The Benefits of Creative Marketing & How to Get Started

What is creative marketing?

Creative marketing is all about thinking outside of the box and presenting ideas and messaging in an innovative way. It’s about challenging more traditional approaches to building marketing campaigns, and finding new ways to advertise with more creative techniques.

Why is creative marketing important?

Creative marketing is becoming more important as each year passes. The simple reason is that as marketing tools advance and companies become able to access higher quality advertising and continue to push their campaigns further with new ideas, it becomes harder to stand out with the methods you’ve been using for years.

That’s why making creative marketing a practice of your team now is so important. By learning to push ideas and boundaries as a team through innovative thinking, you’re making sure that you’re ahead of the competition at all times. It means that as competition becomes fiercer, you can establish yourself as a leader in your industry and develop your brand authority further. When your potential clients can see your brand developing and consistently outputting high-standards of marketing, they'll be more likely to trust your brand and come to it as a first choice.

How can you practise creative thinking?

To prioritise creative marketing, it all starts with improving creative thinking. How can you do that? Well, the good news is that there are practical ways that you can get started and help your team too. 

Brainstorming 

When people think of idea generation, one of the most common scenarios they’ll picture is brainstorming. Brainstorming is a great way of setting aside dedicated time to the practice of creative thinking with your whole team, so it can be a great opportunity to come up with new ideas and begin the process of more creative marketing. As a practical step, you could decide to set aside a certain time in the day that works for your team to have a bit more of an open discussion about upcoming projects and give each team member a time to express their ideas.

When conducting brainstorming sessions, there is some evidence to suggest that face-to-face meetings might work better than a simple Zoom meeting for generating new ideas. Having a general topic for the brainstorm can also help to direct the meeting and keep it as efficient as possible, rather than letting the conversation drift off in tangents and letting the focus slide of the real solution you're trying to achieve.

Individual focusing time

Just as important as working with your team members, individual working time can give you the space to really explore your own ideas and thoughts on a challenge. Letting your team know you’re going to spend a little bit of time focused working is important to help set time aside from possible distractions. As a manager or business owner, it might be a good idea to look for areas in the office that can help facilitate this independent work.

In fact, independent working can actually offer you a whole host of additional benefits like helping you push your own creativity, self-reliance and efficiency

Independent working also gives you the opportunity to build your own confidence in your field of work. The more you explore creative, original ideas and see that they work and are of value - the more you'll build trust in your ability to come up with great ideas when you think outside of the box. When each member of the team is confident in their ideas and happy to express their perspective, the team as a whole is stronger.

Challenge ideas 

One of the most important parts of creative thinking is that of challenging the idea. Once your team has settled on a campaign idea for example, give it some time and revisit the idea again once you have fresher eyes. Ask for the opinions of those with a different perspective to challenge your initial idea. This step helps you to push ideas further and really come up with something truly unique.

As a team member, you can help to encourage this by asking constructive questions to team mates and by accepting criticism of your ideas with the attitude of working together to improve the overall solution.

Summary

In this article we've discussed not only what creative marketing is, but why it's important and how creative thinking can help you to achieve it.

In summary, creative thinking plays a vital role in helping you achieve success with your marketing efforts and will help you achieve much more creative marketing campaigns. Through fostering a culture of creativity in your business, not only will your team achieve better marketing results - it can help with the innovation of pretty much any operation.

For more articles on all things creativity, design and marketing - take a look at the Design Cloud blog today.