Hello everyone!
My name is Liza, and I’ve been working in the field of marketing for over five years, actively involved in the process of content creation. It all started with creating content for student channels at my university, then I worked as an SMM manager at an English-language theater. For the past year, I’ve been working as a creative marketer at Guru Apps by Universe Group, where we make creatives for iOS apps that are seen in 180 countries worldwide.
During this time, I’ve had the chance to work with a variety of different areas and come up with, probably, hundreds (if not thousands) of ideas for video and static content. So, I know better than anyone how difficult it can sometimes be to come up with something new. Especially when you need to do it quickly and effectively.
Today, I want to share a few ways to find new ideas and a selection of AI tools that help me make creatives.
Ways to Find Ideas
One of the biggest challenges for creative marketers has always been finding ideas and inspiration for new advertising concepts. Especially when we talk about product IT advertising, where creativity is the fuel, and it’s crucial to constantly maintain freshness and innovation, not only to attract the attention of users but also to keep it. Particularly now, when competition in the advertising market is growing, and everyone is fighting for users' attention. In fact, there are many ways that help to look at creativity from a different perspective.
For myself, I’ve highlighted the following ways to find ideas:
Ask questions about the creative
Usually, I start making creatives by asking questions to understand the “big picture”:
Who is the product's user, and what are they willing to pay for?
What are their pain points, and how do they communicate about them in the market?
Where will I communicate with the audience (on which platform), and what are its features?
How will I communicate with them (text, visuals)?
What will grab attention and make this creative stand out (what will be the trigger, the format of the creative)?
Analyze test results
This is the foundation for finding new ideas. Why? Because the data we get from tests shows the real reaction of the audience. You see what works and what doesn’t, and based on this, you can quickly adapt your next creatives. It’s much more effective than just guessing or relying on intuition. For example, if one visual element or hook consistently gives high results, it's a clear signal to continue using it or create several variations.
The analysis also helps identify weak spots: maybe a certain idea looked cool on paper, but in the end, didn’t achieve the desired results. Instead of wasting time on constant improvement, you immediately see what needs to change. Essentially, tests are your ongoing real-time “brainstorming,” generating new ideas based on clear data. This is one of those cases where every failure is an opportunity for improvement and new solutions.
Track trending topics and events on social media
We have many successful cases of using popular songs/memes/visual hooks in creatives, like adapting one of the trends for performance advertising.
We also constantly follow local events in the countries where we launch ads. For this, we’ve created a calendar with important local holidays, movie releases, concert dates, and similar events that can be used when creating ads for that locale.
Conduct Ongoing Audience Research
For effective creative work, it is crucial to understand your audience and adapt your communication to their needs. Proper interaction with the target audience allows you to create creatives that resonate with their problems and interests. A clear understanding of the customer’s pain points is the key to developing a truly successful strategy.
Why is this important? When you speak the language of your audience, you gain more trust and increase the chances of successful engagement. Today, it's not enough to just showcase a product—you need to address specific user needs, which will provide an emotional response. It's important not only to know their problems but also to show how your product solves them.
How to conduct an audience analysis?
For quality audience analysis, you should use several approaches:
Research forums
Platforms like Reddit and Quora allow you to see real discussions, questions, and needs of users in different niches.Social media comments
These are a great source of insights. For example, reading comments under videos of bloggers and influencers on TikTok or Instagram helps identify hidden customer “pain points” and trends.Review feedback and discussions
It's essential not just to analyze dry data, but to actively engage in reading real user opinions about certain products or services.
One of our successful cases involved a hypothesis about phone issues (overheating, low performance, poor battery condition) that we revealed after analyzing comments under relevant videos on TikTok.
The idea was to show how our Cleaner Guru app could help solve these issues. And it worked! We received a lot of feedback and realized that we had hit a pain point that was really important to our audience. After launching the campaign, conversions increased, and ad engagement grew because we clearly showed how real problems could be solved.
