Regardless of your market or audience, a comprehensive creative strategy is crucial for growing businesses. Whether you're a small business owner or the head of a major brand, understanding and implementing effective creative strategies will significantly impact your long-term success. 

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At Brighter Click, we pride ourselves on offering clients a comprehensive approach to creative brand strategy. We use a thorough, step-by-step process to help our clients achieve their marketing goals using data-driven, innovative solutions and a 90-day plan designed to optimize campaigns. 

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In this blog, I’ll explain the essence of creative strategy and share some of the secrets to our success, outlining our comprehensive process for helping clients grow continuously. 

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What is Creative Strategy?

A creative strategy is a plan that outlines how businesses can use ad creative to achieve their marketing goals. It involves knowing how to say the right thing to the right people at the right time, ensuring that the message aligns with the brand's objectives and resonates with the target audience. 

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At Brighter Click, we understand that a well-crafted creative strategy is the backbone of successful paid media marketing efforts. Here’s how we break it down: 

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Key Elements of Creative Strategy

• Identify Customers and Their Motivation: Taking the time to understand who your audience is and what will cause them to take action or make a purchase. 
• Brand Messaging: Crafting messages that reflect the brand's values and appeal to the audience.
• Media Planning: Choosing the right channels to deliver your message.
• Creative Execution: Developing creative assets like ads, content, and visuals.

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Creative strategies are essential regardless of your field–we’ve served clients in virtually every vertical, from healthcare and beauty to SaaS and service providers. The right approach to creative strategy ensures that your marketing efforts are not just effective but also memorable and engaging.

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Creative Strategy Examples

As a team that works with a wide range of different clients, we have to adjust our approach each time–though our core processes remain the same. After learning a client’s goals and assessing their current situation, we determine the best route forward. Here’s an example: 

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Last April, we started working on strategic ad messaging for a brand struggling to reach its sales potential. Before we came on board, sales from January through the end of April were just $8,425.

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Our first step was to conduct extensive customer research better to understand their audience’s purchasing motivations and habits. This helped us create unique brand messaging and develop a strategic Facebook ad creative strategy, which we tested and optimized over the coming months.

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We then worked with the client to build a list of influencers in their niche with the goal of gaining awareness and sales through influencer product seeding.

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At the same time, we collaborated with one of our partner agencies to overhaul their website, making it more visually appealing and optimizing it for a seamless user experience to improve conversion rates.

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With our new strategy, sales soared – in the final week of May alone, they brought in $18,839.50, and their total for the month was a massive $47,073.50! Growth was so rapid that it led to inventory depletion twice within the first six months, causing a pivot towards driving pre-orders.

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Why Creative Strategy is Important

Without a strong creative strategy, brands will basically be playing a guessing game when it comes to ad creation. As a creative strategy agency, we emphasize the importance of a strong, data-driven creative strategy for several reasons, including: 

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• Building Brand Identity: A strong creative strategy ensures that all marketing efforts align with the brand's values and messaging, creating a cohesive and recognizable brand identity.
• Engaging the Audience: Creative strategies are designed to capture the audience's attention and keep them engaged, which is crucial for driving conversions.
• Achieving Marketing Goals: A creative strategy helps businesses achieve their marketing goals more efficiently by defining clear objectives and outlining the steps to achieve them.

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Partnering with a creative strategy agency like Brighter Click can provide the expertise and resources needed to develop and execute an effective creative brand strategy. Comprehensive creative strategy research ensures the strategies are data-driven and aligned with the latest market trends.

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Process of Creative Strategy Research

Creating a successful creative strategy involves thorough research and planning. Internally, we create a 90-day plan to ensure we’re always analyzing data, measuring success, and optimizing both the brand strategy we use and its execution in our Facebook ads, TikTok ads, and other branding materials. 

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Here’s a step-by-step guide to the process we use at Brighter Click:

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Define Marketing Goals

The first step in any creative strategy is to define your marketing goals. What are you hoping to achieve? Whether it's increasing brand awareness, driving sales, or launching a new product, having clear objectives will guide your entire strategy.

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We often help clients understand whether they want to increase their ROI (return on investment), decrease their CPA (cost per acquisition), or even increase AOV through opportunities such as bundled purchases. Often, agencies only look at ‘improving sales,’ but a great marketing strategy gets much deeper than that. 

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Understanding the deeper levels of what your clients want to achieve will help you create a strategy that is uniquely aligned with their goals – and more likely to help them achieve them!

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Ads Account Audit

At Brighter Click, our internal media buyer conducts detailed ad performance analysis and audits to optimize performance and ensure our clients get the best return on their investment. 

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Auditing your ads account is essential to understand what’s working and what’s not. This involves analyzing the performance of your ads, identifying successful campaigns, and spotting areas for improvement.

