In this article we will go into the best process for making good marketing and ad content for your brand. After following this process, you can use creatives.new to connect with great freelance creative photographers and illustrators to create the great content with you.

How to make memorable ads that get noticed

The most important thing about ads are:

1. They get noticed
2. They get remembered
3. They leads to more customers, and keep them for longer

1 & 2 are about making distinctive, eye-catching, emotionally engaging content. 3 is aligned with that, however is trickier to navigate. To get more customers your ads have to link clearly into the product, and to get long term customers the ad has to convey what the brand stands for, and what its story is. To gain long term customers, brand followers and advocates, the product has to have meaning for people.

First, make sure you have a complete creative brief

The best way to approach making ad content is to start with 3 as the first focus, and think of your brand story, values or meaning.

This means asking questions like; why you do what you do, what are the values and character of your company, brand or product. How does your product or service help people, and why should they want it. Moreover, why should they love what you do, and feel a sense of affinity with your brand values.

What you create from that type of thinking is your brand story and values. You can then you can translate this brand story into content that satisfies the other two conditions; ads that get noticed and remembered.

The brand story you write will effectively form an important part of the brief for creative artist that you find to make content for you. However, to have a more complete initial creative brief you need a few more things:

• An objective for your ads. The objective has several levels. So on the top level, it might often be to get more customers or to reposition the meaning of your brand in the minds of customers. But you need to put more detail in than this to make a good concept. What type of customers? So you need to segment your customers, as you will usually have several types in terms of age groups, use cases for your product, demographics, geographies etc. Also you need to define over what timescale do you want to do this. Lastly it is vital to say how you will measure success, ideally with clearly defined targets and KPIs that you will measure.
• The core brand messages and story. This is the message that you want to communicate, which you think will achieve the objective. Here are some examples, (with no comment on whether they live up to these values or not):
  • Nike; Celebrates high performance. Feel like an athlete and get motivated when you wear the clothes. Socially aware, shared values with their customers.
  • Apple; mavericks, outsiders, creative, design conscious, minimalist, heritage from 1960s and 70s Californian counter-culture.

• A creative concept. The creative concept is the actual idea for the content that conveys the message. This idea should translate the brand story into a specific content idea that is likely to achieve your objective. We go into more detail about the creative concept below.
• Brand design guidelines. This will be the visual language your brand is known for and could include the tone of voice your brand talks in. It would also include variously; tag lines, colours, fonts and examples of implementations of the brand guideline in different mediums, e.g. website, ads, packaging, emails etc.

What is, and isn’t, a creative concept?

A creative concept forms the content-focussed part of the brief. This is the part that informs you want kind of freelance creative photographer or illustrator you need to find.

The main thing about a creative concept is that at its heart it must have a concept! Sounds easy right? It is actually quite tricky. Often creative concepts get confused with the medium or style of the content. When this is mistaken you will hear people say things like:

• I want to make some illustrations for my website
• I need a new set of photographic images to promote my products
• I want to work with photographer X on some ads

These would be valid things to say if the creative concept leads you in this direction. However they are not things that should exist on their own without the context of what you are trying to portray, and that comes from the creative brief. So they flow from the concept, and if you start with them then you will spend your time trying to retro-fit a concept into the medium, which is harder. Surely it has been done this way successfully but we would advise it is easier to start with the idea, especially in today’s multi-channel marketing landscape where concepts need to work in different mediums but be recognisable across them all.

So you start with the objectives which includes the target market breakdown, the key brand messages and story and the brand guidelines. Now for the creative alchemy! You marry them up in a flash of brilliance, packaging them into a content idea that grabs attention and is memorable. We can’t tell you how to make this flash of brilliance happen, because there is no formula.

Not every brand has the skills in-house to come up with great creative concepts, as usually this is an art form that requires skills and experience that come from this being your sole career focus. So you can hire this skill in, for this you need to look for an art director.

If you hire an art director, make sure they have a great portfolio of creative concepts, with some relevancy to your brand, your objective and target market. But also be flexible and think tangentially, to get something different and eye catching you can go for an art director from outside of your industry domain. For example sometimes brands in certain industries that are looking to position themselves in the high-end of their markets hire art directors with fashion industry experience.

Read this link if you want to read a case study of how great creative marketing or advertising concepts come about, or at the very least how to recognise one.

What does a creative concept look like?

In the case of hiring freelance photographers or illustrators, it should be an outline and sketch of the narrative-drive or aesthetically-driven idea. The creative artist, in this case the photographer or the illustrator, are not the art directors. Usually they don’t create the concept, they translate the concept into the medium they work in using their style of visual storytelling. They can help to modify and develop the brief, but they shouldn’t be presented with a blank page or a single line of text.

Things a creative brief may include:

• A written summary of the idea. This should be short, good ideas usually are based on simple concepts as they will be more memorable. Simple concepts that stand out as different, bold and striking are the hardest things to come by as they involve pure creative, tangential thinking.
• Sketches or a storyboard. Images should be sketched out very loosely and made roughly with stock and found imagery, on photoshop or similar. If it is a storyboard (i.e. for video or animation) then the key moments and scenes of the story should be in there, with the story arc shown clearly.
• Reference imagery. What do you want it to look like? What do you not want it to look like? What do the sketches look like in situ where they will be shown; e.g. on the website, in online ads?

The key for a creative concept is to stay loose enough to allow creative freelance artists to interpret the brief in their style, but tight enough to ensure the objectives, brand story, values and message get delivered in a way that works consistently with the other content the brand has put out there.

What else does a creative brief have in it?

When it is complete, a creative brief can have more finer details such as:

• Channels
• Dates
• Budget
• Deliverables
• A list of people with roles and responsibilities, both creative and project management or producers

If you are already certain of these things then fine. However these items, the more logistical details, can and often should be defined after speaking to creative freelance artists that can execute your brief. It is often useful to bring them in before you have nailed down the finer details, as what they advise you may change some of these things.

You should of course have a good idea of what your marketing budget is, and how much of it you will allocate to producing the content, and how much you will allocate to distributing the content, like in ads, sponsored posts, distributed printed material, billboards etc.

A note of caution here; often less experienced brands have a tendency to allocate more to distribution of content than to the production of it. This feels safer… “at least people will get to see my ads and I can measure that quantitatively”. However, quality of the creative can be measured too, based on engagement and click-through stats. Paying to distribute uninspiring content is wasteful and likely to hurt your brand perception. There is a sweet spot between great content and good distribution, and you need to aim for that. This means paying great creative people to conceptualise and produce great content.

Once you have a creative brief, it’s time to find the creative artists

Ok so you have a complete creative brief, you need to find an artist that who has a style that fits neatly into the style you want to create.

Follow this link to find freelance creative photographers and illustrators based on style, on our creatives.new service.