Published April 7th, 2020 in the Portland Business Journal.
When you think of creative content, what comes to mind? Perhaps it’s photos, videos, or clever copy nestled within the margins of your favorite social media channel or newspaper.
However, I contend that creative content is about more than the final image or words on the screen or page. It’s just as much about ideation, production, distribution, and strategic execution—and integrating these elements into the creative process. By looking at creative content through a strategic lens, you will find that there is more to marketing and advertising than the artwork, copy, layout, and design.
Think strategy first
Before you leap into creative efforts, take a step back to consider a few strategic marketing questions:
What is your product or service?
What are your value propositions?
Who is your target market and what problem is your product or service solving for them?
What’s your call to action — what do you want members of your target market to do?
What resources do you have to work with, from cash to in-house talent?
Your answers to these questions should inform every creative content decision you make moving forward.
Along with asking yourself these questions, I recommend having each member of your marketing and sales team answer these questions on his or her own and then discussing their answers together as a group. This is a powerful way to discover fresh ideas or reveal gaps in your organization’s strategic vision.
Set key performance indicators
From the very beginning of the strategic marketing process, you must set clear, simple, and measurable key performance indicators (KPIs). These will enable you to accurately assess whether or not your creative content is hitting the mark across marketing channels.
Your KPIs will vary depending on which channels you use. Choose KPIs that are meaningful to your organization. If you don’t, you are simply collecting data that will guide you nowhere.
Some possibilities are:
“Likes” on social media
Positive reviews
Return on ad spend (ROA)
Cost per click (CPC)
Cost per lead (CPL)
Revenue
What you measure should always depend on what you’re trying to accomplish and how you intend to use the KPIs to strengthen your business.
Measure, analyze, and adjust
Strategic marketing is a long game and your approach to creative content needs to reflect that. You must resist the urge to push content to your channels simply to “get something up.” Having a big-picture creative content strategy and knowing what you want to accomplish will enable you to collect valuable data in real-time, measure it, evaluate it, and adjust your strategy based on the feedback from your audience.
By thinking in terms of long-term strategic campaigns, rather than individual posts, you get a 10,000-foot view of what’s happening, where you’re confronting obstacles, and how you can pivot.
Every KPI and data point is — quite literally — your customers telling you what they do or do not like. Listen to them. Use your audience’s response to inform your marketing and content decisions, rather than relying on internal office politics or your organization’s pre-existing biases.
Build your calendar
A simple way to organize and clearly communicate your creative content strategy to your internal teams is to develop a content calendar that plainly lays out each aspect of your campaign.
Type of creative (video, photo, animation, etc.) being posted
Launch date
Channel
Copy
Call to action
Relevant notes for those executing the campaign
By distributing this content calendar among the different people and departments that are involved in the sales or marketing of the product or service, you keep communication clear and acquire buy-in from key stakeholders. In addition, this simple tool helps keep everyone on a consistent schedule, clearly delineates responsibilities for success, provides accountability to team members, and defines an actionable approach for strategy execution.
Put strategy first
By now you’ve probably noticed that this article doesn’t offer tips on shooting video on your mobile phone or rules for the run-time of your social media videos. That’s because a successful creative content strategy is about more than the look of the final design. It’s also about the essential strategic questions every organization must ask in order to be successful.
Strategy is the partner of creative and they should be developed and designed in concert. If you can bring this approach to your organization’s creative content, you may just have something that people “like.”