If you’ve ever been more excited for the Super Bowl commercials than the game itself, you know that creativity makes advertising engaging and entertaining. What may surprise you is its overwhelming role in your business’s bottom line.
A Nielsen study on the keys to advertising effectiveness found that creativity remains the number one revenue driver, accounting for almost half of incremental sales. Organizations that aren’t tapping into creative marketing may be completely unaware of the volume of missed opportunities to elicit connections, conversions, and enduring brand loyalty.
Creativity is often considered the “fun part” of advertising, but it’s also highly strategic and data-driven.
Nielsen’s review of the sales impact of advertising elements looked at the top five levers brands can pull to optimize their marketing efforts, including:
Their findings revealed that, in spite of important developments in the ways that ads are targeted and served, creativity remains the most important factor in whether or not a campaign is profitable. Simply put, people are significantly more likely to make purchases from brands with unique, appealing marketing content.
If you want to harness the power of creativity in your advertising efforts, it’s important to understand why and how it functions as a revenue driver.
It’s easy to identify the role of attention-grabbing advertising in cultivating brand awareness, but creative remains a key influence at lower levels of the sales funnel as well.
Creativity is the cornerstone of a singular, recognizable brand identity. Own your unique brand persona, and you’ll form enduring relationships with your audience that go beyond conversion. The emotional impact of creative marketing accounts for this phenomenon — make your customers feel something for your brand, and they’ll be 52% more likely to sing your praises to friends and family.
Because you don’t have to reacquire loyal customers, these emotionally connected buyers have a startling 306% higher lifetime value than those who engage with your brand for practical reasons alone.
Truly creative content reflects your brand’s unique qualities. It allows your audience to get to know you because it speaks to them in a way that only you can.
Creativity and authenticity go hand in hand, and the importance of genuine messaging can’t be overstated: 86% of consumers report that brand authenticity is a deciding consideration in purchasing decisions.
Share your brand with your audience in a distinctive way, and you’ll dramatically increase the impact of your content.
Marketing content that’s designed to appeal to everyone isn’t for anyone.
If you want to emotionally engage your audience, it’s important to tailor your content to the people you intend to reach and understand what success looks like with your brand’s target consumers.
Humor and entertainment, for example, have emerged as high priorities for younger consumers, with 43% of Gen Zers reporting that they prefer ads that make them laugh. While you can’t (and shouldn’t) reduce your audience to a demographic, understanding their needs and values is a crucial first step to creating bespoke, high-impact creative content.
Research confirms that we remember creative advertisements better than unremarkable ones. The staying power of the first impression has tremendous value because customers aren’t always in a position to take the next step the first time they encounter your marketing message. In industries with longer sales cycles, brands may need to stay tucked away in their audience’s minds for quite some time.
It’s equally important, however, to ensure that your brand is memorable in a helpful, strategic way. Most of us can think of an advertising campaign that stuck out because it was shocking, strange, or funny, but we can’t quite remember what it was intended to sell. If you don’t successfully tie messaging back to your brand, your audience will remember your marketing content, but not you.
Creative marketing is about much more than eliciting a strong emotional response. Tell a cohesive story that positions your brand as the hero, and you’ll ensure that you’re part of the memory.
Great creative is worth an investment, but remember that what makes it “great” is how well it suits your business’s needs while keeping pace with current marketing standards.
High-impact marketing content doesn’t necessarily cost more than mediocre content. Choosing a design and copywriting team that understands how the artistic side of marketing complements growth strategies will yield the greatest return on investment.
Sometimes, a sharp, clever tagline can do more for your messaging than a celebrity endorsement ever could. Because the entire purpose of creative marketing is to approach solutions in a unique way, campaigns that cost less to produce can have the biggest impacts if they tell a compelling story to the right people.
Effective, lead-generating creative begins with a deep understanding of your audience. The right creative marketing agency will begin the design and copy process by getting to know your consumers and their relationship with your brand.
Knowing whether your audience yearns for relatability, catharsis, a good laugh, escapism, or something entirely different will inform the best creative direction for your marketing campaigns. Meet their needs in a unique way, and you’ll be on your way to earning their trust and share of wallet.
Creative Marketing = Brand Loyalty