Do you consider yourself a creative marketer?

What makes marketing creative? Is it more imagination or innovation? Is a creative marketer more like an artist or an entrepreneur? Historically, the term "marketing ad" has been associated with the words and images used in advertising campaigns. But marketing, like other business functions, has become more complex and rigorous. Marketers must have data analytics, customer experience, and product design. Are these shifting roles driving a new way of thinking about creativity in marketing?

Create with the customer, not just for the customer

Everyone likes to talk about being "customer oriented". All too often, this means taking a better aim with targeted campaigns. Customers today are not just consumers; they are also creators, developing content and ideas with you. Creativity in marketing requires working with customers from scratch to weave their experiences into your efforts to expand the reach of your business.

Invest in the end-to-end experience

Every marketer believes that the customer experience is important. But most marketers only focus on the parts of that experience under their direct control. Creative marketers keep a broader view and pay attention to the entire customer experience from start to finish. This includes the product, the buying process, the ability to provide support, and customer relationships over time. That takes time and resources, it also requires bringing creative thinking to unfamiliar problems.

Make everyone an advocate

In a fragmented media and social landscape, marketers can no longer achieve their goals of exposure and reputation through paid media and PR alone. People are the new channel. The way to amplify impact is to inspire creativity in others. Treat everyone as an extension of your marketing team: employees, partners and even customers.

Bring creativity to size

The measurability of digital engagement means we can now know exactly what works and what doesn't. This offers marketing the opportunity to measure and manage itself in new ways. Historically, marketing measured success by sticking to budgets and winning creative awards. Today, the ability to measure data and adjust strategies in real time enables marketing to prove its worth to the business in entirely new ways.

Think like a startup

In the past, marketers had to be effective managers, set goals well in advance, and then work within budget to achieve those goals. Today, creative marketers must act more like entrepreneurs and constantly adapt to maintain “product/market fit”.

The changes occurring in consumer behaviour, technology and media are redefining the nature of creativity in marketing. The measure of marketing success is not the input, be it the quality of a content or a campaign, but rather the value of the output, be it sales, loyalty or advocacy. Marketers of the past thought of artists, managers and promoters. Today's marketers must force themselves to think more like innovators and entrepreneurs – creating enterprise value by engaging the entire organization, looking at the full customer experience, using data to make decisions, and measuring effectiveness based on business outcomes.