Creative agencies are the driving force behind captivating and effective creative advertising campaigns. But how can you make sure your creative process is delivering top-notch results? At CRAFTSMAN+, our creative team believe it is crucial to streamline your creative process and employ the best practices available to take the necessary creative steps to maximize success. From identifying goals to the final production and resizing, CRAFTSMAN+ employs a comprehensive approach to deliver outstanding creative solutions.
Find out more about how our creative steps can help your creative process, below:
IDENTIFY GOALS
The first step in optimizing your creative process is to clearly identify your goals. What is the objective of this creative advertising campaign? Is it to boost brand awareness, drive sales, or convey a specific message? By defining your goals upfront, you can ensure that every creative decision made throughout the process aligns with your objectives.
Here are some key questions to start you off:
+ What would make the campaign a success?
+ What can we learn from previous top performing or low performing ads?
+ What’s the target audience?
Once you are aligned with the client on the goals and objectives of the campaign, the process becomes much more streamlined.
ESTABLISH THE RELATIONSHIP
Effective communication with clients is paramount in creative advertising. When CRAFTSMAN+ kicks off the initial process with a client, they establish a shared vision where the creative team actively listens to ideas, expectations, and concerns. This dialogue sets the core precedent of collaboration and ensures that the final creative work meets the client’s needs and vision.
DEFINE BRAND GUIDELINES
Maintaining brand consistency is key to a successful creative advertising process. CRAFTSMAN+ emphasizes the importance of defining brand guidelines early on. By taking the time to deep dive into the brand guidelines including key messaging and pillars, points of difference, product features, creative branding and tone of voice you can align the creative ideation with the brand’s identity and values. This can then guide the creative strategy for the campaign.
HISTORICAL DEEP DIVE
Understanding the historical context of a brand and its previous creative efforts is another crucial step in the creative process. The creative team conducts a deep dive into the brand's past creative campaigns, the current audience, app store reviews, current and previous ads as well as competitor ads, analyzing what worked and what didn't. This historical perspective informs their creative decisions, helping to avoid past pitfalls and capitalize on successful strategies.
INTERNAL/EXTERNAL COMMUNICATION
Set up the proper channels for communication, whether that’s in Slack, using clearly defined email threads, regularly scheduled meetings or a combination of all of three– whatever works best for your project! The key to the CRAFTSMAN+ creative process is to maintain open and transparent communication with clients, ensuring that everyone is on the same page throughout the creative journey. Assigning producers to each client ensures that all stakeholders are aligned throughout the project, with a key point person communicating expectations on how and when feedback is provided, turnaround times, and any roadblocks that might arise.
HIGH LEVEL CONCEPTS
Now it’s time to get creative! When kicking off a campaign, the cornerstone of the creative process should be High Level Concepts. This is where your creative time can really shine– digging deep to develop unique and compelling ideas that set your creative advertising apart from the competition. Use this to establish a brief overview of what the campaign will look like and the strategy behind the vision. Start by defining a hypothesis and/or a connection to a user's motivation to tailor the concepts to the audience.
These concepts will serve as the creative foundation for your campaign, so be thorough.
CONNECT WITH THE USER
When crafting your creative, do you have a key target audience in mind? If so, can you give an example of who that person is and what makes them tick? These are the questions you need to have at the top of mind throughout your creative process. Understanding user motivations is key to crafting advertisements that resonate with your target audience. CRAFTSMAN+ conducts thorough research to identify what drives a brand’s audience, ensuring that the creative message speaks directly to their needs and desires. For example, some users like to connect with others and socialize, whereas other players might be more focused on progressing and leveling up.
This is where a Testing Matrix is incredibly useful.
TESTING MATRIX
To keep track of any potential variants and the overall testing roadmap, we recommend building a test matrix. Before finalizing any creative design, refine and optimize the creative elements, ensuring that your campaign resonates with the target audience.
Find out more about building a Testing Matrix here!
STORYBOARDING
The storyboard phase is where the creative vision begins to take shape visually, and can be particularly beneficial when crafting more complex videos and playable ads. CRAFTSMAN+ creates detailed storyboards that outline the sequence of each scene, align on the story, messaging and visuals before animating, allowing the client to visualize the end result and make any necessary adjustments.
PRODUCTION
With a well-defined concept and a detailed storyboard in place, you can now move in to production. The key to bringing any creative vision to life is not only leveraging your creative team’s expertise, but utilizing creative software that can assist in the areas of creative production that take time and resources. Using software such as Adobe Suite can assist in the initial creative phase, but what about resizing, localization and playable production?
PLAYABLE AD PRODUCTION
Introducing Craftsman Play the all-in-one solution for creating, distributing, and managing interactive ads experiences across all major networks, seamlessly!
With its intuitive framework, automated resourcing and self-service options, Craftsman Play is changing the creative advertising landscape for the better. Check it out for yourself HERE!
RESIZING AND LOCALIZATION
It is well known in the creative production process that resizing and localization take up valuable time and resources, time that can be better spent on updating and refining creative campaigns! Here’s where Craftsman Canvas can help.
Build your static ad once and automatically get it reformatted and sized for any digital platform! Localizations and custom designs are updated for any language or geo-location with swaps happening at the touch of a button. SIGN UP FOR A BETA TEST HERE!
Your deliverables are now ready to be uploaded to the networks of your choice! At this stage it’s important to keep an eye on the performance metrics. After a few weeks there should be noticeable takeaways that we can then take into account for the next set of tests, in order to create the next top ad performer!
