Ever designed creative marketing campaigns, or thought about it? We’ve had to build creative marketing campaigns for our clients in small businesses for the past 6+ years. We learned much from how Jay Baer builds creative marketing.
We have learned a few things about making creative marketing campaigns and advertising look professional even on a tight budget. And the true measure of a successful marketing campaign design? That is having customers remember and talk about them.
Many small businesses don’t have a lot of time or resources to have their marketing campaigns or ads professionally designed. Marketing or advertising, you need to create information that your customers find interesting and worth talking about and remembering. Customers read and remember things that interest them.
So what’s a small business to do?
Here are eight important marketing design elements we rely on to design creative marketing campaigns and the best examples of each that we could find. Great way to learn and stimulate marketing campaign design ideas.
Baer builds creative marketing … consumer insights
Consumer insight is a simple truth that applies to a significant set of your target community. Businesses must understand what customers are and aren’t buying and why. They should also understand the way and why customers behave the way they do.
Here are two examples of customer insights:
The first example is Sam Walton who put large stores in sparsely populated locations – the opposite of retail orthodoxy – because he ‘understood’ that the vastly improved highway system had made it easy for shoppers from the larger urban areas to travel to these stores and for the suppliers to deliver goods cheaply.
Another example is Steve Jobs insisting that the iMac was launched with four colors because he got that color is a way that people express themselves and makes the computer personal.
This did not go down well with the left-brained people who could say the negatives: delayed launch, higher inventory, more pressure in forecasting, etc.
Specific, attainable objectives
The objective of creative marketing campaigns is to position your business as a better but less expensive alternative to your best competitors.
You should specify what your customer community should think, feel, and do. Focus on using emotions as much as possible.
Baer builds creative marketing … create a persona
Create the customer persona to represent your target community (think community and not the audience.
Why you may ask? A community is about multi-way way engagement in the group, while an audience signifies one-way transmission.)
Listen to these personas, collect quotes and comments, as well as testimonials.
https://digitalsparkmarketing.com/power-of-persuasion/
Target each campaign
Creative marketing campaigns address issues that are specific to given objectives. So one campaign strategy won’t be effective for all of your objectives.
Design marketing campaigns to specific business objectives.
Baer builds creative marketing … think strategically, not predictably
You want to think strategically and avoid predictability. Think to the brand, the positioning of your messages, and direct responses.
Branding – Your branding is all about showing consistent messages and personality all the time. This is not about us, but how people perceive us and our story, what we look like, and what value we offer others.
Positioning – Positioning is about finding a niche in customers’ minds, and filling it with a tagline and unique selling position (USP) that will capture their attention and be remembered. A USP is one of the fundamental pieces of any solid marketing campaign. Simply stated, it’s a summary of what makes your business unique and valuable to your target market. It answers the question: How do your business services benefit your clients better than anyone else can?
This is because a USP can give a great deal of clarity to your business model, what your company does and why you do it. It can define your business and most important business goals in just a sentence.
Direct response – A direct response is a trigger you want from customers that results in an action you are seeking. The final result will hopefully yield new business for your company.
Baer builds creative marketing … tell great stories
Good stories immediately focus on engagement, experiences, and emotion … central tenets that are attractive to most customers. The narrative makes your message relevant and memorable through personalization.
Stories are a great means for sharing and interpreting experiences, and great experiences have this innate ability to change the way in which we view our world.
Baer builds creative marketing … emotional influence and persuasion
Budweiser puppy love that was, by most accounts, the biggest winner from the 2014 Super Bowl. There are no better means of influence or the power of persuasion than emotion. Hands down the best, in our opinion.
Experiences that trigger our emotions are saved and consolidated in lasting memory because the emotions generated by the experiences signal our brains that the experiences are important to remember.
Check out this ad here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQB7QRyF4p4
There are eight basic, universal emotions – joy, surprise, anticipation, acceptance, fear, anger, sadness, and disgust. Successful appeals to these basic emotions consolidate stories and the desired calls to action in the lasting memories of audiences.
Baer builds creative marketing … visual elements
Use pictures/visuals to convey the message much better than words. “Seeing is believing” and “actions speak louder than words” are two common sayings that reflect a bias and preference for visual presentation.
Does Samsung have another winning marketing strategy?
Here is a four-minute Samsung ad with 15-20 new features shown for their iPhone. No talking. And so simple that you quickly grasp the features and don’t lose interest. And the coordinated music has a way to keep you tied in. Creating customer interest doesn’t get any simpler than this. A very simple, yet entertaining design, don’t you think?
This ad subtly grabs and holds attention based on a great music soundtrack, no speaking, and total reliance on superb visuals.
Letting the visuals carry the messages.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LHv1FPd1Ec
Creating customer interest doesn’t get any simpler than this. A very simple, yet entertaining design, don’t you think?
