5 min read

Why Creativity Is Not Your Universal Marketing Tool and What Matters More

Written by

Pavlo Fedykovych

Published on

October 22, 2019

October 6, 2024

In today's article, we decided to investigate the role of creativity and innovation in modern marketing campaigns. While creativity is clearly an essential marketing tool that deserves to be invested in, there are other crucial elements that can help you build a successful marketing case.

Table of contents:

Before you kick-off, it's important to highlight that we value the creativity and hope that everyone understands that it's an essential part of the marketing industry. It's hard to imagine guys from Mad Men providing their clients with the boring briefs, slogans, and artworks, right? We agree on that.

However, some brands and small business owners tend to rely on creativity too much. They think that creative content itself will boost their marketing efforts, but no matter the level of creativeness, the content will not reach the audience itself. You won't be able to push the right buttons of your target audience by just being creative, as well.

Then what's the ultimate solution? Today we want to talk about why you should value technology and significant data insights and make it work towards the support of your creative efforts.

1. How much marketing materials does humanity produce daily?

Companies tend to spend billions of dollars annually on ads and marketing activities worldwide. Times, when digital marketing appeared to be something new and unknown, have passed, and even the tiniest online company knows how to utilize digital marketing tools. As a result, we've got to understand that humanity produces tons of marketing materials daily.

Rough statistics by Forbes state that we produce around 2.5 quintillion bytes of data daily. And if it doesn't make you go wow, we're not sure what can.

Taking that in the account, it's fair to admit that any company tries to stand out and decide to invest in the creativity of their marketing efforts. It deserves respect, cause creativity takes courage, and there is no doubt in that. But they make a fatal mistake considering creativity, their only marketing tool that should deliver.

2. Being creative is not enough to reach to the right target audience

So you produce unique and super-creative content? Congratulations, so do thousands of brands. But do you have the ability to deliver it to the right audience?

Content distribution and how you reach out to your target audience means a lot. As we have already highlighted in the previous section, your potential clients have thousands of posts, ads, videos, etc. screaming at them from all of their devices. To make sure you hit the right spot with your marketing campaign — you've got to have numbers to support your efforts.

That's where we conclude that data is a unique asset that can be considered as valuable as the original part of your content.

And while you're shooting in the dark with your purely creative approach, we offer you to consider the data insights a guiding torch that can double your marketing efforts and deliver more impressive results.

3. Does this mean that being creative is no longer necessary in 2019?

No.

And while our short and precise answer encapsulates how important it is not to forget about creativity in marketing, we want to share more detailed thoughts on that with you.

Basically, what we're trying to say is that creativity should only be considered as one of the essential elements of your marketing campaigns. It's one of the tools that you've got to use to become successful, but we strongly oppose the idea of considering it the only universal tool.

As a professional marketer, you've got to be flexible, not just creative. And being flexible means being open to other marketing tools, not being stuck with one. But after all, incorporating the creative approach to your marketing strategy is excellent. Let us just say that other marketing tools and data insights can help you steer your marketing efforts in the right direction.

4. Reasons to find a balance between data and creativity

Now it's time to take a look at what we want to offer and what we consider the best alternative to the creativity-centered approach. We genuinely believe in the importance of the data that your company can get by analyzing the market, target audience, and the friction points that your brand has with your clients. This can become a fundamental element that will later serve as a ground to build your marketing campaign. Then you won't have to shoot blindly. You will be able to put your creativity to better work.

Here are just a few reasons why finding a perfect balance between the data and your creativity is vital.

See how human behavior converts to numbers

Creativity-centered marketing limits your 'field of view' while you create content and marketing-related materials. You're just trying to blow up the social media, magazines, and other means of communication with the exclusive viral content. With that being said, you do not take into account how your target audience will interact with your marketing campaign and what drives human behavior, converting them into leads and numbers.

When you have the data on your target audience, prospective clients' problems, and simply what kind of content they like, you will create content that will have a way higher engagement rate.

After all, it's all about engagement and how people interact with your brand's commercials and marketing activities. Engagement is the only way to convert your prospective buyers into long-term clients. And understanding how customers' behavior converts to numbers will do the job for you. It will ease the marketing campaign production.

