Add creative marketing into your strategy to make you competitive.
When small-to-midsize business (SMB) leaders approach their marketing strategies, it’s important to think outside the box. Creative marketing provides a unique twist that may be more effective for connecting with specific audiences than traditional methods. By taking a different tactic than other companies, you help differentiate your brand, which can boost brand recognition.
To help you use creative marketing to set your business apart, we’ll discuss what creative marketing is, why it’s important, and how you can develop a creative marketing strategy. Using these insights, you can formulate creative strategies that land better with customers and set your brand apart from your competitors.
What is creative marketing?
Creative marketing involves using imaginative strategies and techniques to present your offering and brand to customers. Your goal is to grab your audience’s attention in a way that increases engagement and sets you apart from your competition.
For SMB owners, creative marketing can make the difference between connecting with customers and blending in with the messaging of bigger, better-funded competitors. It’s a powerful way of being more impactful without overspending. A creative idea can make a single campaign more effective than several run-of-the-mill ones because it will stand out in the minds of your target customers.
As a result, you tackle a key business problem—how to maximize the effectiveness of your marketing without maxing out your budget. In addition, you make it easy for customers to distinguish your brand from those of other companies, making it a simpler task for them to choose and then promote your products or services.
Why is creative marketing important?
Creative marketing can improve your chances of connecting with customers and distinguishing yourself from others in your sector. This even applies to well-known brands: Dunkin Donuts recently ran a campaign starring the Bostonian bard, Ben Affleck. In one ad, Mr. Affleck dons his full Massachusetts accent as he serves customers in a Medford Dunkin.[1]
Like many creative marketing campaigns, the Affleck ad leverages humor. For Dunkin Donuts, this added some important ingredients to its brand recipe: levity and relatability. For smaller companies, creative marketing is important because, as it did for Dunkin Donuts, it can add a different flavor to your brand—one that may fit your customers’ palates.
How to develop creative marketing campaigns
The process of developing creative marketing campaigns consists of five basic steps. When used in sequence, these can result in effective campaigns that improve as you reflect on them.
1. Define goals and objectives
Defining goals and objectives in creative marketing revolves around pinpointing what you want each campaign to accomplish and the milestones you’ll use to gauge success.
Goals, in the context of creative marketing, refer to high-level statements that you use to guide your efforts. For example, a goal could be to boost brand engagement with baby boomers.
Objectives are different in that they consist of the milestones or steps you take to reach your goals. For instance, an objective may be to generate 20,000 impressions on a creative ad featuring an allusion to classic baby boomer shows and movies such as Grease or Blazing Saddles.
By dividing your goals and objectives as separate entities, you can take a more systematic approach to your creative marketing strategy.
2. Understand your target audience
Each target audience finds different things funny, interesting, or exciting, so figuring out what grabs your target market’s attention is an important step.
Here are some ways you can better understand your audience:
Outline your target audience’s demographic details, including age, income, education level, and most important personal “assets,” which may include their homes, vehicles, or time with family and friends.
Get to know what your target audience tends to purchase. For business clients, this could include solutions that are similar or related to yours. For individual customers, lifestyle choices often dictate how they spend money.
Conduct surveys of sample customers. You can hire a professional survey company to pick the participants, help you develop questions, and analyze the results.
3. Define your creative strategy
The sky’s the limit when it comes to your creative strategy, which makes it all the more important to define it in concrete terms. Some common creative marketing strategies include using:
Humor
Emotionally compelling storytelling
Unique visual aesthetics
Surprising your audience with unexpected messaging or imagery
Unique face-to-face marketing experiences such as public taste tests or dance contests
User-generated marketing collateral, such as brand logos, artwork, or music
Regardless of the strategy you choose, the goal is to make your campaigns stand out and engage users from a different angle.
