Get the strategy right before tackling creative

Healthcare marketing teams are expected to deliver under pressure: to work with fewer hands and resources and to balance conflicting priorities. No wonder they’re in a hurry to get every project done. There’s another one coming right behind it. 

When marketers are in a hurry there’s a pressure to skip the strategy step and go straight to design. But without a well-defined strategy, you’ll wind up with a new logo that falls short of capturing the organization’s true mission and vision, a website that confuses audiences, campaigns that don’t sync with the brand’s goals or, for that matter, other communications, and other problems. Those mistakes cause more work in the end. 

We say, slow down a beat. The time you spend on brand or project strategy — before you dive into choosing images and creating layouts — is well spent.  

A foundational strategy should absolutely fuel any rebranding effort, and it should also guide individual creative projects. At the brand level, a solid strategy defines your organization’s character, reputation, positioning, and potential. It shapes the perceptions of your audience and builds trust. And a strong brand strategy serves as the building blocks for every project too, providing guidelines on voice, messaging, look and feel, and measures for success.  

Strategy makes everything easier. It prevents those unhelpful “I hate purple” kinds of feedback from stakeholders. The creative process is streamlined because there are guidelines. The way the brand behaves in public is consistent because the internal team gets it. Work happens more efficiently because no one has to reinvent the wheel every time a new request comes in. 

So let’s look at the specific benefits that come from getting the strategy right before you start on creative. 

1. Clarity

A well-established brand strategy gives you a clear direction for each campaign or project: what the purpose is, what problem you are solving, who the audience is. That last part is key. So much of creative direction focuses on who you’re talking to (and who you aren’t) and what you’re offering. By establishing a clear strategy, you can better understand who your customers are, what they value, and how they perceive your brand. These insights are crucial for creating designs that resonate with your target market. Without a clear picture of your audience it’s impossible to even get started. If it gets backward, you might have a beautiful piece of design that doesn’t really resonate with your audience. Operating without this clarity sets the creative and marketing teams up for failure.

2. Consistency

We’ve written plenty about how trust is the most important goal of marketing in the healthcare space. You’re asking people to place their mental or physical health care in your hands. To build that trust, your organization has to behave and communicate consistently across touchpoints, in every channel, every day. In a large organization with different departments or satellite marketing teams, brand consistency is especially challenging. But brand strategy and an integrated approach to marketing will make sure the brand makes sense in the big picture, that all the different campaigns relate to each other and are relaying a cohesive message. Articulated in the form of brand guidelines (specs for typography, color, image, voice, messaging, and more), brand strategy elevates the organization above competitors and creates confidence. 

3. Creativity

Non-designers often think that creativity happens best when there are no rules. In fact, designers will tell you that brand strategy, with strong visual brand guidelines and well thought out concepts, allows them to channel their creativity; they often come up with even more creative solutions when there are boundaries they must work within. It’s hard to start with a blank screen.

A written brand guide and library of creative assets is a kit of parts marketers and designers can work with. It’s like building a house: Your creative team can raise the walls when the foundation has already been laid. Brand standards also make your team more efficient — they help narrow down the process of finding imagery, offer copywriters direction on tone, give designers templates and tools that are proven to work. Because nobody is guessing, they don’t have to iterate and rework, which saves time. 

We’re also huge fans of using creative briefs for every project, large or small. A brief is a reminder of the brand strategy; it outlines the audience, purpose, creative direction, and success metrics for the project. It’s an especially useful tool in reviewing potential solutions because it serves as an impartial guide that reins in people’s personal preferences when they’re discussing a design. 

4. Outcomes

When you have a clear strategy it is easier to measure outcomes and goals because you have a defined and agreed-upon vision of success. Strategy enables you to create benchmarks against which every campaign or social media initiative is graded. Tracking performance, especially in the digital space, allows you to make real-time adjustments so you lean into what’s working. It’s also important for internal management, so you can show that your work hits the mark. 

5. Risk

All of the above — clarity, consistency, creative, and outcomes — combine to reduce the risk in any marketing initiative. Brand strategy helps your team work more efficiently, manage costs, and improve effectiveness.    

In the healthcare space, messaging tends to be pretty complicated by nature. Brand strategy helps you stay clear and concise. 

Without strategy, the creative team has to do all the audience research and exploration of photo, type, and color styles in order to dial in on a solution — essentially they have to create the brand, to make all those decisions, in order to produce an individual project. And 10 different creative pros will make those choices in 10 different ways. 

Instead, marketers should make time to do the thoughtful work of creating brand strategy first rather than doing it on the fly. (Here’s a bit about our brand strategy process.) You can’t get away with skipping the branding before you head into the design phase.