Creative strategists play a vital role in supporting a company to grow through effective marketing campaigns. Best creative strategists combine the creative and imaginative intuition of a marketer with the logical reasoning of an analyst. This article will cover all aspects of what is a creative strategist and how that person can help your business.
So, needless to say, there’s a huge demand for professionals who can play both sides of the spectrum; Be creative and at the same time be analytical. A creative strategist is the modern day Leonardo DaVinci. They find meaningful relations between seemingly un-relatable concepts and ideas and create groundbreaking, unicorn kinda brands, tools and more.
They’re the ones that spot the underlying business problems instantly, thanks to their analytical mind and create touching narratives that drive peoples hearts.
From this article, you’ll learn all there is to know about a creative strategist, from what it means to why you need to hire one. So, let’s get started!
If you are already set on hiring a creative strategist, let’s talk.
What Is A Creative Strategist? The Definition
A creative strategist is a marketing expert who focuses on improving a company’s marketing and advertising strategies. Although the creative strategist may also assist and provide ideas on individual ads or campaigns, their main focus is setting the company’s overall marketing strategy.
A creative strategist is a bridge connecting the creative and the business objectives. The creative strategist’s role is to research and understand the purpose of the brand, its opponents, discover insights into the audience, use that knowledge to design compelling campaign concepts and ultimately pitch the concept successfully.
It’s a big responsibility suitable for only the best and brightest to handle your digital marketing strategies and campaigns.
4 Qualities And Skills A Creative Strategist Should Have
An excellent creative strategist needs particular skills, qualities, and personality traits in order to effectively execute their responsibilities. Some of these skills can be taught in school, while others come only through practice and experience.
Some of the essential qualities and skills to look for in a creative strategist you can find listed right here!
Read more about the benefits of hiring a creative strategist.
Creative And Analytical Skills
To set strategies for any business, a creative strategist needs to understand the company’s market. Analytical skills allow developing and implementing steps that will ensure and support the business’ growth. They will analyze sales data, market trends, and customer reviews and make reasonable and logical assessments. Detailed competitor analysis helps a creative strategist identify underserved markets or make new approaches to existing ones, providing an advantage over competitors. When it comes to frameworks, this is the one competitor analysis framework I use to analyze my client’s competitors
Additionally, creativity is a vital skill for all marketing positions, and it is essential for creative strategists. Thinking and analyzing marketing solutions allows a creative strategist to recognize unique approaches to grow the companies market share.
Communication
Effectively communicating information, verbally and in writing, is a crucial skill for a creative strategist. When working with clients, colleagues or supervisors, transparent communication allows creative strategists to explain their ideas and plans.
A creative strategist is a natural-born pitcher.
After the clients or supervisors approve a project and the marketing team starts executing the plan, regular communication with staff provides each employee with direction for what their obligations and responsibilities are.
To have a successful creative strategy, communication between the organization members is essential.
Financial Knowledge
When creating a marketing plan, it’s beneficial for a creative strategist to have some knowledge of financial principles. In addition to basic budgeting skills, a creative strategist benefits from knowing the relationship between spending and return on investment for a strategy.
This is what helps them recognize the best way of action concerning spending levels on campaigns.
Business Sense
The creative strategist has to have the ability to present the business value of advertisements and marketing to business people.
So, it’s essential for them to stay updated in the business and marketing field, always learning and exploring new things that are competitive enough on the market and finally, actively participate in forums and debates.
Read my step-by-step guide on how to implement a business development method that will help you make money while executing it.
Job Description: Requirements, Roles & Responsibilities
The Creative Strategist is first and foremost a creative leader and thinker who will help promote an innovative strategy that will develop and implement actions that will ensure and support the business’ growth.
Creative strategists are the experts in thinking outside of the box to develop media plans to reach as large an audience as possible or to reach a specific audience type.
Here’s a look at the creative strategist job requirements, along with the roles and responsibilities that come with it.
