Creative and data teams have distinct responsibilities and skill sets, and it can be tempting to work in silos, focusing only on respective disciplines. But data informs better creative, and better creative leads to sharper insights, so it’s vital to take a collaborative approach. Read on to find out why.
What’s working? What could be performing better? What is this particular audience segment looking for? These are all important questions, and luckily your data team will have the answers. Equipped with all these insights, your creatives can shape and fine-tune their output to make it more effective.
This might mean a slight change in approach, or it could lead to something more significant, but creative that is backed by data is going to pack more of a punch when it comes to making an impact with your audience.
Obviously, data teams and creative teams work to different objectives, but it doesn’t mean that they can’t combine their powers. Data shouldn’t be seen as something that stifles creativity; it should be used as fuel to drive towards the ultimate goals of your campaign.
Maybe it’s stat-based ad messaging, imagery that better resonates with an engaged audience segment, or maybe the data shows that your audience prefers emotional storytelling to shiny product photography. Whatever the data uncovers, work with your creative team to help them translate it into high-performing output.
Ad fatigue can be a real hindrance to campaigns - you might have found a very successful ad formula, but your audience will eventually get bored of seeing it over and over again. Testing can help you avoid this entirely.
Teams can and should test their work in silos, but collaborative testing is crucial, too. Testing multiple ad variations and mixing different iterations of creative and messaging will help data and creative teams identify which versions perform best. Once you’ve narrowed it down, you can then start to scale the best performing versions, giving you a greater chance of achieving better results.
This could be a major redesign or rewrite of an ad, or it could be something as simple as changing the colour of a button to see if it drives more clicks. It’s all worth testing and tweaking to squeeze a little more impact out of your campaigns.
One of the best parts of collaboration, in any context, is the spark of inspiration that comes from sharing ideas. Different perspectives, extra insights and data points can bounce off each other, feed into wider ideas, and perhaps unlock a fresher, more effective approach to a campaign that otherwise might have stayed hidden.
Collaborating across departments sets a good precedent for future projects, and one of the most significant benefits of this precedent is the feedback loop. When collaboration becomes the norm, you then have data informing your creative, and your creative generating new data points for your analysts to work with. This creates a cycle of inspiration and information that means you’ll keep developing new, exciting ideas to keep your audience engaged.
The future of marketing won’t be powered only by data or spearheaded by creative campaigns - it’s going to be a collaborative effort. All the data insights in the world won’t count for much if your campaigns don’t grab attention, and even the most talented creatives can’t grab attention without a solid foundation of data to work from.
Collaboration between data and creative isn’t to be reserved for a one-off project - it should be the norm within brands and agencies, creating that powerful cycle of insight and imagination that can drive the best results.
Our expert creative and search teams work together to deliver impactful campaigns, backed by stats and designed to make an impression. Get in touch today to see how we can work together.
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