From immersive media to artificial intelligence, the Era of Sense and Response Marketing has ushered in endless opportunities for experimentation, empowering brands of all sizes to build a creative growth engine.

In our innovative marketing landscape, it’s pivotal for creative leaders to keep their brand at the forefront, offering new ways to stand out and successfully break through the competition in engaging and unique ways.

From impactful internal culture shifts to embracing the latest emerging technology, here are five ways to establish that creative growth engine for your brand:

Eliminate Silos to Foster a Culture of Collaboration

Cultivating a creative growth engine hinges on the culture you create for your team. As creative leaders, it is our responsibility to foster a collaborative environment where designers of all levels are inspired to innovate. Notably, innovation flourishes when designers don’t work in silos. While there are certainly experts in different areas like rich media, video and animation, building a team anchored in cross-training and collaboration promotes opportunities for learning by enabling folks across the team to have greater insight into what their peers are working on. This also ensures that teams have flexibility for support based on influxes in demand, empowering your team to stay agile, keep up with industry changes and avoid burnout.

Encourage AI Experimentation & Exploration

This incredibly exciting time of tech development requires creative professionals to stay ahead of emerging technology—experimentation with AI in particular is essential. Encourage exploration with new AI tools like generative AI across your team, whether it’s to enhance productivity with copy brainstorming or elevate ads by transforming static images to life-like 3D experiences. Inspire your team to find ways to integrate AI tools to both improve internal efficiency as well as enhance the customer experience for clients and consumers. Take this a step further and offer opportunities for professional development to help them refine their skills like attending an AI-focused conference as a team or offering reimbursements for webinars and training. Regardless of their experience level, ensure your team is inspired to innovate and experiment with their findings across their work.

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Lean into Immersive Experiences Across the Marketing Funnel

From AR experiences to interactive mobile campaigns, there are endless opportunities to transform each interaction into influential experiences that will strengthen invaluable customer relationships. One great place to start is elevating mobile and CTV campaigns with interactive elements that bring the product to life, piquing consumers’ interest to learn more. In fact, immersive media has set new standards for engagement benchmarks, driving click-through rates up to 8.72% (over 14.4x the industry benchmark). Consider the simple yet powerful ways you can elevate ads by creating experiences like virtual showrooms to highlight your new private label clothing line, alluring table settings showcasing a vast array of pre-made meal options or interactive slideshows offering seasonal cocktail recipes to celebrate your latest spirit launch.

Embrace Personalization to Enhance CX

A new study found that personalized experiences throughout the customer journey, even post-purchase, are expected and pivotal for building long-term customer loyalty. Consider experimenting with creative tools like AR that can help you transform marketing touchpoints into unforgettable customer experiences. The AR market is expected to reach $97.7B by 2028 for a reason—for marketers, it’s unlocking incredible ways for brands to enhance the customer experience in our digital world. Let’s say an eyeglass company is looking to promote their newest line of sunglasses for the summer. A CTV ad featuring a QR code for an AR-driven mobile experience allowing viewers to try on sunglasses of various frames and colors based on their purchase history or preferences can act as both a way to attract new shoppers and an engaging touchpoint for loyal customers.

Tap Dynamic Creative Optimization to Fuel Success

The benefits of optimization are two-fold, both helping marketers get the most out of their marketing dollars and ensuring creatives better respond to customers’ needs. Embrace channels like mobile, social, CTV and digital out-of-home that can offer creative optimization while a campaign’s inflight, giving you the ability to optimize creatives, offers and media placements based on performance once they achieve a desired benchmark. Rather than waiting for post-campaign analysis to understand which performed the best (and wasting ad dollars in the process), run different versions of the creative and optimize in real-time. This type of optimization has proven to improve 11x media effectiveness and eliminate media waste up to 94%.

In our rapidly evolving martech landscape, adopting a test and learn approach will make the exceptional creative teams shine. Building a creative growth engine for your brand starts from within—an empowered team armed with the tools, training and bandwidth needed to create breakthrough experiences will help you not only remain at the forefront of marketing innovation, but a brand beloved by customers for unforgettable marketing experiences.

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