What is Creative Development?
Creative development has become more important in recent years. This is because it impacts everything from design to a company’s business goals as well as its presentation of its offer online. It is about using the right ideas, campaigns, material, and many more.
Although SEO has more of a technical nature, it will help your efforts be noticed by your target audience, which is why it should be considered during the creative development for your business marketing efforts. This reason is why expert marketers recommend local SEO for small businesses.
How Does Creative Development Work?
Creative development sounds great and all, but how does it work? And how can you apply it to your business?
First, create a creative strategy.
A creative strategy involves the development of assets while considering current and future business objectives. There are a few steps you need to go over with your team to be able to create an effective creative strategy including:
- Clarifying business objectives.
- Identifying your audiences.
- Identifying real benefits from your business.
- Determining the right CTAs for your brand.
- Outlining your budget and media options.
These steps will help you set the standards and milestones for the next phases of the creative development process.
Measure your success.
How do you measure the success of creativity? There is more to it than just beauty. A piece of art can be so mesmerizing, yet be so hidden that no one can see it. For small businesses, this is where SEO services come in. You want to make sure that all your efforts are seen– and SEO will help you do just that. If done right, you can be on the first page of the search results page!
Now, it is difficult to measure the success of creative assets– this is why it is so important to identify your business objectives during the creative strategy phase. Once you have a clear business objective in mind, it is easier to see if your creative assets are taking you anywhere near your goals.
By having a clear objective, you can set or create a single metric to measure the success of our creative assets. And once you have a metric in place, you can easily see which channels, methods, and materials are working for your brand.
What happens when there are assets that are not hitting their objectives or reaching your expectations? Now, you need to proceed to the next phase.
Adjust and modify any under-performing creative assets.
Is your Facebook ad not working as well as you thought it would? Maybe your post on LinkedIn is not reaching as many people as you expected. That is okay! It does not mean that you have failed yet, it only means that you have some room for improvement.
The first thing you need to do to fix an underperforming creative asset is to identify the problem. Some of the most common reasons why creative assets under-perform include the following:
- The message is not relevant to the audience at the moment (using an old trend or bringing up an old topic).
- The medium is wrong for the message.
- The medium is wrong for the audience.
- The CTA is asking too much from your audience.
Always do your research when it comes to any creative development asset you are using for your business. You can also do A/B testing to identify the problem. A/B testing involves using different variations of the asset to see which component is not working for you.
Once you have identified the problem, you can start brainstorming for solutions. For instance, if your topic does not interest your audience– then it’s time to look for a new one. If your target audience includes businessmen, managers, and CEOs– maybe you should not be trying to reach them through Instagram– maybe LinkedIn is the way to go. Or maybe people are just not ready to commit to your product or service yet– maybe instead of using “Buy Now”, you can use “Free Trial” or “Ask for Quote” first.
The key to fixing underperforming creative assets is to continually tweak and customize your messaging to maximize marketing efficiency. You might also want to check if you have SEO optimized them wherever necessary. Local SEO services are meant to help small businesses establish a strong online presence– especially when working with creative assets that involve your website.
Remember, underperformance doesn’t mean failure, it just means you can still do better.
Managing your brand assets.
There ought to be a lot of materials, elements, and assets in the creative development process for your business. You will have different variations of your logo, the colors of your brand, the templates or style guide for your graphics, and many more. Consistency is important when establishing a brand. So ideally, every image, blog post, animated asset, or video should be managed and organized. You and people within your company (especially ones involved in visual designs) need to know when to use which asset.
Establishing your best practices for content.
Content creation is the heart and soul of digital marketing– and it is also one of the essential elements of any creative developmental plan. Once everything– from the objectives to the asset management– is in order, it is time to establish the best practices for your company’s content creation process.
Some of the content creation best practices for creative development include:
- Adding a Call-to-Action on your content.
- Writing for humans, not the bots or the algorithm.
- Creating designs and graphics that reflect your business.
- Creating videos in a short but informative format.
To plainly state the facts
There is more to the creative process than just making things aesthetically pleasing. You can do all the right things when it comes to visual materials, but still, fail to capture your target audience.
You need to understand the process and the science behind the development of your creative assets.
One way to entice customers is by focusing on the benefits they’ll see rather than on your product. The key to success in marketing is knowing exactly what you want your collateral to do and refining it over time to improve that single metric.
When you want to evaluate the effectiveness of your creativity, determine if it is achieving its desired goal. If not, update and iterate until you see a performance improvement.
Creative development for businesses is an endless endeavor. From written content to billboards, the possibilities are anything but limited.
Good creativity doesn’t rely on how much you spend, it focuses on sending the right message to your customers.