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We do this to identify winning ads, identify what motivates purchases, and iterate these ideas into new ads later. This information is essential for building a thorough 90-day plan. 

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Know Your Customer

Understanding your customer is crucial for any creative strategy. This involves comprehensive customer research to gather insights about their preferences, behaviors, and needs. Here’s how we do it… 

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Brand Messaging Strategy

A strong brand messaging strategy involves conducting a competitive messaging analysis to understand how your brand's messaging compares to competitors in the same market. This helps refine your brand voice and ensure consistency across all marketing channels. 

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One of our internal approaches is using our customer reviews and competitor analysis to create what we call ‘Motivators’. These are the emotions that we expect will motivate potential customers to buy. We search through reviews and Reddit threads (as well as competitor reviews) to identify a list of key motivators that come up most frequently. 

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These can be as general as, ‘Quality,’ ‘Value,’ ‘Speed’, and ‘Trust’ or as specific as ‘Brand Reputation’ (related to a specific brand being sold by an eCommerce website or retailer) or ‘Memory Loss’ (related to clinical trials for a healthcare client). 

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Website and Marketing Copy

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We use these motivators to build a strong brand messaging strategy, allowing us to test ad and website copy that appeal to potential clients. These become the basis of our 90-day testing plan, which is reflected in the copy and designs we create for ads. 

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Every 90 days, we reassess, see how our motivators performed, and rethink our strategy. Based on each quarter's chosen motivators, our creative strategist briefs several Facebook ads, TikTok ads, or UGC videos to align with the themes. 

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Here’s a deeper look at how we do that: 

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Customer Review Analysis

We usually start by searching through online reviews, Reddit threads, and other online sources to discover how customers discuss a brand. We’re looking for: 

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• Paint points that drove them to purchase the product
• Positive USPs that caused them to leave a review 
• The language they use to discuss the product (so we can mirror this in our ad campaign copy) 
• Any other differentiators or indicators of who their core audience may be. For example, we may notice that a certain product has many reviews mentioning that it was purchased for the reviewer's father – this gives us a good idea of the person who frequently makes the purchase and the end user. 
• We look for patterns in feedback to understand what motivates customers to make a purchase and what issues they might be facing.

Competitor Analysis

Understanding what your competitors are doing can provide valuable insights into your own strategy. Competitor marketing analysis involves examining their marketing tactics, strengths, and weaknesses. It also involves assessing their marketing strategies, from where they promote to which types of ads they run. 

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One of the major benefits of competitor analysis in developing a marketing plan is understanding what type of language they use, what type of images they use, and figuring out how to set yourself apart from what’s already being done. If another company is saying the same thing as you, you’re losing your place in the market. 

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During a recent project, we found that a client's main competitor heavily invested in influencer marketing. Our client, however, had not explored this avenue. By recommending and implementing an influencer marketing campaign, we helped the client gain significant market share and improve brand visibility. We did this by carving out their unique niche while leaning into a strategy that worked for a competitor. 

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Facebook Ads Account

As a Facebook ad agency, conducting a thorough Facebook ads analysis is crucial for businesses using Facebook ads. Our media buyer constantly analyzes and optimizes ad performance, deciding where the budget should be allocated and the direction of future campaigns.

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Analysis of Facebook ads greatly strengthens our creative strategy planning. For example, during a Facebook ad audit for an outdoor product, our media buyer discovered that their highest-performing ads featured videos demonstrating the product in use.

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This insight from a Facebook ad analysis led us to recommend a shift in their overall brand ad strategy to focus more on catching viewers' attention through customer testimonials and real-life product usage, significantly boosting their ad effectiveness.

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Building an Effective Creative Strategy Plan

By understanding creative strategy, exploring its various applications, and following a thorough research process, businesses can develop effective strategies that resonate with their audience and achieve their marketing goals. 

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Partnering with a creative strategy agency like Brighter Click can further enhance these efforts, providing the expertise and resources needed to succeed. Whether you're defining marketing goals, conducting customer research, or analyzing ad performance, every step is crucial in crafting a successful creative strategy. 

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We take every step discussed above and build them into a 90-day testing plan to guide our first three months with a client. Then, we reassess our progress every three months and create a completely new plan based on our findings. This ensures we create new, data-driven strategies to continuously optimize our work, reach clients’ goals, and drive growth.

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Download Our 90-Day Presentation Deck!

To give you a head start, we’re offering a FREE download of our 90-Day Presentation Deck! This is the template we use to present brand strategy and messaging to clients each quarter–and it’s the first time we’ve ever given it away!

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Want More Strategies for Success?

Check out The Marketing Mindset Podcast, where I interview industry leaders, marketers, and CEOs from a wide range of industries every week! 

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