Mia
Did you know that almost 20% of all businesses fail They can’t capture the attention of their target audience and build brand authority.
There’s more to getting your name out there than telling people how great your products are. You’ve got to make a real connection with your customers.
The best way to do that is with creativity in marketing. By embracing memes, taking advantage of current trends, and working with influencers, you’ll stand out from your competition.
The first step is finding a little inspiration for your campaign. We can help you out with that. Check out this guide for a few amazing creative marketing ideas.
What Is Creativity in Marketing?
Creative thinking in marketing involves incorporating unique concepts and ideas into something that your business can use to attract new clients.
There are different types of creative marketing you can use. One of the more popular options is blogs.
Blogging will allow you to keep your audience up to date on industry news or share interesting tips. You can use your content to target keywords and bring people to your site through the power of SEO.
As great as long-form blog posts are, your website shouldn’t only contain walls of text. Add videos to break up the monotony and create visual interest. People are more likely to interact with videos than long articles anyway.
Case studies bring people in by showing your target audience that you’re an expert in your field.
Users like seeing themselves or people like themselves on a company’s website. That’s where user-generated content comes in. Encourage your fans to post pictures of themselves using your product.
These are only a few examples of creative marketing.
Why Is It Important?
So, what is the importance of creativity in marketing? The obvious answer is that being unique will help you stand out from your competitors.
It can also help you build brand awareness, connect with your customers, develop interesting ideas, and save money.
Build Brand Awareness
By creatively working your brand name into a successful campaign, you’ll spread the word around about your business.
For example, if you collaborate with a popular influencer, people will associate that awesome cross-over with your brand. That means they’ll be more likely to connect your name with your logo.
Create a Connection With Your Customers
Creative marketing creates a unique opportunity for you to collaborate and connect with your customers. The people who make up your target audience are unique individuals with interesting ideas.
By working with them, you’ll be able to identify their pain points and come up with ways to solve them. They may even help you plug huge holes in your marketing campaign.
Listening to your target audience will also allow you to make an emotional connection with them. It will humanize you in their eyes.
Develop New Ideas
If your marketing team is stuck in a slump, creative marketing can help pull them out.
They’ll come up with tons of new ideas for promotions. Your company will see an increase in product sales in no time.
Stand Out
No matter what type of industry you’re in, it’s likely that you have a lot of competition. If you don’t do something to make yourself stand out, there’s a good chance that you’ll lose parts of your target audience. This is especially true if your competition is better established than you.
You have to convenience potential customers that you’re different somehow. The best way to do this is by showing off your original ideas.
Save Money
Once you launch a marketing campaign, you’ve got to pour tons of resources into promoting it. If you don’t, nobody will know about it, right? You might be wrong about that.
In truth, creative campaigns tend to promote themselves organically. You’ll waste little to no resources getting the word out about them.
How to Conduct Your Campaign
Now that you know why you should give creative marketing a try, it’s time to talk about how to go about it.
Step one is finding inspiration. After that, you’ve got to build your dream team and go into brainstorming mode.
Find Your Inspiration
Finding inspiration is the research phase of creative marketing. Look up another company’s campaigns and study what they did right along with what they did wrong.
While you shouldn’t copy your competitors, there’s nothing wrong with analyzing. You may get a few great ideas.
Schedule a consultation with a marketing expert. They’ll look at the needs of your company and help you come up with creative ideas that will work.
Build Your Dream Team
Next, it’s time to build your dream team. You’re going to need a team leader who can plan the activities and help oversee marketing projects.
Depending on the size of your company, you’re likely to break your advertising department into smaller groups. If you don’t assign a facilitator for each group, they’ll have no direction.
As the name suggests, a notetaker will write down everyone’s ideas. After every brainstorming session, they’ll summarize what happened during the meeting and email it to everyone.
Team members will spend brainstorming sessions throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks. Be sure to hear every team member out.
Just because someone’s idea might not work, doesn’t mean it doesn’t have any use. It could act as a springboard for someone else’s idea.
Focus on One Thing at a Time
Changing your entire marketing strategy to include creative thinking can be overwhelming. Instead of doing a complete 180, it might be a good idea to focus on one big problem and work your way from there.
For example, let’s say that you want to attract college students with your marketing campaign, but you don’t know how to go about it. It’s okay to center all your brainstorming sessions around that.
