A Vital Part of the Creative Process That You’re Not Doing

When it comes to coming up with creative ideas, we all have our strategies. For some, it’s brain storming. For others, it’s walking away and letting the ideas flow free. And still for some, it’s a clever team meeting process that results in kick-ass ideas. But when it comes to most creative processes, there’s a vital part of the creative process that you’re not doing – great pre-research.

See, what every great creative thinker in the world already knows is that their creativity is based on inputs. They can’t create without building blocks, and for creative ideas, that often means having information.

The critical step for creative marketing.

When it comes to marketing, market research is that critical first step in the creative process. Great marketing is built on great ideas, and you need a foundation for those ideas to take hold. What do you know about your audience that you can reinvent? What types of pain-points are they addressing that you can build a campaign around?

Market research can answer these questions, and help you use the responses to guide next steps.

Think back to Marketing 101.

Classically, the marketing process begins by understanding the customer. A great market research foundation facilitates that need. It dissects who your audience is, and how they think about your product and your industry. It also captures their emotions, their goals, their motivations, and their lives.

Essentially, we’re boiling data down into demographics, psychographics and ethnographics, and reformulating it all into something that’s easy to understand. The information is meant to inform, breaking through biases and preconceived notions, so creative team members can immediately grasp it and do something with it.

Start strong, finish stronger.

Putting effort into the beginning of the process sets the tone and the capabilities. This is true of every project you’ll ever do, but in marketing especially this is the case. Great market research is about learning for the sake of inspiration. It starts with data, but it comes together as insights that create ‘ah-ha’ moments for creative professionals.

If you’re spending time analyzing data, make it your goal to only deliver actionable insights. Don’t worry about sharing the whole set of findings with the creative folks. Instead, highlight the two or three datapoints about your audience that float to the top due to their profoundness, or their difference from the norms. Boil it into the few points that matter most, ignore the rest, and use what’s left as the catalyst for great ideas.

Make it easy to understand.

The challenge in all of this isn’t in the data, and it’s not even in the ideas. It’s in the translation of the two.

When communicating data to marketers, the most important thing a researcher can do is make it easy to understand. Creative teams don’t need all the data – they need the most critical insight you can pull from it. And they need them communicated clearly.

To get going, write down your insights, and start to cross out anything that feels redundant. You’re trying to inspire here, and keeping it short and sweet will help you get there.

Next, ask yourself if there’s more interesting ways to communicate the insights. Could you explain through a metaphor? What about giving examples that exemplify how the audiences thinks and feels?

You can also include diagrams, pictures, graphs, etc. if they focus on conveying the most important parts of the information in the clearest, easiest way. Remember, you’re not limited by anything, so how you choose to communicate your insights is completely up to you!

Finally, consider everything you know about copywriting. You want your insights to be as compelling as possible so everyone can understand them, and a strong background in clever copy will get you there. Just like headline copy, you want to keep your insight short and sweet without losing any of the impact.

Deliver it the right way.

The document with which you organize your insights is how your creative team is going to review them, and it’s up to you to organize it the right way. Often, insights will form into a Creative Brief, which will guide the direction of the creative team’s process. Other times, you might create a one-sheet for a team to review, and you can use bullets, infographs and more to convey everything.

However you choose to go about it, let the ideas come together in a way that tells a story. If your first section is about motivation, make your second section play-off that motivation, telling your readers how the audience goes about achieving their motivations. Altogether, the document should come together as a narrative, painting a picture of your research findings.

Do research to do great work.

Research is the foundation for the greatest campaigns in history. It’s up to marketers and market researchers alike to digest research information, and in most cases, that requires a research summary that conveys without causing the Zzzs.

Research can be dry and it can be boring – if it’s presented wrong. But marketers are creative people with great ideas, and they need something more engaging. Remember, research doesn’t stop at the analysis, but goes a step further into the communication and conveying portion. That final step is critical if you want your research to impact your creative. Take the time, do it right, and you’ll be amazed by the results!