Creative Strategy

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

What is a creative strategy?

With your marketing brief, creative brief, media brief, and media plan in place, you can now move onto the finer details of your creative strategy.

The creative strategy is one of the most important elements of your strategy because it is the most visual element. In other words, it will dictate the overall look and feel of your marketing from a branding and creative perspective.

Establishing a creative strategy

Developing the creative strategy is where the fun really begins! It’s time to take your strategy and build creative messages and ideas that you will communicate through digital content.

A creative strategy is the long-term approach of how you develop visual stimuli for your brand, product, or service. It dictates the theme, look, and feel of all your digital assets.

Needless to say, the creative strategy should adhere to the overarching strategy. Doing this ensures that all work is following a specific guide, targeting a specific response, and cultivating repeat and specific behavior.

As previously mentioned, consider budget when developing creative strategy. It is important not to limit your initial thinking, but at the same time, at some stage, you need to draw the line and be realistic about your possibilities and what creative assets you can afford to develop.

You need to identify several key areas in your creative strategy.

• Ideas: What ads or content will you make? What will the content say? And how are you different?
• Narrative: Refer back to your content strategy – what is the story you are trying to tell?
• Value proposition: Consider your online value proposition and your customer value proposition. What is your key competitive differentiation? And how can you best communicate this to potential customers with the help of your creative strategy?
• Visual: What will everything look like? Is there a visual theme or guideline?
• Execution: What media, formats, shapes, and sizes will you use as part of the creative suite?

Managing expectations

Managing expectations is a part of the job of any digital marketing manager. There is often a myth that creative can be done for ‘free’, or that it’s ‘just pictures’, so it’s easy to do. This is not the case!

All creative, technical executions require time and money investment to produce. So you need to manage your ambitions (and the ambitions of other stakeholders) in line with your available budget and the time to produce the creative assets.

Because you’ll be creating ads and marketing content for different channels, you should create a list of the various formats that you want to use in your strategy. This list should be added to your content strategy, and include the creative requirements of each format, as well as the dimensions and specifications.

Creative strategy vs content strategy

Let’s take a moment to consider the distinction between creative strategy and content strategy.

• Creative strategy refers to every aspect of creative required for all media channels. This includes both inbound and outbound channels and the website or ecommerce site.
• Content strategy, on the other hand, focuses on the website and inbound channels.

The content strategy seeks to maximize SEO, brand consistency, and visibility. And it ensures that content creation maximizes value to the customer and attracts and retains them. Remember, you are creating content for your potential and existing customers.