Successful marketing campaigns rely, to some extent, on creative genius. Even if your product is better, your price is lower and your experience greater than your nearest competitor, if you present your customers with boring, stale, uninspired marketing messages, they’re not even going to look your business over.
In a world where everyone is bombarded with advertising from morning to night, you need to stand out from the crowd. Here are 7 exciting ideas to help you be more creative with your marketing campaigns, to help your voice be heard above all the noise.
Challenge the way your teams are working
If there’s no creativity coming out of your teams, shake things up a bit. Dispel the typical segregation and get people to work with people they don’t normally spend time with. Designers should sit with analysts, content marketers with coders, directors with office juniors.
Give people specific things to discuss, or arrange brainstorming sessions with an interesting mix of people present. Get people out of their comfort zones and talking to new people, and you never know what magic might happen!
Get all CSI with an ideas wall
Detectives have been using ideas walls for decades, so why not bring this fun method of inspiration into your marketing team too? Placing visual clues and post-it notes of information onto a wall lets you stand back and start to see the connections between them, helping you dig deeper into what makes your clients tick and your products sell.
Think about the marketing media you can and will be using, influencers in your industry, ideas and inspiration for campaigns and content and where you’re going to host your content or campaign. Consider your client, who they are, what they like and where they hang out. Use string, highlighters, move things around, join things up, and soon you’ll start to see patterns emerging that could just be the spawn of a new and amazing idea.
Market with your clients, not to them
It’s all too easy to become wrapped up in the process of marketing, and to forget that there’s an actual real-life person on the end of our campaigns. Marketers often fail because they’ve got wrapped up in the features of whatever product or service they are marketing, and forgot to tell their clients what the benefits are.
Take the time to really get to know your audience. We loved this example from the US, where a data and network solutions company called Brocade created a ‘customer first’ programme to improve their marketing and customer satisfaction. By working with their top 200 customers, they uncovered all their pain points and places where their products were letting them down, helping them to improve the packages they offered and boost their sales even further. Could you work with your best customers to do the same?
Check what your competitors are doing
We’re not talking about outright copying here. In fact, we’re not saying you should follow in their footsteps at all. However, seeing as your competitors have similar products and audiences to you, it makes absolute sense to check up on what creative marketing they are doing right now.
Take a look at their social channels to see how their audience is reacting to their efforts. Decide for yourself if it’s a flop or a huge success. Take inspiration where you find it, and learn from their mistakes so you don’t have to make them yourself. It’s all a learning curve, so why not learn from your direct peers too?
Ask yourself what’s intriguing to you right now
As a marketer, it’s very easy to become so engrossed in our own products and industry, we forget to check what’s going on in the wider world. Think about the first-person experience as you go about your life, and make a mental (or physical) note of what works for you.
Was there an ad on TV that really stood out during that last commercial break? Why? What about all those emails in your inbox; why will you delete some and open others? Did you see a billboard or bus ad on your way to work that really sticks in your mind? What was special about it? Figure out what’s floating your boat right now, and even if you’re not really your own target demographic, look at what’s clever about these creative ads and take elements from them back to the office with you.
Stop chucking out bad ideas
As a B2B creative agency, we don’t think there is a bad idea. It doesn’t exist. There are ideas that maybe aren’t right for today, or aren’t feasible on our budget, but that doesn’t make them bad. In fact, some of the best creative marketing ideas have come out of something wild, wacky and ridiculous, which almost got binned at the first stage.
People have a natural tendency to want to keep things organised; streamlined. This leads us to throwing out everything save for the few ideas that made the first cut. Instead of doing this, take the time to keep your ‘bad’ ideas around for a bit longer, and look at them again in a day, week, month or even a year. Can you adapt them? Tinker with them to make them work? Are they actually brilliant but you just haven’t realised it yet? Never say never.
Crowdsource, outsource and generally be more resourceful
Believe it or not, you’re not expected to be a bona fide marketing guru all by yourself. Chances are, you started your business on a win and a prayer, with a relatively good product that you wanted to see take flight. Fast forward to today, and you’re expected to compete with multi billion-pound organisations who have far greater resources than you do.
Engaging with freelance talent, a great B2B creative agency or other sources of talent will help you get where you need to be without breaking your back to be there. If you want to do some PPC advertising, but don’t know where to start, why not get a PPC expert to do it for you? If you just don’t have the creative talent in your own team to come up with a new campaign, talk to a B2B creative agency for their input. Chances are you’ll save more money than you’ll spend by doing it this way, and will get more ROI from your investment too.
For more advice on B2B creative marketing or to find out how our experts stay creative, talk to our team today.