What creativity in marketing looks like today
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| Source: Harvard Business Review |
What does it mean to be a creative marketer today and which strategies deliver real business result in nowadays digital marketing world? We all know about the importance of Social Media Marketing, a well-designed website and Search-Engine Optimization. But what are the underlying business mindsets, which make your digital marketing strategy a success? These are the main questions, which Bonchek M. and France C. raised in their interviews of senior marketing executives of top brands for the Harvard Business Review (2017). They identified five trends of today’s creative marketer.
1. Create with the customer, not just for the customer
Seeing customers as creators and not just consumers is a crucial change in the marketer’s mindset. An exemplary case would be Intuit (financial software company), which made their marketing team engage with the customer world. As a result, they diagnosed a pain point for the customer in the tracking of gas mileage, so that they implemented a new feature in their app to automatically track mileage. This enabled their clients to hand in more easily their yearly tax plannings.
2. Invest in the end-to-end experience
What distinguishes the normal marketer from the creative marketer today? Being able to have a holistic view on the entire customer experience makes a marketer creative. The case of the US healthcare company Kaiser Permanente illustrates the payoff of a good customer end-to-end experience. After realizing that their most powerful differentiator is the digital experience for their customers, they introduced a “welcome program” for guiding their new members through the platform. Consequently, 60% of their new members registered within the first six months and these members were also 2.6 times more likely to be a customer of Kaiser Permanente two years later.
3. Turn everyone into an advocate
Turning customers into advocates with the mantra “inspire creativity in others” is the key term for a successful marketer. In practice this means, that everyone in your company should be treated as an extension of the marketing department. The authors use the case of Old Navy (US clothing company), because they used digital content to engage and connect kids with their brand. This resulted in an exceptional brand recognition through 32,000 kids participating, 60% increase in social media engagement and 600% increase in more likely recommendations.
4. Bring creativity measurement
Everything is about performance for today’s management in businesses. Therefore, the performance measurement is also a key tool for marketing in the digital era. Operating and steering marketing activities based on real-time data is extremely powerful as the case of OpenTable (app for online reservations at restaurants) demonstrates. This company analyzes the restaurants performance (e.g. unused capacities) and equips them with the possibility to react quickly with marketing campaigns to low bookings.
5. Think like a start-up
It is not about being a manager working within budget for quarterly defined goals in marketing departments. Today, marketers need to act entrepreneurial and innovative to secure the product and market fit of their firm’s portfolio. In short this means, that they need to employ the business practices of lean startup and agile development for their competitive advantage. The case of Checkr shows that an agile method with customer tests and quick iterations helped them to create a new market, which resulted in reaching early 2017 revenue targets.
These five trends represent a radical shift in the strategy for marketers, mainly caused by the arrival of the digital technologies. It is crucial to in the fast-paced marketing world to have key strategies. They enable the marketers to create value through engaging the entire firm, planning the whole customer experience and using data based decision making. The stated strategies represent a good framework for marketers not to get overwhelmed by the possibilities of digital marketing and to focus on the key drivers for real business results.
Gerard Galindo & Marcus Pernegger
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