How to ensure your next marketing campaign is more creative
In today’s cluttered marketing landscape, simply having a sound strategy is not enough to capture consumer attention and drive business results.
Breakthrough campaigns require creativity that surprises, delights and disrupts expectations. Follow these key tips to ensure your next marketing initiative rises above the noise with imagination that ignites tangible impact.
Get fresh perspectives
Getting input and perspectives from people outside your core marketing team can bring new ideas and approaches.
Try holding a brainstorming session with staff from other departments, customers or running an idea contest open to the general public. Fresh perspectives from people not entrenched in how your marketing campaigns usually run may spark creative marketing ideas you would have never thought of.
If your in-house team is struggling, consider working with an expert creative agency. Creative campaigns with Fluro, for example, may help your business achieve far greater success.
Do outside research
Look at what creative campaigns your competitors or companies in other industries are running. Study marketing awards and industry reports spotlighting creative excellence to find inspiring ideas from brands globally.
Even campaigns that have little relation to your industry can spark creative thoughts on angles, formats and media platforms you can adapt. Keep an open mind and catalog campaigns or elements that catch your interest to potentially draw from.
Set specific creative goals
Rather than setting broad goals to generally be more creative, set specific imaginative goals and parameters.
For example, aim to have at least one highly visual, interactive or experiential element per campaign. Or require each campaign to include some element never utilised in your past marketing whether it’s an experimental ad format, use of CGI or leveraging new technologies like VR. Pushing your team outside conventional options forces more creativity.
Build in creative time
Your team needs adequate time to ideate if you want truly innovative marketing concepts. When timelines are too compressed, you often end up just tweaking past tactics versus developing something entirely new.
Build in brainstorming meetings early where no ideas are too crazy and set milestones for when the creative brief must be set to give time for exploring options. Recognise that game-changing creativity requires an investment of time as well as budget resources.
Incentivise imagination
Provide incentives that specifically reward creative excellence versus just sales metrics performance. recognise employees who put forward inventive campaign proposals whether ultimately selected or not.
Consider small prizes for the most disruptive campaign concept proposed or staff voting awards honouring the most imaginative marketing. When you incentivise innovation specifically versus only focusing on ROI, you’ll see more boundary-pushing proposals brought forward.
Embrace some risk
Truly breakthrough marketing often entails an element of risk whether in format, messaging or media platforms leveraged. Your full team needs to recognise that truly game-changing creative may not always have guaranteed results but represents a deliberate opportunity.
Set specific budget allowances or campaign frequency quotas designated just for testing more risky creative concepts showing promise to build an organisational comfort level with embracing some creative uncertainty.
The most effective marketing today fuses both right and left brain strengths leveraging both strategic considerations but also spur-of-the-moment inspiration.
Following the above tips will prime your organisation to deliver your next marketing showpiece loaded with ingenious surprise and delight. Pushing for more creativity will not only engage audiences and drive results but also energise your team, delivering the remarkable.
