Business customers are people too. When marketing teams give more consideration to search engine optimization and pleasing the algorithms than addressing the needs of their audience, we end up with sea of homogenised, copycat offerings that become indistinguishable to potential customers. Marketers have to contend with compressed timeframes, the need to keep costs low, a constant stream of new competitors, and prioritisation of technical considerations. As a result, creativity in brand marketing campaigns suffers.

Marketing Challenges for Brands

1. The Attention Economy

For years, marketers followed a basic formula of producing more content when they needed more traffic. There is now more content available on the web than ever before and it is overwhelming. Blogs, videos, white papers, case studies, webinars... It’s all there whenever they log into their social media feeds or open their email.

When you think about it, the amount of content brands asks potential customers to wade through is staggering. How are they supposed to narrow it down to what’s important?

There isn’t a problem with shrinking consumer attention spans. People pay more attention than ever to the content they find relevant. The 2018 State of Attention Report from Prezi showed that almost 60% of business professionals felt able to give relevant content their undivided attention.

However, anything that doesn’t fit into that sphere gets tuned out. Nearly half of respondents in that same report stated they had become more selective about the content they focused on versus the same period a year prior.

Your potential customers breezing past your content represents countless hours of marketing planning go right down the drain. Marketers have to do better when it comes to creating content that captures a reader’s attention, draws them in and holds them.

2. Over-Optimisation

Digital marketing and online shopping used to be a novelty. Now it's the standard. Digital marketing is just marketing. Online shopping is just shopping.

The same tools that used to help brands stand out have led to a situation where the experience for customers feels the same. Think about the last time you shopped online or browsed on Instagram or Twitter. How many companies or accounts jumped out as offering a truly unique experience or point of view?

Forrester’s Customer Experience Index shows that CX performance has become flat for four years in a row. If there’s no difference between you and a competitor, why would a customer feel compelled to choose your brand over another? It’s hard to build brand loyalty with new consumers if you’re not creative in giving them a unique customer experience.

Forrester also notes that spending on marketing technology is set to grow from 9-11% through the year 2022. During that same period, spending on creative is projected to only grow around 2.4%. The widespread focus on technology has led to many marketers spending less and less time coming up with creative concepts.

Perhaps this is a strange thing for a company with a strong and enthusiastic focus on marketing technology to be saying, but we need to strike a balance.

Yes, understanding human behaviour and optimising for the way your prospects interact with your brand is essential in today's marketing landscape. Analytics and digital marketing tools play an important role in driving progress in the industry. However, we’ve seen the balance shift too much toward technology versus making human connections. When that happens, we end up with a sea of over-optimised, bland promotions and customer tools with little distinction between each other.

It's not only boring for the consumer. Forty per cent of marketers in the UK state that creativity is the skill they value most. Yet most spend only 21% of their work time in that area. That works out to around an hour and a half per day.

Managers should make sure their most valuable resource – marketers ready and willing to embrace creativity – have what they need. Bring in analytical and digital marketing tools, but also encourage originality, intuition and creativity.

Taking that kind of initiative typically leads to more satisfying and interesting user experiences. The end results can be key to helping brands differentiate themselves from competitors.

Tips on Building More Creative Marketing Strategies

What can brands do to overcome these significant pain points and come up with more innovative marketing techniques?

1. Incorporate Storytelling

Brands should make it a priority to tell audiences a story with each piece of content. It’s how you forge deeper connections with customers. Humans like hearing about and learning from the experiences of others.

The Prezi report notes that 55% of business professionals engage more when a brand tells them a significant story. Stories make brands feel more human, which makes them more relatable to consumers. Great stories evoke real emotion, which customers remember long after the details of your narrative fade.

Talk to customers about the reasons for your brand’s existence. Let audiences know how your presence in the marketplace makes things better for them and, on a deeper level, the world. You can talk about your successes and challenges in ways that are unique to your brand.

You want that emotional connection to remain constant. The more effective your storytelling, the greater your ability to draw like-minded audience members together to form a community that feels they need your products or services. That often leads to the kind of effective, organic promotion that you can’t buy with the most expensive media campaign.

Use your stories in ways that tell customers why you’re different from other brands. When audiences trust you, they are more likely to stick to you when it’s time to make a purchase. Those relationships can be nurtured and encouraged to last for years, extending the life of your brand.

Stories provide an opportunity for brands to stand out in what’s becoming an increasingly homogenised marketplace. The way you communicate through storytelling could be the difference-maker in a customer, giving you the time of day over a competitor and help brands achieve marketing goals.

