Content is the most important resource for a business looking to promote itself. Marketing, both digital and traditional, demands content as fuel. Without it, you have nothing to educate, inform, or entertain your audience with.
Producing creative content gives you the actual stuff that’s going to power your content marketing campaigns and keep your social feeds interesting. Let’s take a closer look at creative content and its place in the marketing landscape.
What is creative content?
Creative content is simply content that utilises creative aspects to make it more engaging and unique. This makes it quite closely related to artistic pursuits like photography, creative writing, and graphic design.
Creative content sets itself part from ‘simple content’ by being interesting to people (which feeds back nicely into good SEO practice—more on that a little later). Sharing an FAQ or description of your product may be content, but it’s arguably not very creative in nature, and often not very interesting.
Why creative content is important
First and foremost, you should be creating your content for people. While appeasing Google’s algorithms is good for SEO, you’re ultimately trying to sell to an audience of humans. People are making the searches and browsing the internet, and people are the ones who will be spending money with you.
Content marketing is demonstrably important in itself—it’s three times more effective at generating leads than traditional marketing, after all—but what about creative content marketing?
This highlights the importance of creative content. People appreciate creativity because creativity is so human. Showing people something they’ve never seen before is much more likely to stick in the mind and encourage more interaction with your brand.
Furthermore, Google’s recent moves towards emphasising the importance of helpful content feeds into the need to make your content interesting and digestible. An intelligently designed infographic can supplement written content very effectively.
Helping your customer to understand certain concepts may be essential to explain your product or service, making it primarily serving to your efforts to sell them, but the merits of imparting that understanding to your audience also can’t be discounted. Your creative content can absolutely be engaging (perhaps even artistic), helpful to your marketing efforts, and a valuable source of information and knowledge to your customer all at once.
Ultimately, putting the time and effort into making your content more creative shows your audience that you care. It proves that you’re willing to expend creative energy and try to do things differently, which is important if you’re also claiming to bring something new to your business area. If you create bland and uninspiring content—or worse, simply take others’—you’ll never have your own brand identity and unique voice, making it hard to ever communicate effectively with your audience.
