A creative strategist is a very important part of the process of helping a company develop effective marketing initiatives. Effective creative strategists have two critical qualities: they have to be creative and have an analytical eye. Super easy!
This article defines what a creative strategy and a creative strategist is, what the job requires, and most importantly, the creative strategist benefits.
So, let’s begin!
Creative Strategy And Creative Strategist Defined
Before moving forward and explaining the benefits for your company from hiring a creative strategist, it’s necessary to understand the terms creative strategy and creative strategist, and that’s why we are here!
What Is Creative Strategy?
A creative strategy is a deliberate and strategic approach to developing and implementing steps to ensure long-term business growth. The right creative strategy can be a game-changer for people in the marketing industry.
Every day the public is more and more demanding and does not settle for advertisements and clichés, and that’s why the creative strategy has become a significant feature in the process of creating a profound connection with the audience.
Certainly, you can remember the brands behind some unique and brilliant slogans, which remain in consumers’ memories. Maybe you can even complete the sentence in your mind?
For example, “Maybe She’s Born With It, Maybe it’s…” and you already know that the end and the brand are Maybelline. Or, “I’m Lovin’ It” you even can’t forget the intonation.
Maybelline and Mc Donalds are great examples of brands that advertise their products and make their commercial memorable through a creative strategy.
What Is A Creative Strategist?
A creative strategist is a marketing expert whose focus is improving the company’s overall marketing and advertising strategies. Advertising agencies or marketing firms are usually the ones that employ creative strategists. They balance the business and the creative sides, as their job is two positions set into one: Strategist and Creative Director.
Being “the creative eyes” means that it’s expected of every creative strategist, no matter their experience or expertise, to think creatively and find a unique or new way of looking at the obstacles waiting to be solved.
What Does A Creative Strategist Actually Do?
Creative strategists are specialists in thinking outside of the box when it comes to developing plans to reach a broad audience or just a specific type of audience. These professionals can devise ideas to match the client’s needs by developing strategies over various mediums.
A creative strategist has many responsibilities when developing an employer’s or client’s marketing strategy. Specific tasks may vary based on the size of the company and its marketing department, but often, typical responsibilities for a creative strategist include:
- Analyzing the market and the industry reports and identifying future trends.
- Hosting focus groups to test the effectiveness of a marketing strategy or estimate the public view on a given issue or product.
- Meeting with customers to review their expectations for an upcoming marketing campaign.
- Developing marketing strategies that can help achieve the company’s goals like alternative B2B lead generation approaches.
- Advising the company’s creative director.
- Monitoring the progress of marketing media.
- Tracking results of the existing marketing strategies.
- Adjusting or ending marketing strategies if the results are not meeting the expectations.
- Ideating creative ways to explore what the industry is doing, like finding out what your competitors pricing models are.
Since working as a creative strategist demands creativity and lots of business knowledge, a creative strategist needs to have extensive skills to execute their tasks efficiently.
Some essential skills every creative strategist should have are:
- Analytical Skills
- Budgeting Skills
- Creativity
- Communication Skills
- Problem Solving Skills
- Strong Understanding Of Digital Marketing
- Strong Commercial Experience and Expertise In Delivering Branded Content Solutions
- Clear Understanding Of And Experience In The Creative Production Process
Creative Strategist Benefits: 5 Ways On How Can One Help Your Business
There are numerous ways of how your company can see a great benefit from hiring a creative strategist, from discovering upcoming marketing trends to receiving marketing strategies that can help achieve the company’s goals.
Understanding these benefits is an essential step in recognizing the importance of employing a creative strategist.
That’s why from this article, you’ll learn the five ways on how can a creative strategist help your business expand and advance.
Make Your Marketing Campaigns More Efficient And Effective
If a campaign can spread awareness across the audience and become a subject that everyone is talking about, then it’s a successful one.
To create a strong campaign, you have to keep several factors in mind and have the entire campaign cover all qualities that define a successful one.
