The best digital marketers can never have too much information. The ability to harness the quantitative insights relevant to any campaign and use them to create actionable strategies, is essential to every successful marketing enterprise in 2024.
At the same time, it’s easy to get lost in the numbers. More data is available than ever before. Although data should inform every aspect of a campaign strategy, the secret sauce that makes a successful campaign stand out is something no computer can script — creativity.
3 Tips to Improve Creativity in Marketing
- Creativity starts with buy-in from leadership.
- Partner with independent digital creators to expand your reach and vary your campaign.
- Prioritize creative marketers and train them to be more data savvy.
It’s true that marketing has become more of a science than ever, with algorithms and buyer’s journeys reducing every task to one step in a decision tree or flow chart. During each process, however, a dash of human ingenuity is still required to stand out in a competitive landscape. Here’s a closer look at why creativity still matters in marketing and how to do it.
Why Creativity Still Matters in Marketing
Creativity helps make your message stand out in a cluttered world of information. Customers and clients respond to messaging that speaks to them on a personal level more than any algorithm-generated insights. Any long-term effort to build brand equity starts with fostering a sense of personal familiarity with your brand and maintaining that familiarity over time. Organizations in the B2B and B2C space recognize the need to creatively evolve and respond to shifting trends while maintaining a familiar voice.
Of course, marketers can’t emphasize creativity to the point of ignoring data-driven insights. But consider taking the opposite approach to its logical extreme: complete reliance on quantitative inputs and AI-generated content. The messaging might come close to its target, yet invariably will miss some nuances that only a human can grasp. AI outputs are only as good as its source inputs, but no AI output will be as sensitive to a target audience’s peculiar needs and tastes as a human.
Data should inform that process, but human insights are always the first ingredient in seeing what is possible. Creativity allows us to be the first to identify when something might be possible. Innovation is applied creativity, turning a new idea into a valuable solution or novel process.
Originality will separate memorable from unmemorable marketing content. It’s easy for an ad campaign that’s been generalized to attract the most eyeballs to meet the approval of data-driven recommendations. The temptation to be everything to everyone is strong. Yet this approach will never allow your marketing content to stand out among the overwhelming sea of messages people see, hear and read on a daily basis.
Investing in developing highly creative ads pays off in higher ROI, engagement and performance impact.
3 Ways to Improve Creativity in Digital Marketing
Digital marketing practices, such as email, text and social media channels, etc., evolved in parallel with online consumer tracking practices. The race to turn consumer data into a game-changing insight is a tempting one to win. While it’s easy to fall behind the competition when data-driven insights are ignored, creativity is the separator that allows a marketing campaign to surge ahead. When creative insights are applied, digital marketers thrive, allowing for a unique ability to make messages stand out either through a message or its application.
The challenge therein is to apply those creative insights intelligently. The ability to discern between two nuanced messages and determine which will land with a target audience and which will not, is a uniquely human trait. Not only must original messaging be on-target, it must align with your available data. A creative-leaning marketer must know when to take off their thinking cap and let the data dictate their next move. Your data, for example, might identify x discrete audiences to target with an ad campaign, with each audience’s message uniquely crafted by a human author. But at some point the rate of return on x+1 will become cost prohibitive.
Here are three tips for applying creative insights intelligently in a data-driven industry:
1. Creativity Starts With Leadership
More than any metrics that capture creative effectiveness, the biggest advocates for creativity must be corporate leaders. An organization whose leaders value creativity understands that creativity can go well beyond brand communications and advertisements, using innovative thinking to shape how systems are designed, how challenges are converted into opportunities, how employees collaborate and how organizations engage with customers and other stakeholders. Cross-collaboration within an organization can tap into your marketers’ creative potential in a variety of initiatives.
2. Partner With Creators
Advertisers need a large creative pipeline to generate fresh content assets to test, learn from and optimize to drive better performance. If that’s the case, it makes sense that brands in both the B2B and B2C space are increasingly associating with independent digital creators and influencers, who bring in their own audiences as sources of potential demand generation, as well as the creative content brands desire.
3. Give Data a Chance to Inspire
It’s easier to take a creative marketing team and train them to be data-savvy than asking your number-crunchers to generate original messaging from a data set. Creators appreciate the clarity that comes with data, such as the specific audiences an organization is trying to reach, then surround it with the right voice or visual appearance. The two disciplines enjoy a more symbiotic relationship than we sometimes give them credit for.
Whether insourced or outsourced, the need for creativity in marketing remains as strong as ever. Leaders who recognize that need and foster the creative freedom to push the boundaries of their existing initiatives, will in time see a better ROI from campaigns than those who merely follow the script.
