The Impact of Creative Strategists on Brand Growth & Innovation
Published Oct 28
To grow your brand, your creative ideas and business goals must align. But getting this right isn’t as easy as it sounds. To realize your brand’s full potential, you most likely need the expertise of a creative strategist.
As brands compete fiercely for attention in a saturated digital world, the expertise of creative strategists has never been greater.
Creative quality is vital to marketing results—in fact, 80% of marketers see it as key to marketing success. Creativity alone isn’t enough, though. Brands need a clear marketing strategy if they’re serious about achieving success.
The creative strategist is the brain behind a creative or marketing strategy that delivers. They bridge the gap between creativity and data-driven insights, crafting a roadmap to engage customers and nurture sustained brand growth.
Brands that embrace a creative strategy for business innovation are more likely to grow steadily from a solid foundation, outpace their competitors, deliver fresh ideas and create meaningful customer experiences.
This article highlights how bringing a creative strategist on board can significantly improve overall business performance and long-term brand success, including insights from Grace Cooper, Superside’s Creative Strategist. It also highlights the tangible impacts these experts have on brands and why your business needs a creative strategist partner like Superside.
Who Are Creative Strategists and What Do They Do?
A creative strategist merges new ideas with careful planning to connect a brand's vision with its goals. Unlike purely creative roles such as designers or copywriters, these strategists have critical analytical skills, too. They create long-term strategies that ensure a brand’s identity matches its position in the market.
The creative strategist looks at the bigger picture to ensure that the creative outputs look great, clarify the essence of the brand, and, most importantly, also perform effectively. The role combines strategic thinking, creative ideation, and problem-solving, all aimed at delivering compelling, data-driven campaigns or content that align with a customer's goals.
A creative strategist must understand consumers’ behavior, current industry trends and brand stories. This knowledge helps them to create marketing strategies that promote growth, innovation and customer engagement.
These experts have various responsibilities, but their main job is to conduct market research, do a regular trend analysis and gather insights that help shape a brand’s creative approach. They ensure that every creative effort, such as campaigns, product launches or events, supports the brand’s overall goals. They also collaborate with different teams—creative, marketing, design and product development—to maintain brand consistency across all messaging and touchpoints.
Creative strategy within campaign development revolves around understanding the customer’s business goals, target audience, and market positioning to craft a strategy that guides the creative team in producing work that meets these objectives A key role is steering creative conceptualization with highly refined, and data-driven, insights that will allow innovative ideas that can be translated into visual and written assets whilst always aligning with the brand’s messaging and identity.
Traditional designers and creative strategists have different roles in the creative process. Strategists look at the big picture and how a brand must be positioned in the long term. Their creative strategy work usually begins before visual design starts. They help identify what the brand needs to communicate and how it should enter the market.
Traditional designers, on the other hand, work as part of a creative team and create visual elements such as logos, packaging and ads. Designers pay attention to aesthetics and user experience, tapping into data to inform decisions. Creative strategists shape the brand’s story and ensure its creative work supports larger business goals.
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The Strategic Role of the Creative Strategist in Brand Growth
Now that you know what a creative strategist does, let’s look at how these professionals drive enterprise growth.
1. Market research and competitor analysis
Creative strategists analyze consumers’ behavior and preferences as well as emerging trends to identify growth opportunities. They gather quantitative and qualitative data through surveys, workshops and software tools to understand what resonates with the target audience.
In competitor analysis, a creative strategist examines rival brands to understand their strategies, strengths and weaknesses. They use this information to find gaps in the market and set a brand apart.
A creative strategist will use these insights to develop a roadmap for future marketing and business success.
The creative strategist looks at the overall campaign or brand ecosystem, understanding how individual assets fit into a broader marketing strategy.
2. Aligning creative work with business objectives
A creative strategist guides projects' aesthetic and strategic direction, weaving brand identity with visual excellence while keeping business goals in sharp focus.
From product launches to marketing campaigns, their oversight supports the brand’s vision and mission.
This creates consistency, reinforcing the brand’s identity and enhancing its impact. By orienting all creative work to business objectives, the strategist helps the company stay focused on achieving measurable results through their marketing campaigns.
