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One of the fastest growing jobs in marketing right now is a Creative Strategist.
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Today we're going to cover what a Creative Strategist does, how much they typically make, what skills the role needs, what makes an elite Creative Strategist elite, and then how you can actually land a role like this and the tools we need to know.
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Here at Motion, our customers are analyzing over $5 billion in social ads each year. And the writing is on the wall inside of our platform.
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We see that in order to succeed in advertising, you need to have amazing creative and you need a lot of it. And that's where the job of a Creative Strategist really comes into play.
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Chapter 1. What does a Creative Strategist do and how much do they make?
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According to Glassdoor, a Creative Strategist in the US can expect to make an average salary of around $85,000 per year with a total pay range typically between like 86 and 158.
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Really it depends on your experience, location, company size, and senior-level Creative Strategists are potentially earning significantly more than that.
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And the Creative Strategist is really wearing a lot of hats in their job.
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They're writing UGC briefs, they're analyzing ad performance data, they're brainstorming with the team for the next big ad idea, and they're ensuring creative team members and performance team members are really just rowing their boats in the same direction.
> [VISUAL: Document titled "Creative Brief for BFCM Ads 2024"]
> [VISUAL: Motion dashboard showing ad creatives and performance metrics]
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So what does a day in the life look like for a Creative Strategist?
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Well, they're probably starting their day by looking at how ads are performing. They'll open up a tool like Motion, Google Analytics, Triple Whale, Northbeam, or whatever tool they're using to start parsing through the data.
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And then they're going to hold a few meetings to share insights from these reports. They're translating what they've learned into actionable creative briefs that guide a company's content production.
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And if you want to learn about the ideal meetings that a Creative Strategist can hold, well check out our video on that that we did here.
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Chapter 2. What skills do you need to become a Creative Strategist?
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To be a killer Creative Strategist, you really need to balance your right brain creativity and your left brain analytics.
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Most often we're seeing Creative Strategists are really coming over from job titles with, you know, things like Media Buyer, Paid Specialist, Growth Marketer, Creative Director, Copywriter, Content Strategist, even Social Media Managers or Campaign Managers.
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The bottom line though is that a Creative Strategist needs to be able to understand and translate performance data in your ad platforms like Meta, TikTok, and YouTube into actionable insights that people can use to iterate old ads and create new ads that scale.
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They should also know how to define, calculate, and be able to spout off industry averages for ad metrics across different platforms like the Marketing Efficiency Ratio, the Thumbstop Ratio, Cost Per Click, Conversion Rate, Cost Per Acquisition, basically anything that's inside of that CSV export when you go into Meta Ads and export that big old sheet.
> [VISUAL: Motion dashboard showing a list of top creatives and performance trends]
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Chapter 3. What makes an elite Creative Strategist?
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So what separates a good Creative Strategist from an elite one? Easy. They go beyond the basics. They're like the Beyonce of brainstorming creative ideas and the Sherlock Holmes of snooping through campaign data.
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When it comes to research and idea generation, an elite Creative Strategist doesn't just like pull ideas from thin air. They are conducting deep, deep customer research from customer reviews, Reddit threads, competitor ads, surveys, and tons more to uncover everything they'll need to develop and test different hypotheses.
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Then they neatly and succinctly share these findings with their team. For example, Mark Magdayo over at True Classic, he discovered their 'Daddy Energy' angle for a lot of their ads you've probably seen by analyzing consumer language in social media comments.
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And this insight actually transformed a simple ad into a huge viral success for their brand. If you want to be at the top of your creative strategy applicant class, then you really need to be able to show off four proven skills with examples. Number one, you obsess over qualitative and quantitative data insights.
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Number two, you've mastered the art of testing with what Dara Denney calls the sweet-spot brief, which is short, quick to test, and it's something that you can quickly iterate on.
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Number three, you know what ads work, and why they work across different brands and different channels.
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And then lastly, number four, you inspire action by selling these ideas to your team with clear goals and some room for flexibility.
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Just study some of the greats that we've had headline here at Motion at our events like Jess Bachman, Savannah Sanchez, Connor MacDonald, Cody Plofker, Dara Denney, Phillip Jackson. There's tons more. That's just to name a few.
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> [VISUAL: Collage of video clips featuring marketing professionals: Jess Bachman, Savannah Sanchez, Connor MacDonald, Connor Rolain, Cody Plofker, Dara Denney, Phillip Jackson]
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Chapter 4. How to land a Creative Strategist role, preparation, and tools to master.
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There are a bunch of ways to land a Creative Strategist role at the end of the day really. But one great way is to start in kind of like an adjacent role and then level your way up.
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So many folks will get a junior position as like a Media Buyer, Marketing Specialist, or a Content Strategist, and then they're going to build up their portfolio to demonstrate that they have competency in creative strategy.
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So one example that we found within our own customer base here at Motion was Meredith Unger over at Tinuiti.
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She actually started developing winning campaigns for just a single advertising channel and then she worked really hard to gain more and more experience. Eventually, she was actually able to showcase highlights with campaigns that had CTR increases, improved ROAS, and just overall performance boosts before transitioning into a full-fledged Creative Strategist role that oversees multiple channels. You're also going to want to be able to master different tools that really power modern creative strategy. There are tons of tools out there and this list is not exhaustive, but here are the ones that most Creative Strategists have mastered.
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Meta Ads, TikTok Ads, Google Ads, that's all for running campaigns. Of course, you've got Shopify for selling your products. Replo for landing page creation and iteration. You've got Recart or Postscript for SMS marketing. Of course, Motion for tracking all your creative performance and, you know, doing researching for ad inspiration. Like I mentioned earlier, Northbeam or Triple Whale for data attribution and forecasting. Tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, Gigabrain, that's for consumer data mining. You've also got tools like Kno, SurveyMonkey, Qualtrics, Typeform, that's going to be for like user research, customer feedback. And then for like editing and post-production, you've got Figma, Canva, CapCut. Those are going to be really great tools. And then obviously you've got your collab tools for communication like Slack, email, Teams, all that good stuff.
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Obviously, there's tons more tools that I didn't list here, but I think that's a solid starting point for a Creative Strategist without getting totally, totally overwhelmed. The last tip that we have for you is to start by just networking and immersing yourself in this industry of creative strategy.
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You can use platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter to connect with fellow creative strategy professionals.
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You can attend a digital event, we have a lot of them here at Motion. And then you can sign up for newsletters like Thumbstop, No Best Practices, and the Marketing Operators. Those are all three really good ones.
> [VISUAL: Screenshots of newsletter signup pages: Thumbstop by Motion, No Best Practices, Operators Newsletter]
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And at the end of the day, to land a role like this, you just need a solid portfolio of work, a mastery of ad performance skills, creative briefing, and researching expertise.
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We hope that this guide helps you to become a Creative Strategist. And if you want us to dive deeper into any of the topics here, just let us know. Creative strategy is our bread and butter and we want to help you out.
