It takes courage for marketers to challenge conventional thinking and offer an innovative idea — and a thick skin when those ideas are greeted with the following kinds of responses:
“I don’t get it.”
“It doesn’t feel on-brand.”
“It just doesn’t work.”
Hopefully you’re getting more constructive kinds of criticism, but the problem with some areas of creative thinking is that they seem so subjective. Marketing requires telling stories, using intriguing visuals and unusual copy to arouse a particular emotion. Unfortunately, that means your colleagues in sales, service or even the CEO might fall back on their personal opinions of the work without fully understanding what’s behind it.
Digital technologies have multiplied the channels available to distribute a marketing message by an order of magnitude. However, they also offer ways to provide a more business-oriented approach to talking about creativity, giving marketers some ammunition when their ideas are shot down.
These are just a few examples of where harnessing the power of marketing automation solutions such as Marketing Cloud could win over your toughest critics:
1. Get Granular About Your Audience From The Beginning
Sometimes marketing ideas might seem too crazy if you’re discussing them as something that will be aimed at everyone within a given market. The best marketing today, on the other hand, aims for more of a one-to-one effect than one-to-many. Artificial intelligence tools such as Salesforce Einstein can drill down into areas of your database that make personalizing content easier. That way, you can make your pitch based on a specific demographic or even a real-life customer example.
Maybe you want to send out a physical item to people, like a stress ball or a fortune cookie. That might seem like a waste of money until you can show what kind of specific message might resonate for an individual customer, especially when you have data to provide more context around why that kind of tactic and content will lead to a desired action. Once you’ve proved your point using one individual as an example, you can start to extrapolate and discuss how the same approach could be optimized for a larger proportion of your audience.
2. Show How Far The Idea Could Spread
Just pretend you’re working in a B2B retail firm. You have a great idea for a campaign that would make use of out-of-home (OOH) creative. Of course, billboards are not always the most common channel that a B2B company would consider, so some leaders might be leery about the idea.
An unconventional channel becomes a lot more acceptable, though, when the team realizes it’s only part of an overall journey. Depending on the nature of the content, what begins on a billboard, can then be followed up with what the organization is sending out via online and mobile ads. There could be an image of the billboard and context woven into the next edition of the firm’s e-mail newsletter. The journey could also include a series of posts that repurpose or build on the same marketing creative through one or more social media channels.
3. Connect The Dots Between Creativity And Learning
In the old days, the creative work that came out of marketing departments was more or less a fait accompli. Like an actual product, it was meant to be published in some form, consumed by its audience and then replaced with something else. This was as true of a 30-second TV commercial in the consumer world as it was for a piece of physical direct mail that was sent to a list of B2B buyers.
Marketing creative that moves through digital channels doesn’t have to be static. In fact, the best creative work in marketing tends to evolve based on direct feedback from its target audience, and the end results become a gold mine of information that is shared across the company.
Let’s say you’re working in B2B finance firm and you want to do some innovative marketing using social media. Of course you’ll write and design a compelling message, but depending on the tools you use, the campaign can be updated in real-time to improve its performance, or based on external economic factors. In fact, no matter how it performs the organization can feed the data back into tools like Einstein to continuously learn and offer insights to coworkers in sales, service and other areas. Those who might not be keen on a certain creative approach can be swayed when they see that what you’re proposing is more like a malleable first draft, which will be used to get feedback and learnings from the individuals who bring in direct revenue to the company.
4. Show Your CTAs Are Just As Creative As The Work Itself
Sometimes ideas for marketing creative get mothballed because they take time, talent and considerable amounts of money to make. Unless the team can really buy into the value it will bring, marketing can look like more of a cost centre.
Suppose you’re marketing to healthcare professionals. You’ve come up with a brilliant idea for an online calculator that will help them figure out what they need to budget for the kinds of products and services a firm like yours offers. Of course, online calculators require some background data and programming to get set up. Those who wind up using it could become leads for the sales team, but what if that doesn’t seem like enough to give project a green light?
Be creative in showing how your calls to action (CTAs) could offer additional opportunities to engage with your audience. For instance, upon completion of the calculator visitors could not only get their result, but a link to a relevant blog post. Or an invitation to a webinar or live event. Or a connection to a social channel where a related conversation is happening in real time. The “creativity” we’re talking about here is not simply the range of choices but how you can offer specific CTAs based on the profile of the person using the calculator, the time they use it or a range of other factors.
It’s not always going to be easy to get a creative idea off the ground, but tools like Marketing Cloud provide several ways to put out-of-the-box thinking into action.