Luckily, a creative strategist can assist with all this by helping you work more promptly and more productively. They’ll also turn insights and data into innovative directions to follow and eventually reach your wanted outcomes. For example, here’s how a client of mine managed to produce 100 long form articles in about 2 months.
Analyze Your Content from Various Perspectives
When creating a marketing strategy, you can benefit from looking at your marketing resources, purposes and methods from several different perspectives. Varied views can help you consider opportunities and pitfalls that may negatively impact your marketing or help it succeed. Furthermore, combining diverse viewpoints can help your marketing stand out in the crowd and perfectly match your products and services.
If you don’t have someone acknowledging diversity and inclusion throughout your marketing plan, you risk creating monotonous, uninspiring, or downright offensive content.
Having a diverse organization working on each project is very important for the reasons mentioned above, but the Creative Strategist can also be of great help. Considering they have a significant influence on marketing strategy and project execution, they’re uniquely positioned to keep diversity and inclusion in focus during the whole process.
Help You Find The Right Audience For Your Products
The buying process is under the client’s control, and creative strategists must create targeted, personalized experiences for the audience if they want to be the ones to grab their attention among all other brands on the market.
One of the most reliable and easiest ways to determine your target audience is to study who previously used your product or service and analyze them as a group. An excellent way to learn this is through engaging on social media or distributing customer surveys.
When strategists have a thorough understanding of their ideal buyer, they can make more informed decisions about how they want to share their content.
Introduce You To The Latest Trends, Innovations And Ideas
An open mind is a valuable resource. When you’re interested in new possibilities and start thinking creatively, you’re more likely to stay motivated and keep your business one step ahead of the competition.
And sometimes, the success of a project depends on more than just minor ideas or concepts for new ways forward. It needs someone to develop a big, radical, innovative idea, and that’s in the creative strategists’ job description!
Keep Your Company From Falling Behind
In this quickly evolving digital landscape, you need a team with the right skill sets to create innovative and engaging content to connect with your existing and potential customers.
If some of the leading organizations in your field already have creative strategists promoting their content marketing, maybe it’s time to rethink your team structure and hire a creative strategist to catch up and surpass the competition.
For example, this business development method helps you research new marketing and sales approaches, while making you money. If you’re interested in finding out if the same can work for you, let me know.
How To Hire The Right Creative Strategist For Your Company?
The hiring process is challenging, and it’s even more complicated if you haven’t made an effort to document what success turns out to be for that specific position. You end up getting sucked into all sorts of personal prejudice, using your instincts to decide what you’d like from your potential employee.
Finding the right person for this crucial position can be a complicated process, but knowing what questions to ask and where to look, will make it go a lot smoother.
Check Out The Creative Strategist Portfolio
Social media means that we are just a click away from a portfolio. And while a CV can give you the information you need of a person’s experience and expertise, if they don’t have a proper portfolio, they can’t really call themselves a creative anything, let alone a strategist.
A modernized portfolio shows a strong sense of self-confidence and professionalism, so it’s best to only consider creative strategists with good ones.
Ask About Their Strategy And Vision
Any good creative strategist needs to have a vision and a strategy. Therefore, when you are interviewing potential applicants, please take note of their natural curiosity because the best candidates you’ll find for the job are those who are curious about anything and everything to do with their job.
Ask the Right Questions
Whether you’re interviewing your potential creative strategist over Zoom or a drink at your local cafe, the questions you ask your candidates are just as important as how you ask them.
Ask them how they work. What is their approach? Do they have the courage to say no to a new trend if it doesn’t fit your company branding? And what kind of features would they bring to your team?
The questions you ask should be unique to your company, and you should have enough time to decide whether or not that person makes sense as a creative strategist of your enterprise during the meeting.
Final Thoughts
That’s how a creative strategist can help your business in a nutshell. So now you know all the benefits of hiring a creative strategist and how to choose the right one for your company!
Hope you enjoyed reading this article, and of course, don’t forget to share your thoughts and questions in the comment section!
If you’re not sure if you need a creative strategist, but you could use help creating that client strategy due next week, reach out and let’s talk.
