Creativity in Marketing: What It Is and How To Use It

Updated January 26, 2023

Marketing professionals consider several variables when creating campaigns, such as engagement and target audience. Along with this data-driven approach, it's also beneficial to incorporate creativity into marketing. If you're interested in entering the field of marketing, you might benefit from learning about marketing creativity. In this article, we define creativity in marketing, explain its importance, discuss how to implement it, list the benefits included and provide a few examples.

What is creativity in marketing?

Implementing creativity in marketing is the process of incorporating creative concepts and ideas into your marketing strategies with the goal of selling a product or service. Typically, the objectives and goals of creative marketing are the same as traditional forms of marketing. The strategies and approaches may vary widely. Using creativity in marketing can give your audience an experience that inspires, engages, surprises or incorporates them. Creative marketing strategies can improve the establishment and understanding of your brand. It can help your marketing team better align its marketing strategies with the company's overarching business goals.

Why is creativity in marketing important?

It's important to include creativity in marketing for a wide variety of reasons. While strategic methods are common forms of marketing, it's also helpful to develop creative approaches to marketing. Some key reasons that creativity in marketing is important are:

Build your brand

Creativity in marketing provides more potential for you to build your brand. For example, if you introduce a new campaign that creatively incorporates your brand name, this may have a bigger impact on an audience. Building a brand over time can differentiate you from competitors in your industry. Doing this with creative methods and strategies may increase the ability of the audience to recognize your brand among others.

Collaborate with your audience

Using creative methods of marketing may provide opportunities to better understand and engage with your audience. You may have better success in appealing to the emotions of your audience by taking a creative approach. You can try to find new ways to collaborate with the audience to get a sense of their opinions, feelings and needs. Learning more about what the audience thinks can help your team discover and solve challenges in your strategy.

Generate new ideas

Incorporating creativity into your team's marketing strategy can help people develop new ideas for promotions or campaigns. Generate new ideas may act as a catalyst for the marketing department to achieve an increase in success, engagement and product sales. If you develop methods for coming up with creative ideas, you may find that most of your team's ideas become more creative.

Save valuable resources

By implementing creativity into your marketing strategy, you may save valuable resources, such as the advertising budget. If you create a well-executed creative campaign, it may generate a large amount of engagement on its own. If this occurs, you may not have to invest heavily in the promotion of that campaign since it takes place organically. The more this type of engagement happens on a creative promotion, the more cost effective creativity in marketing can become for your department or team.

Boost performance

The combination of data and creativity may significantly boost the performance of your marketing content. Your team can measure the success of various creative marketing endeavors to determine how your target audience received particular campaigns. Over time, you can learn more about which type of creative content appeals to your target audience, how they engage with the creative campaigns and what changes you can make to improve the levels of engagement.

How to conduct creative marketing campaigns

Conducting creative marketing campaigns requires originality and alignment with your organization's goals, brand and objectives. There are a few different strategies you might choose to implement to begin executing creative marketing campaigns. Some of these strategies include:

1. Find inspiration

Before you begin, try to find inspiration for new campaign ideas. One way to do this is by researching successful creative campaigns and observing what other brands have attempted. Another way is by conducting meetings with various marketing planners, creatives and other marketing experts to learn more about potential processes to implement within your team. Finding people or past promotions that inspire you and your team can lead to productive conversations or ideas about how your brand can begin implementing creative marketing.

2. Focus on one challenge

One strategy you might use is to channel your team's creativity into solving one particular problem. For example, imagine that your target audience seems to include people of several age groups. You might use this information to develop a creative approach to reaching multiple people within each age group. Starting by focusing on a specific challenge may help the transition to creative marketing feel more manageable than changing your entire marketing strategy at once.

3. Build partnerships

Using the creativity of others is an important method for generating new ideas. You may gain ideas from employees outside your immediate department. Consider meeting with others to see if they can think of areas that the marketing team can direct their attention. You can try to come up with new strategies of collaboration to ensure you develop a successful, creative strategy to generate new ideas. You can partner with people in other departments to help turn the idea into a reality.

4. Invest in the process

Another helpful strategy for implementing creativity in marketing is to pay attention to the audience's experience from start to finish or end to end. You can examine the creation of the product to the buying process and everything that comes between. Thinking creatively about each aspect can highlight areas where you can improve marketing or introduce a new, creative aspect. Consider using data from various aspects of the business to identify distinct areas where the marketing team can focus on applying the creative approach.

5. Adjust your approach

If you've been in the marketing industry for a while, you may have experience working as a marketing manager or director in a traditional marketing role. To channel other types of creativity, you might consider operating the department in a more flexible manner. By meeting the changing demands of the market, your team may generate fresh ideas as a result of the new management approach. If you're attempting to develop a campaign that varies significantly from what your team typically products, adjusting your approach may benefit the entire process by creating a space for new ideas.

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6. Focus on memorability

When creating a new campaign, it's important to focus on memorability because it's likely you want your audience to remember your advertisement. Since audiences interact with high volumes of advertisements each day, week and month, memorability can become a strategy to differentiate your brand others. When you develop an original, creative advertisement campaign that focuses on memorability, it may increase the likelihood that your audience remembers the message of the campaign and acts on it by making a purchase, for example.

Benefits of creative marketing

Some benefits of implementing creative marketing include:

Surprising your audience
Inspiring your team to develop original content
Increasing audience engagement
Developing a consistent and unique brand
Communicating with the audience in an innovative way
Differentiating your company from the competition

Examples of creativity in marketing

Here are two different examples of using creativity in marketing:

Guerilla marketing

Guerilla marketing is one type of marketing creativity that involves using the element of surprise to disrupt your audience's expectations positively. Typically, these marketing stunts take place in public. Guerilla marketing campaigns are likely to be original, in line with a brand-specific message and engaging for the audience.

For example, imagine a small pizzeria decides they want to expand their customer base by using guerilla marketing. The restaurant plans a family-friendly event that they advertise as having a special guest. When people arrive at the event, they learn that a world-famous chef is assisting the restaurant in making pizza for all the attendees. This surprise may act as a form of guerilla marketing that serves to generate a larger audience or customer base.

Social trends

Another method of creativity in marketing is by adapting a popular trend on social media to market for a product. This method may appeal directly to your audience that participates on social media. For example, imagine a small business owner wants to increase engagement on social media. They might decide to create content that uses a popular trend as the basis for communicating the message. This type of marketing can appeal to a specific audience and may lead to an increase of engagement with your brand online.