The Role of Creativity in Digital Marketing

Most in the advertising industry know that digital marketing has come to change the game. It is predicted to stay the most successful and popular type of marketing for the foreseeable future. It isn’t hard to understand how this has come to be; digital marketing offers businesses an unprecedented level of personalization and targeting, ensuring the most effective use of time and resources. However, what some experts are beginning to notice is a trend: companies are focusing too much on the technicalities of targeting and data. Many companies rely on fixed formulae to achieve these goals, resulting in a loss of creativity in the digital marketing industry. This trend is potentially very damaging, as marketing has always relied heavily on creativity to ensure an advertisement is noticed, engages with the target audience, and solidifies a brand’s image.

Exploring some of the ways in which digital marketing can be used more creatively can offer some inspiration for companies looking to engage in more original and effective practices.

Engaging with a Distracted Audience

Since the average amount of time an individual will spend on a website is 45 seconds, engaging with an audience has never been more important. This is where creativity comes in: capturing the attention of an internet user is an increasingly difficult task. However, creativity does not need to come at the cost of the multiple benefits of digital marketing; using specialized companies like Searchbloom allows businesses to employ tailored marketing campaigns that are simultaneously creative, data-driven, and targeted.

Data-Focused Creativity

Where valuable consumer data is concerned, digital marketing far surpasses any other marketing format. Using this data can help to inform the best creative digital marketing strategies by showing a company more about who its customers are, what they engage with, and what captures their attention. The best strategies have measurable results, like when Amazon Music created a physical poster campaign so that it could engage with customers online who used it as a backdrop for photos – the number of online posts with the backdrop could be estimated, and as could success.

An example of a successful marketing strategy that combines digital data with creativity is Spotify’s ‘Thanks 2016, it’s been weird’ campaign. Spotify analyzed the listening habits of its customers to create a unique, humorous, and hyper-localized campaign. One of the many ads of this campaign was a poster in a tube station in London; it featured the text: Dear 3,749 people who streamed ‘It’s The End Of The World As We Know It’ on the day of the Brexit Vote. Hang in There. Spotify was also responsible for a poster in Midtown Manhattan that read, ‘Dear person in the Theater District who listened to the Hamilton soundtrack 5376 times this year. Can you get us tickets?’

Targeted Creative Campaigns

Once the analysis of data has been completed, a company is then able to use its findings to inform the most appropriate targeted marketing for its customers, providing an added benefit for a business that might not quite have the budget to display a poster on New York’s valuable real estate. Targeted advertisements only appear to users whose data indicates similar interests, ensuring the highest ROI possible.

Branching out into a new strategy might appear intimidating at first, since implementing new ideas always carries some risk, but since a digital marketing campaign can adapt and grow in real-time, this shouldn’t be too threatening.