4. Implement your creative marketing campaign
Once you have these core pieces in place, it’s time to implement your campaign using a combination of the most effective channels and collateral. As you decide how to get your marketing in front of users, consider these common options:
Social media
Video marketing via YouTube, Vimeo, or another platform
Email
Podcasts
Live streaming
Outdoor advertisements
Depending on your marketing collateral, you may be able to use multiple channels to implement your campaign. For instance, using a video, you can leverage your YouTube channel, social media outlets, and email marketing using a link to your content.
5. Measure results
By measuring results, you gain a deeper understanding of how effective your campaign is and ways to improve your next effort. Measurement is most effective when you ground it in your campaign’s goals.
It’s important to note that just because you’re being creative with your marketing doesn’t mean you have to resort to non-quantifiable metrics. Often, the same metrics you’d use to measure the success of a traditional campaign work for gauging the effectiveness of a creative effort as well. As discussed below, these may involve revenue, site traffic, social media reach, and more.
Creative marketing examples
Here are some examples of creative marketing that have raised a few eyebrows:
Burger King added, “OK, Google, what is the Whopper burger?” at the end of a 15-second ad.[2] This triggered customers’ smart speakers to start reading the Whopper’s Wikipedia page.
WeTransfer created an ad featuring a spoken word poem telling customers to leave the internet and go out and live life.[3] Because WeTransfer’s service saves you time, getting off the internet is, ironically, on-brand.
Nike put their logo with the word “RUN” next to it on the backs of public benches.[4] And the company also removed the seat. Get it?
Spotify featured the stats of artists people listened to in a social media campaign designed to strengthen connections between musicians and their fans.[5]
Pet food company Chewy appeals to their target market’s emotions by highlighting thoughtful instances of customer service. One example is a viral tweet about how a Chewy rep responded when a customer’s dog passed away.[6]
Each of these creative marketing case studies helps differentiate the brand from its competitors and engages with customers in an expected way.
How to measure the success of a creative marketing campaign
Here are some metrics that many find useful when quantifying the impact of their creative marketing:
Revenue: You can measure sales trends before and for a time period following your campaign and see if there’s a move upward monetarily.
Traffic: A boost in either site or in-store traffic may be one of the core objectives of your strategy. You can measure it using site analytics and in-store traffic counters.
Social media reach: Reach is a reported metric on social accounts, but you can also track new followers gained or a higher click-through rate.
Engagement: This "vanity metric" includes likes, shares, clicks, and comments on social media campaigns.
Organic SEO conversion metrics: The number of sign-ups, downloads, or sales the campaign inspires.
Increased brand awareness: This is measured through customer surveys. You can issue surveys or use online engagement measurement tools to measure customer sentiment before and after your campaign.
Common questions about creative marketing
Here are some common queries about creative marketing:
What is the difference between creative marketing and traditional marketing?
Traditional marketing involves conventional approaches, such as print ads, radio commercials, direct mail, and billboards. A conventional marketing approach also tends to depend on one-way communication, where the company sends a message to a customer without expecting feedback or interaction.
Creative marketing tends to involve approaches that catch your target market by surprise when it comes to the kind of messaging, ad placement and techniques, and the level of interaction customers have with your marketing collateral.
What are the challenges of creative marketing?
One of the most significant challenges of creative marketing techniques is making sure you stay on brand. In an attempt to do something different, it can be easy to stray from the ideals and imagery of your brand.
Also, it’s possible to get “too” creative. In an attempt to get a laugh or catch your audience off-guard, you may end up offending people or doing something that’s so out of character it loses some of your customers’ trust.
Hiring an agency to help
By using the above how-to steps, you can design a creative marketing strategy that earns more interest from customers and differentiates you from the competition. And by following the measurement techniques, you can quantify the impact of your campaigns. Then you can use that data to tweak your next creative marketing effort.
Your next step is to start choosing a creative agency. On the other hand, if you want to take on your creative marketing campaign on your own, you can start figuring out the best marketing type and channel for your creative campaign. Regardless of which path you take, these resources can help:
