Creative Strategy for Small Businesses

Small companies can’t afford to waste their marketing budget, especially during a recession. To keep marketing on track, start with a creative strategy.

Don’t good creative ideas just sort of “happen?” The answer is no. We all benefit from thoughtful preparation. Even during the creative process.

Certainly, marketing involves lots of creativity. But imagine, what if there were no boundaries on that creative thinking? Any and all ideas would be considered and pursued, regardless of whether they are relevant to the audience, the product or the brand.

At best, you’d waste lots of time and money until you found the right idea. At worst, you’d create a campaign that fails to motivate - and may even alienate - your target audience.

Before you embark on building any piece of marketing - advertising, print collateral, Web design, e-communications, etc. - you need a blueprint, called a creative strategy. Good marketing firms use this simple document to help define the audience, message and more.

A creative strategy asks and answers a set of basic questions to help everyone agree on a direction before time and money is spent on creative development. It helps you be both efficient and effective.

A good creative strategy defines the following:

Target Audience - Who is the message aimed at, from a demographic and/or psychographic perspective?

Source of Business - Do we plan to take business from competitors? If so, with whom are we competing?

Advertising Objective - What should the advertising accomplish? Generate trial? Create or change image? Introduce new product or new features? Create interest via a promotion?

Primary Rational Benefit - What are we promising our target, expressed in a single-minded, rational statement?

Support - What focused and deliverable reasons can we offer to make the Primary Rational Benefit believable?

Emotional Appeal - How will we motivate the target from an emotional standpoint? Do we want to make them feel warm and fuzzy about our product? Angry at the competition? Sympathetic to our cause? How will we impact our target’s “state of heart?”

Tonality - What personality do we want to establish or reinforce? Fun? Professional? Supportive? What image do we want our target to take away?

Mandatories - What legal or other required elements must be addressed or included?

When you answer these questions, you narrow your focus and develop a blueprint for your campaign. As a result, all parties - the client, agency and any other contributors - can “sing from the same hymnal.”

Plus - and this is A BIG PLUS - it will be much easier to keep people from developing ideas that stray from agreed-upon objectives.