Affiliate Soft Skills: Creativity

Publisher’s professional skills are priceless, so we constantly share our experience, tips, and Aff1 tools. However, hard skills are necessary, but not sufficient skills. To become a real pro, you need to be ahead of the crowd and know more than others. So we dedicated a new series of articles to soft skills. Today, we are talking about creativity.

Let's be honest: numbers and indicators, statistical analysis make up the lion's share of our advertising campaigns. All our decisions are based on data and accurate information. We have become hostages to graphs, charts, tables. But!

Before you analyze something, you need to invent, visualize, create this “something”. Analytics analyzes and creativity creates. Therefore, analytics without creativity is meaningless. Especially in the field of selling goods and attracting traffic.

Creativity in affiliate marketing requires the right approach from the very beginning. This is a broad outlook, the ability to learn from other people’s experiences and create unique creatives that stand out among competitors.

Why get traffic with creativity?

So, affiliate marketing takes off when it has two wings:

1. Analytics responsible for choosing the most effective advertising channel and accurate targeting on social networks.
2. Creativity is responsible for the visibility of your advertising, attracting the attention of buyers and their desire to buy your offer.

To put it even simpler, buyers won’t notice your advertising if it doesn’t differ from others. There is too much noise on the Internet, so to attract traffic you need to find or come up with a way to get attention.

The good news is that creativity is a skill that you can master if you want and try.

How to boost your creativity

Just as you can develop muscles through sports, you can also develop your “creative muscle.”

To develop the creative side of your work, accept the fact that there may be more than one correct answer to a question. Don’t copy creative ideas from your colleagues and competitors. Create and test different approaches and connections.

To create ideas, you need to have a lot of associations in your head. Steve Jobs said that creativity is the ability to find connections that others don't see. The more different associations you have in your head, the easier it will be for you to generate ideas.

Watchfulness, which we discussed in detail in a special article, will also come in handy.

Train associative thinking! Try to silently extend a word, for example “carousel”, for 5 seconds with associations. For example: carousel - children - garden - fruits - apples - store. Or capsules for prostatitis - male power - superman - advertising in comic book style.

It is very important to fuel yourself. Emotions, new interesting ideas. If you want to always be creative, then you must train yourself to fill your “creative well”, watch some interesting stories, listen to different music, and so on.

Show empathy. A person-centered approach is the source of creativity. Observing consumer behavior does not provide answers, inspiration or the basis for innovation. Show empathy for the consumer. You'll come up with more innovative ideas when you better understand the needs of the audience you're working for.

By the way, we discussed empathy in detail in a special article. Be sure to use these tips!

Combine the incongruous. Do you want to increase sales, think about how you can increase them with the help of, for example, croissants, dumbbells? The more random stimuli, the bigger and better. For example, if you need to sell hygienic lipstick, look at it like a doctor. If we were doctors, how would we market lipstick? Or how would we promote if we were children? When you try to look at the world with different eyes, you have a new association, a new flow of ideas.

Instead of conclusions

Affiliate marketing is about constantly innovating and creative solutions to maximize profits. Creating advertising campaigns that actually sell takes work. This is a creative process, and with any budget you need to come up with something new and catchy, which only creative individuals can do. Creativity sells.

About other skills, read articles on the Aff1.com blog and feel free to contact our managers for offers, advice and tips in your work!