While a traditional designer primarily focuses on creating visual elements based on a brief, the creative strategist shapes the brief itself, ensuring that it’s aligned with business objectives and that the creative solutions solve the right problems.
3. Developing long-term brand strategies
Creative strategists develop long-term marketing plans that promote strategic brand growth.
Instead of focusing on short-term sales or engagement, they look to the future and create strategies that help brands change and grow over time. This forward-thinking approach helps brands stay relevant and competitive in the long run.
4. Using data to inform creative decisions
Strategists don’t rely on instincts alone. They use performance data, market research data and customer data to inform their creative decisions.
This data-driven approach allows the creative strategist to take calculated risks, ensuring creative work resonates with customers and drives tangible business outcomes.
Strategists typically also play a critical evaluation role in assessing the success of a campaign through data, identifying what worked and what did not, and using these insights to refine future creative directions.
5. Enhancing brand storytelling
A strong brand story is vital for creating emotional connections with customers, and a strategist plays a crucial role in crafting these narratives. By understanding each target persona’s values, aspirations and pain points, they develop storytelling strategies that resonate with the target audience.
A creative strategist ensures every communication reflects the brand’s core identity and engages target customers meaningfully. This approach helps brands foster loyalty and differentiate themselves from the competition.
6. Facilitating cross-department collaboration
Creative strategists act as primary contacts for in-house teams, facilitating communication between marketing, design and product development teams and ensuring alignment on project goals.
Creative strategists can work more directly with customers and teams, discussing brand strategy, business goals, and campaign ideation, whereas designers may be more involved in the production and iteration process.
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How Creative Strategists Drive Innovation
These strategists play a crucial role in promoting creative innovation for enterprises. They do this by:
1. Identifying market trends and opportunities
A creative strategist helps the company to stay competitive by monitoring emerging trends and technologies. Staying abreast of new social media trends and advancements in AI, for example, enables brands to adapt their strategies and capitalize on opportunities.
For example, a creative strategist can help a brand shift from publishing long-form to short-form video content by creating a strategy to deliver engaging, snackable videos for mobile audiences.
In a digital era, brands have access to vast amounts of data. However, expertise is required to interpret this data to transform it into actionable creative strategies. Creative strategists use analytics to understand customer preferences, track performance, and continuously optimize creative efforts. This data-driven approach ensures that the creative work is both innovative and highly effective to achieve improved ROI and engagement.
2. Encouraging experimentation and risk-taking
A good creative strategist empowers their teams to explore unconventional solutions. This openness to innovation often leads to breakthrough campaigns and solutions that resonate with audiences.
They typically promote a culture of experimentation, encouraging their creative team to test new concepts, try imaginative formats and explore new platforms.
The pace of change in consumer behavior, technology, and market trends is faster than ever before. Creative strategists stay on top of these shifts and proactively guide brands to adapt their creative approach. Whether it is integrating new technologies like AI, exploring new platforms, or responding to shifts in consumer sentiment, a strategist ensures that the brand remains relevant and agile in the face of change.
3. Developing breakthrough campaigns
Creative strategists work hard to help brands stand out and drive change by blending innovative ideas with strategic objectives, positioning their companies as industry leaders. Their bold strategies challenge the norm and set new trends, helping brands make a lasting impact.
Consumers now expect personalized content that speaks directly to their needs and interests. Creative strategists are key to developing audience-first strategies by leveraging data and insights to tailor messaging, visuals and experiences to specific consumer segments. This level of customization requires a strategist’s expertise in connecting creative efforts to individual customer journeys.
For example, augmented reality (AR) can be used to great effect by a creative strategist who understands its capabilities. At Superside, we developed an AR game to increase awareness for our Standout Summit. Using an Instagram AR lens, users could find sessions that interested them by tilting their heads. This enhanced engagement and brand awareness in the run-up to the event while showcasing our tech capabilities.
4. Integrating technology and creative thinking
The creative strategist is adept at merging technology with creative thought processes and uses data analytics (e.g., analysis of their ad performance data) and emerging tools (e.g., artificial intelligence) to create engaging, personalized customer experiences.
Once again, work delivered by Superside’s AI-enhanced creative team provides the perfect example.
