It can be hard getting a creative team aligned. sg360°’s Creative Strategy Brief transforms incongruent ideas into a laser-focused roadmap that unites the team around a singular vision.
By defining your target audience’s deepest motivations, establishing a clear features-benefits hierarchy, and mapping out measurable success metrics, we create the strategic foundation that strengthens internal alignment, eliminating wasted effort and maximizing campaign ROI from day one.
The brief contains all the pieces you need to know exactly what to say, who to say it to, and how to measure success:
Insights refer to a deep understanding of a target audience, their behaviors, preferences, needs, and motivations. These audience insights are derived from various sources, including market research, customer data, campaign analytics, and consumer surveys. By gathering and analyzing audience insights, sg360°’s Data Scientists can gain valuable information that shapes marketing strategies and helps create highly targeted and personalized campaigns.
If you’ve ever struggled with what to say and why it matters to your audience, building the right Messaging Architecture is the foundation for your direct mail campaign. Not only does it cover the what and the why, but it also outlines the tone, voice, visuals, and guidelines that guarantee execution stays on-brand.
The Messaging Architecture is your roadmap for crafting relevant offers that appeal to various audience segments, differentiating your brand from your competitors, and ensuring the call-to-action (CTA) feels natural, persuasive, and aligned with audience motivations.
While it would be much easier to think that every one of your customers feels the same way about your products and services, the reality is that they don’t. In fact, some of your customers don’t utilize or respond to half of what you’re selling. If you’re serious about crafting messaging that resonates with your target audience, you need to understand which features spark interest and which ones don’t.
That’s the benefit of organizing your product/service features and benefits in the order to which they will have the greatest impact on each one of your target segments. Good thing we’re here to help you address each segment’s needs by delivering messages in the sequence that builds understanding and engagement. This data-driven approach can enhance the clarity of your communications, making each effort more effective which of course improves campaign performance.
We analyze your competitors’ marketing strategies and creative assets to identify opportunities, threats, and points of differentiation. Our team looks at how these brands are positioning themselves, speaking to the market, presenting their offers, and converting customers.
A solid review hones in on gaps, such as benefits your competitors are missing, segments they are underserving, or life events they are ignoring.
To accurately measure the effectiveness of a campaign strategy, you need to ensure that you’re capturing information on every consumer interaction throughout the conversion funnel; from customer exposure to the offer/message engagement to conversion.
To do all of this, we can help you to think through every possible way of tracking customer interactions, such as QR codes, custom landing pages, tracking website activity, gathering transaction data, monitoring your Google Analytics page. Once we have data from each interaction point, our Data Scientists can start to understand what is working, what is not working, and adjust tactics and overall strategy to improve results for future campaigns.
Are you happy with the results of your current control packages? Are they exceeding expectations or are you looking for improvement? If your answers are no, no and yes, then you’re in luck.
sg360º’s Creative AuditTM uses our unique and proprietary process to uncover how recipients are viewing and reading your direct mail pieces.
The Creative Audit provides you a personalized strategy for making changes to copy, imagery, layout and offer that will lead to higher readership and ultimately, generate a higher response rate.
There are three phases in our process: Heat Mapping, Gaze Sequencing and the Creative Analysis.
Heat-mapping was developed by neuroscientists and data experts to quickly and accurately simulate how readers will see different elements of your direct mail piece in the first 3-5 seconds.
The predictive model simulates a phase of human vision called pre-attentive processing. During this phase, our eyes subconsciously gaze at the most salient content in our field of view.
If someone sees a region of your content during first-glance vision, it’s more likely that their attention will be drawn to the region during conscious viewing.
Gaze Sequencing allows us to understand the reader’s eye flow.
We use the predictive model again to simulate human vision and, in this process, we ‘track’ where the eyes are moving to during that 3-5 second span.
This sequencing tells us a lot about the design and layout of the piece, and most importantly, are they looking where we want them to which is most likely the offer and the response mechanism.
Our last step in the Audit really digs into what’s working and what’s not.
We use a simple thumbs up, thumbs sideways and thumbs down “scoring system” to analyze each element of the piece.
The Creative Analysis ties the whole Audit together, providing the roadmap for improved performance.
Your campaign’s strategic foundation: goals, audience insights, offer, and desired action aligned with your business goals
Defined and consistent hierarchy of messages to guide prospects through the decision journey and increase conversion
Visual inspiration for tone, style, layout, and brand expression, and insights into positioning, offer clear differentiation from competitors
Whether you’re interested in a conversation or ready for a consultation, an sg360° direct marketing expert is here to help.
Provide some simple information so we can match you with the perfect expert. You’ll receive an email response within 20 minutes and a phone call within 24 hours.
