Creative and communication's role in driving a seamless experience across the full path to purchase

With 75% of advertising impact being determined by creativity, it’s vital we remain focused on the role that creative and messaging plays in driving a seamless experience across the full path to purchase.

Here we explore 4 key building blocks of a strong communication and creative strategy that results in brilliant commerce creative:

Audience Targeted: Start by defining your ‘prime prospect’. Rather than trying to be everything to everyone, the most creative campaigns often make strategic choices about who they want to resonate with most. Once you’ve identified your prime prospect, learn everything you can about their demographics, attitudes, and behaviours, and if you can, turn this into a profile that your organisation can work with creatively such as a pen portrait. You’ll then need to identify a ‘key insight’ written from your prime prospect’s point of view which provides a problem that your product can solve. A key insight is often described as the ‘ah-ha’ moment - it has many definitions but at Capture we talk about it as a not yet obvious discovery that enables us to establish a connection between brands and their prime prospect. It’s admittedly the hardest part of the creative strategy process, so you will know you've got to an insight and not just an observation if it has two important ingredients - a motivation (the 'why' behind something they do, think, or say) and a tension (a problem which your brand can answer).

In a world where people are increasingly paying to block ads, great creative should never be wallpaper - it should be engaging and inspiring without being distracting for your prime prospect and the way we do this is by really understanding their wants and needs.

Data Driven: Where budget allows, brands should continuously test and iterate their creative and messaging to identify what resonates best with their audience, optimising their campaigns and thereby increasing conversion rates over time.

Testing your creative before it goes live using market research such as focus groups and surveys will give you a strong understanding of exactly what is and isn’t working, but it’s also more 'hypothetical'. Testing your creative after it goes live using A/B testing allows you to understand exactly how your creative has performed in a real environment and how it’s impacted sales, however it’s less focused on the ‘why’. We recommend a combination of both methods.

Consistent but Tailored: Your communication and creative strategy should be consistent but ultimately tailored across the path to purchase.

Consistent messaging and creatives that are aligned with a brand's values, mission, and personality can help establish a clear and recognisable brand identity. But this doesn’t mean producing ‘matching luggage’ across all your artwork. Instead, use the brand message as a starting point to deliver a more contextual message based on media or audience. It's also important to remain single minded with your messaging across the path to purchase vs trying to communicate everything on every touchpoint.

Distinctive: The last, but arguably most important, building block of a great creative strategy is distinction. You could do a brilliant job of everything discussed above, but it will be meaningless if your prime prospect is not able to identify the creative as coming from your brand or your product. Distinctive creative will utilise clear, consistent, and instantly recognisable branding and a message that communicates the value proposition to establish a consistent brand identity.