What is a Creative Strategy?

A creative strategy for ecommerce brands involves crafting targeted, compelling content that drives traffic, engagement, and sales. By leveraging market research and audience insights, it ensures your messaging resonates with potential customers. This focused approach leads to higher conversion rates, increased revenue, and improved return on ad spend.

Why do I need a strategy before creating videos & images?

Think of creating videos and images without a strategy like baking a cake without a recipe—you might get lucky, but more often than not, you’ll end up with a hot mess.

A strategy is your blueprint, ensuring your visuals aren’t just pretty, but purposeful. It defines who your audience is, what you want them to do, and how to best reach them. Without it, you’re throwing content into the void, hoping something sticks. With a strategy, you’re creating targeted, intentional content that actually drives results.

In short: a strategy makes sure your videos and images aren’t just eye candy—they’re also brain fuel.

Video without a strategy is a waste of time. It’s like setting sail with no idea where you’re going—you’ll get lost and never reach your goal. This is exactly why brands get frustrated with video, thinking it’s a money pit that never delivers results. Without a solid creative strategy, they’re right.

So, what does the Creative Strategy process look like?

If you want to drive serious growth and revenue with your performance creatives, there are five steps you absolutely need to follow. Miss even one, and you’re setting yourself up for failure.

‍

Step 1: Brand

We often see brands dive into creative work without really understanding their own identity, target audience, or how to connect with them effectively. In this phase, we’ll dig deep into your brand to make sure your positioning, purpose, mission, vision, and values align with your performance creative goals. We’ll identify your customers' pain points and the real and emotional benefits of what you offer. Then, we’ll figure out the best way to express your brand and communicate with your audience. From then on, every piece of creative work will be held to these standards.

‍

Step 2: Customer Evidence

Half of your brand’s identity comes from how your customers see you, not just how you see yourself. So, now that you’ve got a clear picture of who you are, it’s time to get to know your audience inside and out to figure out what will actually drive conversions.

We need to dig into everything about them—the media they consume, their lifestyle, emotions, influencers, community, pain points, habits, media consumption patterns, financial situation, and more. We’ll gather this info from reviews, online forums, website analytics, research, purchase data, and other sources. Once we have all this data, we’ll create detailed persona templates to map out the different customer segments that buy your products.

‍

Step 3: Creative Ideation

Creative ideation can be one of the biggest headaches for our clients. The idea needs to tell your story and message which we’ve identified in the previous two stages so it’s in the best position to convert new customers. All of your ideas need to be accountable to step 1 & 2, if not your ads won't convert.

‍

Step 4: Paid Media

Now it's time to turn on the media buying tap. There was an era where performance didn't need good creative, but that’s long gone. In 2024, your creative is half of your targeting strategy. If you don’t use your creative to truly connect with and convert your customers, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table.

Tip: Make sure your creative is crafted specifically and authentically for the platform where you’re spending your budget.

‍

Step 5: Testing & Iterations

You should never create just one video. You need to create a suite of creative assets native for each platform & that varies in USPs, pain points, hooks & CTAs. Having full transparency over ad sets is mega important to ensure you can react to the live data & change your creative to suit.