When was the last time you saw an advertising campaign that you thought was truly creative? Creativity is essential in marketing and advertising, but many people struggle to be creative when promoting their brand. Even when you think you’re being creative or have a great idea to begin with, you can end up with something that doesn’t look like what you initially intended at the end of the process. If you want to be truly creative, you need to know how to avoid cliches, boring ideas and things that have been done before. This guide will help you to make all of your future marketing more creative and interesting.
Know What’s Been Done Before
TEN BIG MARKETING RISKS THAT PAID OFF FOR BRANDS
You need to know what has come before you if you want to be creative when planning marketing campaigns. Understanding what’s been done in the past doesn’t necessarily mean that you should be avoiding doing anything like it. In fact, past advertising campaigns could influence what you do and provide plenty of inspiration. But it’s also important to know what has become old hat. You should also be aware of what your competitors are doing now so that you don’t simply follow the crowd and do exactly what they’re doing.
Have a Diverse Team of Marketers
For a team that is overflowing with creative ideas, try to gather marketers from diverse backgrounds. By doing this, you will have people who can offer a range of ideas, experiences and thoughts. If your team have largely the same cultural, educational and life experiences, you could end up with a room full of people who all simply agree with each other and share the same ideas. You could even end up creating marketing campaigns that completely miss the mark or are offensive to certain demographics if you don’t strive for a diverse team.
Work with an Agency That Knows Your Space
Working with outside agencies gives you the extra support you need to produce your marketing campaigns. Even if you have your own marketing executives, working together with an agency brings fresh new insight to your work. If you’re looking for a marketing agency to work with, it makes sense to look for one that has experience working in your field. Choosing Timmermann Group to take care of marketing for your pet food brand makes sense because they have experience with clients in the same space. Doing this means you will have an agency that understands your competitors and can use their creativity to do something different.
Use Different Types of Content and Media
There are many different types of media and content that you can use in your marketing campaigns. Creative use of different types of content can give your marketing an edge, and show that you’re capable of doing something interesting. Many brands have started to use video in an interesting way, even going as far as to make short films and video series that aim to be more than just straight adverts for a brand. You can think of innovative ways to use various forms of content or be inspired by existing ad campaigns to put your own twist on it.
Value Humans Over Machines
Technology is helping marketers to achieve a lot in their marketing campaigns. It helps with putting campaigns together, as well as with analyzing the results of a campaign. However, it’s important not to rely too much on technology if you want to be creative. Technology can only get you so far, and fancy new tools aren’t going to do all of the work for you. Humans are still necessary for large parts of the marketing process, especially when it comes to being creative. You need creative minds to help you do your best work.
Be Willing to Take Risks
Playing it safe can still help you to promote your business. You could produce marketing campaigns that people pay attention to, even if they are perhaps not that exciting. However, if you want to be creative, you should be willing to take risks. Of course, the more risk you take, the larger the chance is that your risk doesn’t work out. However, if it does pay off, you’re sure to be glad that you took the risk.
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Make Sure You’re Telling Stories
Storytelling has become the essential element of any good ad campaign. People want there to be some value in the marketing that they receive. They want to hear, watch and read interesting stories, and they want to be able to see themselves in ad campaigns. If you want to be creative, you need to think beyond creating basic, standalone marketing materials. Aim to tell stories with your marketing so that you can create emotions and put out memorable ad campaigns.
Find Fun Ways to Personalize
Personalizing your marketing materials can also be a way to introduce more creativity into your marketing. There are simple ways to make ads more personal, such as including names on marketing emails, but there are other personalization methods you can explore and have fun with too. For example, you might want to consider how to personalize promotional items and merchandise that you could send to clients. There are many different items you can choose, from baked goods to items that connect to your brand in some way.
Do Something Surprising and Unexpected
Doing something completely unexpected is the ultimate way to be creative with your marketing. Of course, you need to have a truly creative team that can offer up exciting ideas to achieve this. It’s also important not to do something just for shock value or to try and be different. Your decisions still have to make sense for your brand, and they have to work for your customers. Even if you want to do something completely surprising, you need to think about whether it’s going to be the right sort of surprise and how it will be received.
Make your marketing much more creative with the advice above. You can transform your marketing campaigns by focusing on creativity and aiming for something new.