14 Feb 2024
- 12 Oct 2015
- 5 Min read
How to be creative in digital marketing
- by Peter Wright
The word creative is bandied about a lot in the digital marketing world. Industry giants like Moz and Distilled write numerous blog posts telling copywriters and outreach professionals that we have to be creative in order to have any chance of getting our clients’ websites into the big leagues. And they’re completely right. We do have to be creative; it’s just that it can be a little confusing for some people, as this ‘creativity’ looks very different in digital marketing to what it looks like in other professions. But we’ll get to that later on.
Why do we have to be creative in digital marketing?
The answer to this is simple: because Google has made it almost impossible to cheat — which is to say that it’s very tricky to rank well without producing interesting, dynamic content. Numerous updates have come along and changed the way the SEO industry functions. New versions of the Penguin and Panda updates continue to force professionals in the industry to actually earn the traffic they receive and the links they attain. In a roundabout way, Google has forced SEO agencies and companies hiring in-house marketing staff to employ more writers, more journalists, more PR pros, and more graphic designers — which is pretty great for the job market.
So what does it mean to be creative within digital marketing?
Being creative in art, literature or music seems to have connotations of being impulsive and just making anything that comes into our head. Though artists and musicians would probably resent this idea and say that a lot of thought has to occur before creation can begin. Still, the word creative has such artistic connotations that it’s really tricky at first to see how creativity has any place in the digital marketing world. But it does; it’s just that creativity in digital marketing is informed and steered by solid research.
What do we mean by research? For anyone who’s interested, these two posts explain part of our research process in plenty of detail: part one, part two. We spend time working out the kind of content that people are looking for; it’s not good enough to simply take the Field of Dreams approach and build it, hoping the visitors will come. We have to study trends, social shares, Google search volumes, the specific wording behind search queries, etc. We need to understand the industries our clients are in so that we know what competitors are talking about and what the industries are going to be talking about in six months’ time.
But where does creativity fit into all of this research?
With all of this research and no creativity to apply it, we’d be the most informed failures in the world. It’s not enough to just understand the bigger picture, and understanding alone never leads to a great new idea. When confronted with all of the research, the only way to turn it into something new and effective for your client is to use your imagination. Some people can turn it on easier than others. Some people need to look at the research for a little longer before a great new idea comes to them. But if you want to be successful in digital marketing, you absolutely need to be able to look at what exists online, predict what will exist in six–twelve months and to imagine your own content or contribution fitting into this bigger picture.
So what does this look like in practice?
It’s perhaps best to pick a specific example. The scenario: imagine you’re working for a company that sells luggage and you’re trying to improve their online presence as much as you can within a 12-month contract. The first thing you do is research the client’s website, its competitors and the general type of content that is successful in their industry. You find out that the top search queries concerning luggage are as follows:
ryanair baggage — 18,100 searches per month
easyjet baggage — 9,900 searches per month
hand luggage size — 8,100 searches per month
And the list goes on and on. People desperately want to know the baggage guidelines both for hold luggage and for hand luggage on different airlines. So what do we do? This is where creativity comes in. Firstly, we collect all of the information about baggage allowances from all of the different airlines. We write an entire resource, adding in graphical elements and anything else to make it a pleasant user experience. Then we publish it and promote it.
But wait, perhaps there’s a better way to do this? How about we make something interactive where the person types in the airline they want to know about, or selects it from a list. Once selected, a whole bunch of information appears about their chosen airliner. This would be a much more enjoyable user experience — heaps better than anything else that exists at the minute. Over time, traffic builds, as we push out the resource with our outreach team and people find it on their own via Google. The client’s link profile improves, their online brand improves and, most importantly, their conversions improve from the resulting traffic. All of this possible with just a little bit of creativity.
If you’d like to find out more, please don’t hesitate get in touch with our creative whizzes here at Glass Digital. Call us on 0333 7000 555, or contact us.
