CREATIVE & DIGITAL STRATEGY

When we make creative strategies for clients, we use the same frameworks used by Fortune 500 companies.

The biggest thing people get wrong about strategy, is they confuse it with strategic planning. Strategy is positioning your brand to win — why should audiences pick you over your competitor, what can we do to build that preference. Creative strategy is about making those feelings. Algorithms are just what people are engaging with.

We start with research into your audience. Who are they? What situation are they in? What hurts for them? What do they actually care about? Because we’re largely focused on social media and digital strategies, we need to know what platforms the audience uses, what kinds of creative mediums resonate with those audiences on those channels, and so on.

Often when we’re working with smaller marketing teams, they don’t really know who that audience is. So we can also include that initial audience research and development into our strategy.

Here are some of the discovery questions we go through to kick off our creative strategies.

• What is our winning aspiration?

• Where will we play? How will we win there?

• What capabilities need to be in place to win?

• What management systems need to be in place to support our capabilities to win?

• How will success be measured?

• Why aren’t they already your customer? What’s getting in their way?

• What would it take for them to get over that barrier?

• What would our dream campaign look like? What do you like about it?

• If you saw this, would you share it with your friends?

When you hire us for a creative strategy, you get all these insights organized into a playbook that can be used by all members of your marketing team.

For me, creative strategy and brand strategy walk hand-in-hand. Unless one of them is bad.

The constant in both creative and brand strategy is the audience. The brands with the strongest positioning are ones with a clear brand promise. Creative is often how make the audience feel and understand that province without shovelling some stupid slogan down their throats. It’s more like tell me why your brand is interesting without telling me.

A bad brand strategy and a bad creative strategy are both the same: they only focus on the look. Logos, fonts and colours.

What we try to do with creative strategy is communicate the feeling you get when you think about the brand in the most dynamic way possible. What I mean by that is: we only have a second or so to communicate your brand before the audience decides that they want to keep watching.

The easiest way for smaller brands to kill bigger brands is to do things they can’t. We know most big brands are going to be too safe, too branded. They are the commercial break you want to skip; we simply focus on making creative that actually interests people.

TL;DR: Creative strategy brings the brand strategy to life.

Basically, we’ve stolen the same frameworks used by big huge advertising and PR agencies…then took out all the useless filler, and then used our lizard brains to get to what really matters. We can add or remove based on your campaign needs.

Here’s the framework:

• Campaign objective

• The problem

• The insight

• Audience values

• Supporting research

• Audience barriers

• Opportunities

• Creative approach

• Proof of concept

• Rationale

• (Repeat per audience / pain point)

• Awareness tactics

• Consideration and trust building tactics

• Conversion tactics

• Budget options

• Action plan