How can you research the best Creative Strategy for your platform and channels?

Understanding your audience is the first crucial step for developing an effective creative strategy. By conducting thorough research and gathering insights about your target audience, you can tailor your content and messaging to resonate with their needs, interests, and preferences. This understanding will enable you to create compelling and relevant content that engages and connects with your audience on a deeper level, ultimately driving better results for your platform and channels.

If you are looking to conduct external research to identify potential customers, look at: 1) Search Listening Tools Platforms like Answer The Public can help you to extract and categorize user queries into groups. This can help you to develop creatives to address those queries relevant to your product. Now, with the questions in mind, you can take those questions and start exploring discussion based forums (e.g. Reddit / FB Groups). These are the most powerful way to understand your audience as you can identify potential angles and stories related to your audience. If you are running paid social ads, look at the users' profile who've engaged with your ad to identify some common themes :)

Identifying your target audience is a critical step in developing an effective marketing strategy ;) Important parts of the process are: - Market Research - Customer Profiling (Persona's) - Customer Surveys & Interviews - Analytics & Website Data - Competitor Analysis

Strategy is all about understanding behaviour. Behaviours are the result of inputs (or 'triggers'). To create an action, understand the beliefs that lead to a particular behaviour, then find the trigger. The traditional recipe for a sale is to trigger insecurity and impulsivity. Rinse and repeat, until the world burns. The goal of creative strategy, though, is to empathize with the person on the other end of the transaction. Try to meet a need, rather than make a sale. Focus on pain points, not quarterly goals. Seek to understand. Be empathetic. Be thoughtful. Be kind. Be human.

An outcome is what makes creative strategy…a strategy. Be very clear about what you want to achieve in behavioural terms and business outcomes. What do you want to occur and how are you going to measure it. Without these, creativity is unbound from business.

Defining clear and well-structured goals is crucial for the success of your creative strategy. SMART is 1 option, but you can also think about "CLEAR Goals": > Collaborative - Goals should involve input and collaboration from relevant stakeholders. > Limited - Set a reasonable limit to the number of goals to avoid spreading resources too thin. > Emotional - Goals should resonate with and inspire the individuals working to achieve them. > Appreciable - Break large goals into smaller, more manageable parts to maintain focus. > Refinable - Goals should be adaptable and subject to refinement as circumstances change. :)

Here's 3 way to know what platforms to go for: 1) Value Of Product If it's an impulse purchase product (<=$30), TikTok is a go since people don't need to think much about it. Source: Blue Cart If it's a high purchase (>=$100), platforms like Google & FB are good as people would be aware then research about it. Source: CreditCards.com 2) Audience Type For elderly, it's Facebook. For young adults, it's Instagram. For teenagers, it's TikTok. 3) Gender If your target audience is female, Pinterest can be a good option to consider. 4) Product Nature If you are a furniture business, Pinterest can be a good avenue as people are looking for home decor inspirations.

It is important to strategize basis the platform you are using. The content you post on LinkedIn may not work on Instagram and vice versa. Every platform has its own niche and you must execute and implement your creative strategy basis that.

Lots of people can create content and design these days, especially with the assist of AI. We look for a balance of staying creative for the fun of it, and also using AI to speed up efficiency. We organize our ideas first. Create punchy headlines and sub-headers, then do our best to make our content look unique so that readers want to engage. Of course, it's all tied into the problem we are solving for them. There's hundreds of emails out there, so we do our best to stay creative and eye-catching!

Here's my creative strategy workflow for: UGC Ads: - Foreplay / Magic Brief: Ad Spying - ChatGPT: Script Writing - Notion / Google Doc: Final Script Detail - Google Slide / Figma: Shot By Shot (Overview) - Loom: Record & explain my thought process Static Ad: - Foreplay / Magic Brief: Ad Spying - Notion / Google Doc: Brief Writing - Figma: Quick Mockup Sketches - Loom: Record & explain my thought process

Content for the sake of content is just adding to the noise. If you're going to put in the work, at least have something new to say. If you're going to create content, at least make it original.

Quantitative Analysis: Motion is my go-to when it comes to tracking my results and analyze my performance: Hard Metrics: - MER - Cost Per Purchase - Amount Spent Platform-based metrics: - CPM - Frequency - ROAS Soft Metrics: - Post Engagement Rate - Link CTR % - Hook Rate (Video) - Hold Rate (Video) Qualitative Analysis: User comments are something I will look at to gauge the sentiment of the ad. If it is good, this means I'm doing a good job & vice versa.

The sole purpose for any research before developing a creative strategy is to first find what consumers really think about your brand. While there are many ways brands do research, I would suggest having your relevant target group get them into a group discussion ( sample size) spread over different geographies and keeping the questions and topics the same. The key findings and insights that you will get will shock you. These insights and gaps will become your guideline to devise what needs to be corrected. Your strategy will now have the most important part what are we trying to solve or achieve.

How to do creative strategy research for FREE: (but requires more of your time & effort) Create a new social media account (if you care about your privacy): a) Train your social media feed by purposely engaging with industry related content so you can get ads all the time b) Search & engage with competitor's post and watch their ads flooding in This approach can get you large quantity of ads from different brands, helping you to keep an open mind on what ad works the best. Not only that, I've found that this has also helped me to discover high engagement ads organically without any paid ad spy tools.

Creative strategy should be rooted In what behaviour or attitude you are creating, changing or maintaining. Beyond identifying it, strategists should always consider what’s stopping it from occurring now and why. This is the heart of any good strategy.

Sometimes you can do the research and follow the playbook and strategy to a tee but not get what you are looking for. There is a lot of marketing strategy in here, but don't forget "creativity." Creative strategy might mean zigging when others zag; Static ads on a video channel etc. Think about Khaby Lame who doesn't dance or even talk but is #1 on TikTok. Think about the super bowl Coinbase QR code.

Creative Strategy at its best is all about two things: optimism and empathy. You need to believe you can help solve a problem and fulfil a need. You also need to have someone in mind to do it for.