2. Include Eye-Catching Visuals

There’s a reason that so many social media promotions incorporate visual content. Videos have also become a powerhouse marketing tool for brands. Outlets like YouTube and the rapidly growing TikTok allow marketers to forge connections with consumers.

The brain processes pictures more efficiently than written words. People are 65 per cent more likely to remember content associated with a memorable image. That’s why there’s been significant growth in using infographics to deliver essential data points. They combine useful information with visuals that keep a user’s attention.

Visuals are great for customers who don’t have a lot of time to digest a dense whitepaper or other technical content. However, what brands need to remember is that those images should be something customers want to see.

Infographics seem to be more popular during the early part of the buyer’s journey, while videos and webinars prove more popular during the middle stage of the buyer journey. Brands should also pay close attention to what analytics data tells them about user preferences when it comes to engagement with visual content.

3. Personalisation

Don’t think of personalisation as something extra to be added to your content. It should be a central pillar of your customer experience from start to finish. This is where emerging marketing automation technologies can enhance the customer experience.

Personalisation can be applied to your emails, website and other digital media. Develop buyer personas and collect metrics that tell you how visitors move around your website. Tying content into what you understand of the user based on their specific movements and behaviours increases its persuasiveness. Think about ways to make it easier for them to find what they need or to deliver it to them directly.

A study done by Monetate and WBR Research showed that 77% of businesses saw in an increase in revenue when they focused on personalisation.

However, don’t let the use of data and technology overwhelm your team. Give your marketers full rein to come up with creative ideas to build more intimate and interactive user experiences for visitors. Again, it comes back to making visitors feel they’re part of your brand’s community. They feel that connection more when it seems you’ve taken the time to understand what they like.

4. Offer Your Unique Point of View

Brands should look for ways to lend a distinctive voice to the content provided through their channels. Establishing your point of view is a key point of differentiation as what is most important to you won't be the same for other companies. Demonstrating your expertise and knowledge in this way can help your brand stand out from your competitors and to connect with your ideal customer.

You can do this by producing original content that is informative and provides thought leadership - blog posts, white papers and case studies, for example. Another way to distinguish yourself from your competitors is by giving a unique perspective on your industry. Developing the role of content curator allows you to become an authoritative source for B2B companies wanting a new ideas and a wide range of perspectives.

Giving a real-person perspective on relevant subjects is a great way of connecting to customers with a similar mind-set. Don’t worry so much about trying to break through to everyone. Your focus should be on people looking for an authoritative voice that speaks directly to their concerns.

It doesn’t matter if you speak through blogs, videos, or your company’s Facebook page. It’s about establishing why your brand is a leader in that space, which helps move you up in the minds of consumers. Make the messaging consistent regardless of where users decide to engage.

5. Show Authenticity

Forging real bonds between a brand and a customer requires the building of in-the-moment connections through your marketing. People sense when a brand is being inauthentic and that breeds a sense of distrust.

Consumers want brands to address the topics they think are important. As a brand, that might feel risky. But the risk could be tenfold if you continue avoiding those deeper subjects. Instead of focusing on the negatives, look for the intersection between what matters to your brand, your employees and your customers, and be excited about the opportunity to connect them.

Ask the brightest minds within your company what matters to them and the people they care about. Make sure you are opening up discussion to include a diversity of perspectives and opinions. Find positions that align with your company values and ideas to strengthen your company’s message.

6. Consider Content Preferences

People have a ton of things vying for their attention. Whatever you send out, whether it's case studies or other content, needs to be relevant to each individual's needs and provide great value.

All the work you put into coming up with stories, personalising user experiences, and thinking about visuals pays off here. You will only have marketing success if what you're offering tallies with the ever more exacting requirements of busy B2B buyers. You should not only pay attention to the content preferences expressed by your target audience in the research, but also to what works and what doesn't from your own marketing data and customer feedback surveys.

The way you put content together should make it clear to you audience that you’ve done your research, you've got the answer they’re looking for and that you know how best to present it to them.

7. Make Creativity Part of your Culture

Don’t separate the creative and technical minds in your teams into silos. Create opportunities to bring everyone together to solve problems and come up with more creative marketing campaigns. Encourage your marketing team to learn more about different aspects of sales, lead generation and technology, and vice-versa.

By understanding more about available automation, a brand’s marketers have a better understanding of how to turn their ideas into marketing ROI enhancing strategies. It also helps equalise the balance between using automation to streamline processes and using creativity to fuel more innovative marketing campaigns that still rank well in search engines.

1827 Marketing offers brands the chance to revitalise their digital marketing strategies. Find out more about how we combine our marketing expertise and automation platform knowledge to deliver for our customers. Schedule a demo today if you’re ready to transform your marketing tactics.