Superside is the leading AI-powered creative services agency, blending this innovative technology with human ingenuity across all our services. The creative strategy service, too, has embraced this valuable capacity to analyze vast amounts of data cost-effectively to predict trends in consumer behavior, anticipate market shifts and deliver campaigns that are imaginative and relevant as well as data-backed and performance-driven.
When Independence Pet Group (IPG) commissioned us to showcase their love for pets through stickers and meeting backgrounds, we harnessed AI to bring the project to life. In just 11.5 hours, we produced over 750 AI-assisted images, using 90% less budget than we would have using traditional methods.
The detailed AI-powered insights into consumer behavior, preferences and engagement patterns allow the creative strategist to delve deeper into different audiences and hone highly personalized campaign ideas at scale.
By developing creative campaign concepts with AI, the right strategist can push the boundaries of what’s possible, allowing a brand to deliver groundbreaking experiences that get them the attention they deserve. And if you need even more data for your creative strategies, you can always tap into Superads for free.
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How Superside’s Creative Strategists Help Brands Grow and Innovate
Superside understands that effective marketing and branding go beyond compelling design. We know that great creative strategies help yield tangible results for customers, as mentioned by Grace:
The creative strategist at Superside serves as the creative brand custodian, ensuring that things work effectively within the broader business context to meet strategic goals and — just as important — that they look good too. It is about ensuring that creative outputs drive engagement, lead to transactions, and build brand equity.
Our dedicated creative strategists work with brands to develop forward-thinking marketing strategies that address immediate goals while paving the way for sustained growth. Blending innovative concepts with a thorough understanding of business objectives, Superside helps brands maintain a competitive edge.
Our results-oriented approach ensures that the creative work is directly contributing to the client’s growth objectives which the traditional agency model may overlook at times.
We’re a leading provider of integrated creative strategists, with many knock-out creative performance examples to prove it.
Case Study 1: Shopify
Superside helped the eCommerce platform Shopify align its creative strategy with its long-term objectives and deliver outcomes that significantly contributed to the brand’s growth.
Shopify wanted to enhance its creative capabilities while ensuring brand consistency across various channels. The challenge was producing and managing a large volume of creative assets while maintaining quality. In an impressive 24-hour turnaround, our team delivered 4,375 assets—one concept in 25 sizes, seven languages and 25 variations.
Through continuous testing and optimization, Shopify experimented with different outputs, scaled its creative production and quickly implemented new concepts. This approach improved campaign performance and opened up new growth opportunities—all thanks to a fantastic team that included a superb creative strategist.
Superside’s creative strategists provide immense value to clients by combining strategic insight, data-driven creativity and agile execution. Creative strategists ensure that every creative output aligns with a brand’s broader business goals, helping clients turn abstract visions into actionable, impactful campaigns. They bridge the gap between creative excellence and business success to ensure that innovation is always tied to measurable growth.
Case Study 2: PointCard
In another example, we helped fintech company PointCard differentiate itself in a competitive market. Our creative strategist used strategic collaboration, rapid testing and scaled-up design production to boost PointCard’s CTRs by 240% and conversion rates by 275%.
Typically, our creative strategists use consumer insights, market trends and performance metrics to guide their decisions.
By integrating these data points into the creative process, we craft innovative strategies rooted in real-world insights. This data-driven methodology enables us to develop campaigns that resonate with target audiences, foster engagement and drive measurable business growth for our customers.
Superside emphasizes a collaborative approach to creative strategy both with internal teams as well as with our customers. As a result, creative strategies evolve based on customer feedback, market shifts, and performance data whilst also fostering a creative environment that stays focused on the customer's business goals.
Embracing the Power of Creative Strategists With Superside
The creative strategist is pivotal in driving brand growth, ensuring creative efforts align with the overall marketing strategy and broader business goals. Their creative vision and ability to combine knockout concepts with data-driven insights enable brands to succeed long-term, as Grace highlights:
Superside emphasizes a collaborative approach to creative strategy both with internal teams as well as with our customers. As a result, creative strategies evolve based on customer feedback, market shifts, and performance data whilst also fostering a creative environment that stays focused on the customer's business goals.
Superside’s design expertise and progressive creative strategy capabilities make us the ideal partner for brands looking to stay ahead of the competition. Discover how you can access innovative design services and world-class talent on demand. Book a demo call to find the perfect creative strategist for your brand.
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