% during Q4 2019.† 2. Marketing Key Performance Indicators It’s important that you know which metrics to measure when assessing your goal. In reality, you can’t prioritize every metric, because that would mean that all of your metrics have the same importance (and they shouldn’t be). KPIs are metrics that indicate progress towards a particular goal. Some examples of KPIs that you may be measuring are: Leads generated. Conversions. Revenue. Email list subscribers. Pageviews. Tying KPIs into our other example, the main metric that you would want to focus on is conversions. Make sense? Recommended Reading How to Select Marketing Metrics and KPIs to Monitor Pick a KPI or two that goes hand in hand with your goal and then focus on them. You’ll be surprised how much focusing in on a specific metric can help you reach your goal! Now that you’ve set your marketing goals, it’s time to find out who you’re marketing to. 3. Target Audience Define the ideal person that you want to buy your product or service. The better you know your target audience, the better you can market to them. Understand their needs and wants helps you get inside their minds to create a creative strategy that connects to them.Now you’re probably thinking, how can I apply what I know about my target audience to my creative strategy? Well†¦ Here’s a quick example. Let’s say your target audience are purchasers at hospitals and medical centers. To reach them, blasting out a commercial on TV showing your product line of highly niche medical equipment probably won’t help you reach your goal†¦ But, if you write content that can help your target audience solve real-life problems†¦ well, you get the point. There’s your creative strategy. It’s one and it’s based on attracting your target audience through content that helps them solve their problems. 4. Benefit This step is as simple as it sounds. Answer this: What benefit(s) does my target audience get from my product or service? If you don’t know the direct benefits, there’s no way your audience will understand the benefits. Make sense? Ask yourself these three things to make sure that you are hitting the nail on the head: How to Find the Direct Benefits of Your Product or Service What does my target audience gain from it? What problem does it solve? What is my competitive advantage? Let’s go back to our previous example. The medical equipment company would answer these questions to understand the benefit they provide to their customer: What does my target audience gain from my product or service? What problem does my product solve? What is my competitive advantage? 5. Support All the benefits you just listed are awesome, but they aren’t going to believe you unless they are backed up with some facts. Support your benefits so that people actually believe you. There are a number of different ways you can support your benefit in your creative strategy. Customer testimonials  are a great way to show that real people have used your product or service and prove it works! To get customer testimonials, you can directly ask customers or even use reviews that you get. Statistics are a quick and easy way to prove yourself. It can be as simple as stating â€Å"95% of customers said they would never go back to their old laundry detergent.† The stat deems you credible and persuades your audience to believe you. Using facts  in a creative strategy is very similar to adding a statistic. You see facts in creative strategies all of the time. â€Å"Recommended number one whitening toothpaste among dentists.† It’s a fact and it makes people trust the product. Lastly, demonstrating  how your product works can back up your benefits. Just make sure it actually works. 😉 We’ve all seen those OxiClean commercials†¦ Must I say anymore? 6. Positioning Brand positioning strategy  is a large project in itself. When you consider positioning in your creative strategy, make sure it aligns with your brand. The worst thing is when companies aren’t true to themselves. 7. Deliverables The deliverables of your project are going to be any tangible or intangible actions or tasks that direct the promotion of your product or service. Your deliverables are going to be based solely on the type of creative strategy that you are implementing. For example, a creative content strategy is going to look a lot different than a creative social media strategy. To prepare deliverables for your creative strategy, ask yourself: Who needs to be involved in this project? What tactics need to be implemented to reach our goal? What does the timeline look like to complete this project? You can save a ton of time on your project by using a template that has your entire project laid out with the click of a button. ’s task templates  are a simple way to create a workflow one time and apply it to all future projects. The tasks, due dates, and delegations are automatically assigned, so there won’t be any confusion in your project. This is how they work: First, you’ll want to create a task for every item that needs to be created before the project goes live. Next you’ll want to add the due dates of your project. Maybe you want to give it two months, or two weeks, either way you’ll be able to schedule the appropriate days in the task template. All you have to do is select the number of days before publish that each task should get done. Finally, assign the tasks and set approvals to make sure everyone knows what their role is within the project. ’s task template will save you a ton of time on implementing your creative strategies throughout the entire year. Now to the fun part, budgeting. 😉 8. Budget One thing that ticks off stakeholders more than a bad creative strategy is when that creative strategy goes over budget. But don’t worry, here’s all you need to know so that you don’t go over budget to fulfill your tactics! Steps to Keep Your Creative Strategy on Budget Choose your deliverables Accurately estimate how much each deliverable is going to cost Keep track of where your money is going at all times Drop strategies that aren’t performing well The biggest thing with budgeting  is to make sure you keep an eye on the money and the tactics so that going over budget never becomes an issue. Recommended Reading How To Create A Marketing Budget Plan 9. Executional Guidelines When being creative and doing this â€Å"out of the box,† sometimes we can forget about certain guidelines that our companies have. This step won’t apply to every marketing team. Most likely, if you are part of a larger corporation you will need to include it. This step ensures that your strategy follows any necessary guidelines so that your stakeholders don’t have to hand it right back to you. Pat yourself on the back because you officially know how to write a creative strategy. ðŸ™Å' You’re probably thinking okay great, I know how to write one, but that doesn’t help me think of creative concepts. Well, you’re in luck. If you want to see some successful IRL examples of creative strategies, keep on scrollin’. Types of Creative Strategies with Real Life Examples Getting asked to be creative is worse than the dawn of the blinking cursor. But good news, you wouldn’t be asked to come up with a creative strategy if you weren’t capable of it. So hold your head up high and go into this with an â€Å"I can do it† attitude. 💠ª It would take days to cover every type of creative strategy, so this blog post will cover the most prevalent topics with some killer examples. Content Nowadays everyone is doing content marketing. Well not everyone, but 53%  of businesses use content marketing and that is a lot of companies to compete against. 53% of businesses use content marketing. Use a creative strategy to make yours stand out!If you want to stand out from the rest of the companies, it’s your job to be more creative than them. Instead of using the traditional blogging method, here are a few out-of-the-box ideas to take your content marketing to the next level. Make your content useful. You’re probably thinking, I already do this. Chances are that you don’t as much as you could. Just because your content is educational, doesn’t mean it’s useful to your consumers. A few tips to make your content useful is to: Add helpful templates Make it actionable Use it as a discussion platform for your consumers to engage Use emotion. There’s nothing worse than reading a bone dry article. If it’s boring to write, chances are it’s just as boring to read. Make your consumers feel something when they read your content. Whether it’s humor, excitement, or happiness, adding some type of emotion will help your audience remember you. If you aren’t promoting the content that you are writing, people aren’t going to see it. In fact, you can use this little method to boost your social media traffic to your content by 192%. Be the expert. Before you write content for your next campaign, I challenge you to do double the research that you normally do. Make it your goal to have the most educational article that you possibly can. If you do this, people will be more likely to use your content as a reference than the other leading competitors. Them using you as a reference is a great way to get your foot in the door. 🚠ª Make Your Headlines Stand Out. â€Å"5x as many people read the headline as read the body copy.† - David Ogilvy Your headline is just as important as the copy underneath it. Make sure you are spending the time on your headline that it deserves. Make it catchy, enticing, and creative. If you need some help judging whether your headline will do the trick, try using the Headline Analyzer. Creative Content Strategy A company that slays the content marketing game is Sephora. Instead of a traditional blog, they created a content hub  for their customers to share beauty tips and product knowledge. It’s genius. Not only is it a useful resource for customers to go, but it drives them to their ultimate goal of selling product.