Guide your marketing ideas in the right direction

You have to become more precise in your creativity movement. By precision, we mean the ability to hit the right to the pains and desires of your customers. Having data analysis that will correct the direction in which your marketing campaign is moving.

This is about the moment you have meetings with your creative team (designers, copywriters, video producers, etc.) and finding common ground based on the research your data team provides you with.

Having more precise information on what your target audience wants to see will help you eliminate the chance of getting lost in the woods of false ideas.

Find exclusive connections and insights to play with

Sometimes our creative efforts can run into the obstacles of having no exclusive insights and connections between your brand and your customer.

That's why you should value data that can help you fully understand what kind of exclusive bond your users have with your brand and how to play with it. Basically, while creative marketing directors are playing with the human's feelings, numbers can help them make sure that onion is worth peeling.

5. Having a long-distance marketing plan means a lot

When we talk about why creativity is important, we have to keep in mind that the nature of creativity itself is kind of chaotic, and we tend to appeal to our instincts instead of the research. And yes, it does sound like we need to give spurs to this process and handle it more pragmatically.

One of the things that can help you make the process less chaotic and put a balance between creativity and results is the long-distance marketing strategy (or a plan, as some of you may call it).

No matter the wording, this is a useful tool that provides you with the ability not only to plan your marketing efforts but track results and make necessary adjustments in the long run.

With that being said, we genuinely believe that any creative process needs at least a minor supervision and the involvement of pragmatic management like a decent marketing strategy. This is where you will be able to set goals where all of your marketing efforts are aimed to. And having that, you will be able to stay consistent with your creative manifestations.

6. Deal with marketing automation

We know. The word 'automation' itself can be quite disturbing to creative-minded people, cause we all understand that sometimes we have to sacrifice the creative content to automate a specific business-related process.

However, it's time to deal with it and understand that both creativity and automation can work towards the success of your marketing efforts. It's about email automation, interactive ads automation, chatbots, and other examples of automated marketing.

7. Locate your primary channels of content marketing

It's time to get back to what happens to your content after you produce it. While you may have directed all of your efforts towards making a truly creative piece of content, how will you reach out to your audience? Do you know the primary distribution channels that work for all of your customers' groups?

It's essential to research that you've got to invest in to make sure your creativeness doesn't end up in oblivion. Content means nothing without the audience that consumes it, and you cannot provide your audience with your creative doings without knowing what the best way to communicate with them is.

It's a part of delivering your brand's message and boosting your brand awareness. Keeping your communication with your prospective buyers in a creative way is just half of the job. Having all the data to reach them successfully is the missing link.

8. Invest in technology, not just into creative content production

Since we're talking about the content distribution and how it is vital for your creative content to be explored, not just exist. We want to highlight how productive your 'partnership' with the technology can be.

In the long run, investing in the right technology can have a more significant effect than just creative content production.

You can actually consider digital signage technology as a great example of the technology that can compensate for the lack of creativity in your marketing.

First and foremost, digital signage and other digital means of out-of-home advertising are giving you unique opportunities: like targeting a few target audiences at the same time, showcasing any content on the same screen, applying interactive means of engagement with your ads.

So when we talk about an average business owner with a retail spot or another kind of offline business, investing in digital signage equals gaining another content distribution channel to put your creative efforts in the spotlight.

And that is just one example of the technologies that are widely utilized by marketers to boost the effectiveness of their creative approach. There are tons of options among the marketing tools to choose from; it's all about the niche you work in, whether you're a digital brand and whether you have the data research at your disposal or not.

Successful marketing stands on more than one pillar

We are not discouraging you from applying a rather creative approach to the marketing strategy of your brand. The goal of today's post is to remind you that marketing cannot stand on one pillar; there won't be balanced in the work you do in that case.

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If you take literally any successful marketing case among the Fortune-500 campaigns, you will notice that they do not solely rely on the creativeness of their marketing team. Whenever they introduce a new marketing campaign, ad, or anything else — they know exactly how they will deliver the message of it. They know who they're targeting with it and why it will most probably succeed.