Creativity many businesses view creative services as a cost-center, when in truth, a well-defined creative service department should help to increase your bottom line. The potential value of a good creative marketing team extends far beyond copywriting and graphic design services. Instead of utilizing your creative team as implementers, the real value of these professionals is to aid you in addressing your critical business challenges.

Including your creative staff at the strategy level, will enable you to incorporate design thinking, or a human-centered approach into your business process. Start looking at the creative department as an intricate part of your client service and include them in brainstorming solutions to difficult problems.

Repackaging ideas and maximizing creative services within your business is low cost and high impact. Including the creative team in strategy sessions builds buy-in and can provide an entirely different perspective. Best of all, the team approach will ensure implementation is targeted and mission-specific, moving the team forward to develop even stronger campaigns.

Harnessing the talent of your creative services team and viewing them as equal partners alongside your sales department will provide a more holistic operation with all parties working toward the same goal. Best of all? You should see a more effective use of marketing expenditures and a greater return on your investment.

Take time to for data analysis and find ways to mine important information. Use this data to define your client and their buying habits. What is their average age? Do they use technology? And if so, what is their favorites medium??

Once you know who your customer is (e.g., gender, ethnicity, income, education, etc.) and what their behaviors are (e.g., what are they reading, using, buying, etc.) your creative teams can create marketing materials that will have meaningful, results-driven impact.

Google has some really cool tools that will also help drive traffic to your site and load different homepage looks and track conversions to determine what works best. This way, your marketing and creative teams will have proven statistics to show you what works and what doesn’t work. So that you can move in a direction that will save you money and time.

In short, strategy should lead design and your creative services teams needs to be part of the process to bring that strategy to life in a way that resonates with your customers.