Creative Strategist Skills and Requirements
This is the list from which you can learn about the key job requirements for a creative strategist:
- Creative strategist degree or diploma in marketing, communications, advertising, journalism, digital media or a related field.
- Although not required, the best creative strategists pursue a master’s degree, which gives further education and may make a more appealing applicant for creative strategist positions.
- Profound understanding of content management systems, keyword research tools, social media platforms, search engine optimization (SEO), and search engine marketing (SEM).
- Experience in Marketing, Communications or Digital media.
- Experience producing and editing digital content for target audiences across all multimedia and social platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, LinkedIn, YouTube and Yelp.
- Experience in writing and copy editing, including writing in various voices and styles for different target audiences.
Creative Strategist Roles And Responsibilities
Creative strategist responsibilities can differ between organizations. However, whether the creative strategist is a part of a team or works alone, some of the roles and responsibilities are the same, and they are described as the following:
- Meeting with clients to discuss and review their goals and wanted final results from an upcoming marketing campaign.
- Hosting focus groups to test how effective is a marketing strategy or survey public opinion on an issue or product
- Creating documentation and project outlines about marketing initiatives
- Reviewing and evaluating how the existing marketing strategy is performing
- Educate the company on the latest marketing industry and technology trends, innovation opportunities, ground-breaking ideas, and executions
- Keep track of the competitive landscape across this industry
- Provide creative input across all campaigns and projects
If you noticed an area that you think you could use my help with, let’s chat.
Why Do You Need A Creative Strategist
A creative strategist ensures all channels feature a straightforward and engaging approach, the content is on-point, and the social media is up to date.
Because they understand the interrelation between content, images, and media, creative strategists assure that all parts of a brand’s digital presence work well together to create connection and an aesthetically pleasing digital experience for customers.
Businesses want their brand to stand out from other competitors, even if it means creating and producing content that is challenging to write and takes a long time to publish. As a result, businesses are also eager to invest in creative strategists to deliver successful brand marketing.
Here’s my step-by-step strategy on finding competitors’ pricing for any industry.
A Creative Strategist Helps You Set And Reach Goals
A creative strategist helps you define your marketing goals and set your business priorities, also enables you to create a strategy to plan your work and ensure that all marketing effort is purpose-driven.
With a creative strategist on your team, you can ensure that every piece of effort turns into actual results.
A Creative Strategist Makes Your Campaigns More Efficient And Effective
The Creative Strategist will help you work faster by streamlining the workflow and improving the transparency between team members. They’ll also turn insights into creative recommendations, which will help you avoid re-work and make your content more compelling.
Here’s an example of an initiative that I implement to successfully generate B2B leads.
A Creative Strategist Creates Cohesive Marketing Campaigns
Creating and distributing content can get costly. When marketers work without a content strategist there to guide them, they often lose sight of the larger picture and spend far too much money on various projects.
Content strategies help determine how much should be spent per project, how it should be spent and how to cut costs if needed. The creative strategist will help you not only ideate a content production and distribution system but also help you implement it.
Here’s a step-by-step guide on my system that helped a client produce 100 long-form articles in 2 months and managed to get his focus keywords to the top of the SERPs.
A Creative Strategist Helps You Find Your Audience
Creative strategists are the ones who develop audience personas for your brand’s target and help you decide how to engage the audience and help you reach your business targets.
Creative Strategists can evaluate the created content from various perspectives, customer goals vs. business goals, emotional vs. logical considerations, creativity vs. efficiency. They’ll help you avoid facing lousy customer experiences and make sure your content is tailored to your target viewers.
Because of all these reasons, you need to find the right and reliable content strategist that will resonate with your brand marketing goals. Therefore, a content strategist is the best person to help businesses achieve all of these things.
Here are ten more reasons why you need to hire a creative strategist.
Final Thoughts
Having a creative strategist in your team can significantly benefit your company. However, before hiring one, you need to have a sound understanding of this term, and with this article in hand, that’s precisely what you get.
Hopefully, you enjoyed reading this article as much as I enjoyed writing it!
If you’re looking to grow your business and implement new strategies, let’s talk.