Unboxing the Black Box of Marketing Creativity
And no, this is not another info-ad about "harnessing the power of AI."
We know effective marketing is a healthy blend of science, art and psychology. Today's B2B Marketers seem obsessed with the science part — Best Practices of the MarTech Stack, Automations, and KPI reports — as if following formulas, templates and automations with diligent ROI, CPC, MQL, SQL, CAC, CLTV reports will be the magical cash machine that guarantees an ever-upward quarterly revenue trend. STOPPIT!
Newsflash for you: Your prospects and customers
don't care about your analytics.
There is ONE THING your customers care about when it
comes to your brand — their experience of it.
And if you are a B2B marketer with ABM/enterprise strategies, you are in the LONG GAME, not the 4-second-decide-to-buy-now Consumer FAST GAME. What is your sales cycle — 6 - 12 months? What are you doing to keep your prospects warm and engaged during the long cold winter of budget considerations, overcoming prospect influencer/stakeholders’ concerns, staying attractive in the face of aggressive competitors who are courting your prospects?
The marketing team better have a game plan
with content and engagement that does not taste
like a cold bowl of AI-generated oatmeal.
Maybe my experience as a Creative Director gives me a biased perspective on this but — although the three ingredients of the Successful Marketing Elixir are all critical to the success of each other and to the marketing initiative as whole, I believe the most underestimated and under-used secret weapon in today's B2B marcom efforts is The Creative Part.
Early days of art school, I was setting up my oil paint pallet to start painting a landscape. I asked my instructor what is the best way to set up one's pallet — warm to cool hues? Lights to darks? Earthtones to vibrant? My instructor looked at me with a piercing, zen-like, gaze and said: "Your mind should be on your painting, not your pallet." I never forgot that.
Everybody loves science and everybody is afraid of art. Science is predictable — do the same Best Practices as everybody else and get the results. It must be working if everybody else is doing it. Art implies experimentation... experiments can go wrong, they don't always work. What? You do not have time to "get creative?"
Well, do you have time for mediocrity?
You will not get exceptional marketing results with mediocre creative. If you don't have the tolerance for experimentation, you will kill innovation. So, are you willing to create a "safe space" to fail — and then, fail better?
Brands are judged by each touchpoint, not advertising. B2B marketers can take a lesson from consumer marketing. Have a look at some brand stories that broke the mold: Liquid Death, FckOatly.com, Creativity is the Engine that Can Accelerate Business Transformation.
Marketing's Psychology part — dissecting the values, pain points, objections & motivators of your targeted personas (Ideal Customer Profile) and constructing a schedule of various content you hope will be irresistible to them leads us to the part where the magic lives — the ART. And some pertinent questions: What kind of content will my particular audience find irresistible — valuable — worth their time to explore? To give our solutions consideration and even win prospects over enough to start a conversation?
The art/creativity part of a marketing campaign needs to be content that is guided by the psychology part of the equation if your initiative is going to win over your prospect's arguments they are having with themselves:
"Is this solution/offering going to actually solve the problem or create opportunity with my company? "
"Do I feel confident these guys can actually deliver on the features/benefits/promise they are claiming?"
"Do I feel confident recommending this company/solution to my peers and bosses?"
And now, the hard questions — the litmus test to put in front of your creative/content teams: "Does the brand experience we are creating hit the three appeals necessary for our Ideal Customer Profile person to win the argument going on in their head about our company & solutions?
Does it hit Ethos (credibility & character),
Pathos (emotional bond with audience), and
Logos (logical & rational argument)?"
Maybe the ART part of the Effective Marketing Elixir is a bit more nuanced, complex and strategic than you first assumed it to be. Yes, the art part of marketing is fun — so many folks in the organization enjoy throwing their creative ideas into the brand development process. And many assume brand development is a place for self-expression (like your high-school art class). I was developing a corporate identity for a law firm and had the CEO tell me: "I'm colorblind myself but my wife just refinished our bathroom in mauve and she says it's beautiful. So I was thinking our logo should be mauve."
The artistic/creative part of your campaigns needs to be outside the box from what your competitors are doing — thoughtful and unexpected — if it is going to get noticed, remembered, and championed. But it also needs to stay true to the ethos of your brand. Marketing is a big playground for creativity to flourish and it doesn't have to be only about graphic design and copy.
The marketing & creative teams have infinite possibilities to work with — colors, fonts, images, effects, etc... — and many times when we're under deadline pressure, it's tempting to just grab some trendy colors and mildly relevant, non-offensive imagery… maybe AI & Photoshop them a bit, have an AI whip up some copy for 15 minutes and call it good. STOPPIT!
Your brand will blur into the banal over-stimulation of trendy mediocrity. And maybe your CEO will be "comfortable" but will your audience take notice and feel motivated to explore further?
Marketers: challenge your creative team and yourself
to deliver work that makes you feel, makes you think, makes you curious.
Opportunities for brain-grabbing creative exist at every touch-point of a prospect's/client's experience of your brand: online ads, social, video, webinars, datasheets, brochures, landing pages, product solution/feature pages, emails, newsletters, events... Have a look at your marketing communications mix and start with the media types that have the most influence in the prospect decision-making process (probably your website). Then, when you get the "AH-HA" concept, let it proliferate consistently to other media — when users see consistent imagery/creative direction, it fosters a feeling of security/reliability/trustworthiness (that psychology part again) about your brand.