In the modern-day, the world of digital marketing is seemingly everywhere you look – you would think that it would be confined to TV, computer, and phone screens, and so it would only be encountered during the use of these devices, but this isn’t true at all – especially if you live in an urban area, as screens, posters, and other marketing campaigns are plastered everywhere, from train carriages to digital bus stops.
One aspect of digital marketing campaigns that consumers notice, for better or for worse, is the creativity involved in generating effective campaigns.
After all, the entire purpose of marketing campaigns is to catch the consumer’s attention and hopefully convert this attention into a transaction at a later date, so if the campaign isn’t somewhat entertaining or eye-catching, it’s going to slip easily below the radar.
Of course, creativity for creativity’s sake isn’t going to guarantee great results from a marketing campaign either – it’s simply one of the most important factors alongside a host of other critical steps in the process of putting the polish on campaigns that require incredible amounts of hard work, countless hours of research, and idea generation at every step.
In such a competitive market, and with the range of tools, skills, and resources at the fingertips of digital marketers, there is nearly endless potential for a creative mind or spark to ignite a truly captivating and unique marketing campaign.
Read on to find out more about why creativity is so important in the world of digital marketing and how it can be used to achieve the best results for your brand’s campaign.
Impress with varying creative formats
Before marketing’s digital revolution, creative formats were limited entirely to physical materials and environments. Technology has enabled the number of ways in which potential customers can be reached to expand exponentially, with an ever-growing number of internet-connected devices present in their lives and ever-more time spent in a digital environment.
While we have not yet entered the world of Harry Potter-like videos embedded in newspapers, marketers are no longer limited to physical resources such as ink and paper or the ability to hire a crew of actors and cameras and can let creativity flourish with the power of digital technology.
Physical marketing is still critically important, of course, and technologies such as screens installed in public places have merged the two worlds closer together – but digital technology has taken the creative formats that can be used and enabled to essentially endless possibilities.
Animated marketing video production, video, photo, written content, and rich, engaging color make up just some of the multimedia arsenal that digital marketers now have access to, which, when used in conjunction with one another, can be used to create highly effective and engaging digital marketing campaigns.
Engage effectively with the target audience
A hugely important part of any successful campaign, whether digital or otherwise, is ensuring you target the correct audience. A failure to market to the right people will inevitably end up with a campaign falling on deaf ears, and so extensive research should be done into the subjects and formats that will captivate the audience the most effectively.
In the world of digital marketing, the ability to target audiences accurately and effectively is one of the most important to get right. In a case where this is unsuccessful, the campaign has failed from the start, and countless preparation hours have been wasted.
Especially on online platforms, the amount of data that is available to contribute to the targeting of the correct consumers is highly extensive, and with such large quantities of data comes the opportunity to encourage conversions from consumers in highly creative and ingenious ways.
For example, you may discover you have an increase in interactions with an Instagram story promoting a new product or service but fail to achieve a respective increase in conversions – maybe your story was targeting potential customers at the right time, but it was not unique or exciting enough to captivate their attention effectively.
Both in terms of data spawning creative ideas and being creative with how you use data to your company’s advantage, thinking outside of the box will help your brand stand out from the crowd.
Stand out with unique ideas
Leading on from the previous paragraph, creativity is critical to ensuring that your digital marketing campaigns catch the eye – because, as previously discussed, getting ads in front of eyes is now a highly efficient process, given the prevalence of online devices and the data that can be accessed about people’s browsing and shopping habits, as well as their personal preferences.
This means that the number of ads that people are exposed to on a daily basis has hugely increased, and as a result, people have developed increased resistance and greater ambivalence towards ads, especially when they are being shown ads when not necessarily in the mood to spend money.
With so many adverts being shown to consumers on a daily basis, it takes ingenuity to even be noticed, as the digital marketing space is so condensed with the same ideas, tropes, and themes.
When people are being shown advertisements in their spare time, such as when watching TV or scrolling social media, they now expect the adverts to give additional value to their lives – other than simply showing them that a particular product exists and can have this or that benefit for a particular price.
All of this stands to entrench creativity as an essential tool in marketing campaigns, as making a breakthrough to consumers could be a case of thinking outside of the box or creating something incredibly unique that has a much greater chance of captivating them.
A good example of this is using soccer players in a marketing campaign targeting boys between the ages of 7-16 – creating a video where they show off their skills as part of an advert for a product will captivate the intended audience much more than just showing the product itself.
Adapt to different formats and markets
As mentioned previously, technology has truly revolutionized marketing – and one way in which it has done that is by enabling a dazzling array of ways to advertise.
In terms of platforms, it’s no longer a case of just erecting billboards on the highway and buying out a page in a newspaper – these both continue to be valid platforms in their own right, but digital adverts need to be highly specialized to the platform on which they are posted, whether it’s a case of email outreach, short-form video ads for YouTube, or an Instagram Story for a trendy new product.
Whether consumers are targeted by marketing campaigns while watching TV, scrolling Twitter, or playing an online game, it’s important that the advert takes into consideration the platform on which it is posted, as it could be a costly mistake to advertise on platforms where the target audience isn’t even present, or totally miss the mark with the content.
This means that when you create a new marketing campaign, creative, agile minds are required on your team so that a marketing concept can be lifted and successfully transferred to multiple different platforms and still tick the boxes for the correct aesthetic, tone of voice, and relative content.
Such is the nature of social media consumption in the modern-day, with the endless options available to suit each person best, that by focusing on one platform, you are not likely to reach every potential consumer – and so each post to each platform needs the correct creative framing.
Keep things fresh
While it will always be important to stay on-brand with your digital marketing campaigns – as customers being familiar with and being able to recognize your brand quickly is essential in ensuring your brand is in the public conscience – keeping campaigns and their ideas fresh is an essential task for any continually successful marketing campaign.
As mentioned previously, such is the level of saturation of digital marketing that content needs to be captivating instantly, as the chance to catch a browser’s attention grows slimmer as time goes on.
For creative minds, this is the ideal task. There are a number of ways in which content can not only be created but also re-created into something fundamentally different that can achieve different results when exposed to the consumer market.
For example, should you be running a campaign of television adverts for a company, it’s likely that you will have an allotted amount of running time for the advert, as TV adverts can’t be skipped unless the watcher turns off or switches channels.
While the advert in its entirety would potentially be too long to be effective on social media, it can be clipped to fit a shorter time slot and attention span, or small additions could be filmed that are unmistakably the same product but merely reminding and nodding to the main ad campaign.
This means that even if the original ad was popular, this popularity could be used to keep it in the public conscience without becoming repetitive or annoying.
