The Creative Process Made Easy!

Creating a vision for your next marketing campaign can be a daunting process. Especially if you’re not a creative person.

I’m here to lay out the fundamentals of building out a creative strategy for your brand. In last week’s blog, we assisted you with finding that BIG idea for your next marketing campaign. In this blog, I’m going to walk you through creating a good creative strategy that will support your big idea. This includes learning how to effectively create a creative brief that is easy for your creative team or agency to understand. Once you’ve learned the best way to create your creative strategy I will share with you how to bring it to life. We’re going from creative strategy to creative execution.

Once you have your big idea (the central theme for your campaign), you’re going to want to make sure you’re able to set the tone and style. Your tone of voice in your advertising message can affect how others feel when they interact with your brands' products/services. You have to be very specific with the tone of your brand or else people can perhaps get a different or bad perception of your brand. Think to yourself, how do you want to speak to your customers? Maybe you’re selling yogurt and you want people to be happy and enjoy themselves when they eat your product so the way you talk about your product in your advertising is humorous and fun. Or say you’re marketing for a non-profit or charity that raises money for the homeless. Maybe you’ll want to be more serious and factual in your tone and style.

The last part of the creative strategy is choosing a message appeal. Two big message appeals that are commonly used are emotional and rational. Emotional advertising appeal will capture the attention of your audience by leveraging their feelings and their emotions. In emotional advertising, the use of storytelling can be very strong and is meant to captivate the audience and provoke action. Rational advertising appeal is based on logic, facts, and reasoning. A good structure that I find works well with this is to state the problem outright to your customer to get them thinking about how it is a real issue that they’re dealing with. Then position your product as the only solution and do so in a way that you show the immense value you’re providing with your product. Dive deep into the facts and benefits of your products and create a sense of authority with your brand so that it’s an easy decision for your customer.

Now that we’ve figured out the creative strategy we can begin to plan out the creative execution. How are you going to present your product to your customers in an engaging and memorable way that will act as a lead generator? The end goal is for your advertisement to motivate your customer to take your desired action, whether it’s more leads, follows, sales, ect. 

Your execution should have a certain style to it that helps elevate the overall ad. Consider collecting testimonials from valued customers and use this in your ad as social proof that people like your offering. Testimonials help build trust in the mind of your customer. They work like referrals by convincing your website visitors that your business is reliable and trustworthy. It’s also a lot easier for your target customer to connect with and resonate with another customer which leads to it being easier to relate to your brand. 

Another style of execution that is often used is celebrity endorsement. This is when a famous person/ high-profile celebrity is paid to help promote your brand and show how they like it themselves. They can give testimonials themselves. Famous people oftentimes have very loyal followers that will listen to and support them in any way they can. If they show that they love to support a specific brand then their followers may very well do the same. 

Demonstration and product comparison are also two good execution styles that are often used. Demonstration is often seen on infomercials or with products that involved a complex or unique attribute that sets itself apart from other similar products in the market. Product comparison is often used between two brands that compete head to head with each other. It’s often the #2 brand that is using this execution style to help set itself apart. A classic example of this was the battle between Coke and Pepsi. Pepsi did an experiential marketing taste test on the streets where they would have a glass of Coke and a glass of Pepsi and they asked customers which one they liked best. In the end, Pepsi beat Coke by a significant amount.

Now once you’ve established your execution style you should come up with a slogan for your campaign. A slogan is not a tagline. A slogan tells your customers what you do and is used as an advertising tool to help sell your product/service. Taglines are solely messaging for your brand that is used to raise awareness. Once you’ve got your slogan you should keep it in all of your ads. Make it clear, concise, and memorable so you can reinforce the message in your customers' minds. Popular slogans include; Nike “Just do it”, Subway “Think Fresh, Eat Fresh”, and McDonalds “I’m Lovin’ It.”

Once you’ve figured out your slogan, the final step before executing the creative is to figure out your message source. This could be the founder and CEO of the brand, an employee, a celebrity, ect.

Terry O’ Reilly’s podcast Under The Influence (S9E15 – Takes a Licking and Keeps on Ticking: Advertising Torture Tests) explains a unique creative advertising strategy by Masterlock in 1964. They created a Superbowl commercial that honed in on the factual, entertaining, and informative message appeal altogether. It was a “torture test” form of advertising. They tried to blast open one of their locks with a high-powered 30 caliber rifle. It survived the bullet and was still unable to be opened. Their slogan for the campaign was, “Tough Under Fire.” Masterlock sales jumped from 35 million a year to over 200 million a year.

 All of this information for the marketing campaign can become very complex, especially when trying to share it with your creative team or an agency. This is where creative briefs come in handy! Creative briefs are a one - two page document that acts as a super simplified version of the overall creative strategy. Some things included in brief are; the problem, the big picture, the objective, the target audience, and some facts. Canva is a great tool to help create a creative brief and easily make it look nice. Millanote is another great tool that I use a lot for pre-production work on advertising campaigns that involve a lot of organizing. It’s especially useful for planning for photo and video shoots. If you need a hand with planning for and developing your next creative campaign, feel free to send me a message I would love to chat!

What is your favourite execution style is for advertising? Let me know in the comment section below.

Terry O'Reilly. (2021, June 18). Under the Influence. Terry O'Reilly. Retrieved September 30, 2021, from https://terryoreilly.ca/under-the-influence/.