Brainstorm
Now for the actual brainstorming session. In most cases, these take place in a traditional office setting. Be sure to provide comfortable chairs and whiteboards with plenty of space to write on.
If the creative juices aren’t flowing in the company conference room, don’t be afraid to change things up. Move your staff into a fun room with bright-colored walls.
Break for Individual Work
There may be some people who are too shy to share their ideas during the brainstorming session. The solution is to break for individual work.
Give every member of your staff a piece of paper to write down individual ideas. You’re bound to get some interesting submissions.
Memorability Is Key
Your target audience interacts with thousands of advertisements every year. If there’s nothing interesting about your marketing campaign, it’s likely to get lost in a sea of billboards and TV commercials.
To this end, it’s crucial to focus on memorability. Brainstorm a catchy message or slogan to go along with your campaign.
Be Willing to Make Adjustments
Your target audience is going to change right along with current trends. You’ve got to be willing to change your campaign with them.
Taking a fresh approach may force you to branch out from the sort of marketing style that your team is used to.
It can be overwhelming if nobody is willing to be flexible. It could cause creative conflicts that you have to be ready to resolve.
Creative Marketing Ideas
Knowing that you want to use creative marketing and following through are two different things. When in doubt, start small with a giveaway. People love to receive free stuff.
You can also work with an influencer with a well-established following, and don’t be afraid to break out the memes.
Guerilla Marketing
Guerilla marketing is all about using the element of surprise to catch your target audience off guard.
For example, host an event and hire a big-name celebrity as a guest speaker. Give away a few of the people scheduled to speak, but keep the celebrity’s involvement quiet until it’s time for them to walk out on stage.
Referral Program
You’re not the only one who can market your business. Your customers can have a little hand in it as well. All it takes is for one person to tell a friend about your goods and services for the word to get around.
The best way to encourage your fans to talk about your company is by having a referral program. Give out a discount or free gift for every person someone sends your way.
Host a Giveaway
Again, people love freebies! You can give away your own product or do custom rolling papers and mugs. Whatever you think your target audience would enjoy.
Make the entry something reasonable or nobody will bother with it. For example, ask your followers to comment on one of your social media posts and share it.
Work With Influencers
You may not have a huge following on social media quite yet, but someone else does. Use that to your advantage by reaching out to one of these influencers.
If the influencer agrees to the collaboration, you can send them a sample of your product and ask them to review it on their social media page. If done correctly, this should send some of their many followers your way.
Embrace Trends and Memes
The internet is full of marketing inspiration. It feels like there’s a new trend or meme every week. You might as well use what’s provided for you.
You’ll need to keep an eye on the changing trends. There’s nothing more embarrassing than using a super outdated meme to promote your brand.
You also want to avoid misusing a meme. Make sure whatever format you decide to use fits your advertising campaign.
Partner With Another Brand
This is sort of similar to teaming up with influencers. The difference is that you’ll be partnering with another company.
All you have to do is mention each other on your social media pages. This should be enough to gain the attention of both your followers.
Whoever you decide to collaborate with should relate to your industry without being a direct competitor.
Use Customer Testimonials
Potential customers like hearing from other people like them. That’s why they tend to look up reviews and testimonials before deciding to make a purchase.
Jumpstart these potential clients’ research by posting testimonials on your website. You can ask customers to write up a short review or record a video of themselves using your product.
Go Live
Customers prefer buying from people rather than large corporations. While it may seem a bit nerve-racking to go live on social media, it will humanize you in the eyes of your target audience.
Going live is also a unique way to show off your goods and services and talk about your business.
Create an Interesting TikTok Challenge
Everyone enjoys a good challenge. That’s why TikTok challenges are so popular.
Anyone can start one. All you need is a good idea in your head and a catchy hashtag. Provide a clear call to action in your challenge video to prompt your target audience to participate.
Grow Your Business With a Creative Marketing Strategy
One of the main reasons why businesses fail is because of unoriginal marketing. You need to do something fun and exciting to gain the attention of your target audience.
Use a bit of creativity in marketing to interact with potential (and current) customers. All you need to get started is a social media account, a good marketing team, and an interesting idea.
For more tips that will help you use technology to promote your business, visit the Tech section of our blog.