Develop a Strong Visual Literacy
Regularly reviewing creatives from different niches helps to notice new approaches that can be adapted to your product. It's important not only to watch creatives but also to analyze them: look for patterns, concepts, and tools used to achieve results. In our team, we hold meetings every two weeks, where we review creatives from other industries such as health & fitness, language learning, and marketplaces. This analysis helps us understand what techniques work in different niches and how they can be applied to our campaigns.
To do this effectively:
Structure the analysis by focusing on key elements: design, message, and CTA (call to action).
Identify why a particular approach worked in this area and think about how it can be integrated into your product.
Use tools like Trello or Notion to organize ideas and implement them later.
This approach helps push creativity beyond traditional solutions and create more innovative content that resonates with your audience.
Continuous Learning
Constantly learning and improving your skills is essential for a creative marketer. Instead of diving only into the details of creative development, it’s worth focusing on expanding your knowledge of new approaches and strategies. Watching courses from experienced marketers (such as Dara Denney or platforms like Adworldprime) helps keep up with new trends in marketing, automation, and purchasing. These resources not only update your knowledge but also generate new ideas and approaches that can be useful for different products and campaigns.
However, creative marketers need not only to create original ideas but also to do it quickly and efficiently. Here, modern AI tools come to the rescue, simplifying this process.
AI Tools We Use
There are thousands of AI tools on the market that help with idea creation and implementation. I’d like to share some that I use almost daily in my work.
AI Tools for Text Work:
ChatGPT: This is an obvious tool for generating hooks, captions, and even scripts for videos. I also like to use it to create variations on successful headlines and scripts.
Slang Scribe-AI: This tool often helps me add slang and make the text more native to a foreign audience.
Getrecall.ai: An AI tool that quickly summarizes any video. I use it to create notes from lectures and podcasts about creative marketing.
Cockatoo: I often use it for transcribing videos or audio. It greatly speeds up the work process! I like how accurate it is.
AI Tools for Visual Work:
TikTok AI Avatars: Working with influencers or actors is not always fast or efficient, so we also use AI avatars in our work. We most often use TikTok avatars. This tool greatly helps improve the results of creatives. For example, in one of our creatives, we managed to improve the CTR by 60% thanks to the use of an avatar.
In addition, TikTok AI avatars have several major advantages:
Frequently updated;
Free to use;
Quickly generated.
However, using TikTok AI avatars also has some drawbacks:
They may disappear;
Not available unless you collaborate with TikTok;
They don’t always look realistic.
Besides TikTok avatars, I also recommend trying Creatify, Arcads, Heygen, Caption, and CapCut.
Luma AI: A tool for "bringing photos to life." It allows you to quickly animate images, making the content more dynamic and engaging for the audience. We use this AI to create intros in our creatives.
Ideogram: A completely free text-to-image generator. Useful for creating visual elements for creatives.
AI Tools for Audio and Voice Work:
Myvocal.ai and Musicfy: Tools for creating celebrity or character voices (e.g., Drake, Trump, SpongeBob). This way, we can create more engaging and unusual creatives.
Suno: A tool for generating songs. A fun AI that can create a song from, so to say, a top-performing script. It’s unusual and highly attention-grabbing. Here’s what it looks like in our creatives:
Tips and Principles for Constant Inspiration and Efficient Work
Instead of conclusions, I want to leave a few principles that I try to follow to maintain inspiration and stay effective in finding creative solutions:
Never postpone ideas: It's better to immediately document your creative vision to avoid misunderstandings later. Relying only on one reference can easily make you lose the original thought. Plus, ideas may lose value over time, and trends may change. What seems relevant today can quickly become outdated.
Prioritize speed over quality: It’s important not to waste time perfecting a creative at the first stage of testing. The main thing is that the idea is clear. I recommend refining the creative if the idea shows good results.
Spend time in nature and shift your focus: Sometimes ideas come in complete silence when you least expect them. ;)
P.S. We’d be happy to have you join our team if you are creative, think outside the box, and want to create something truly cool and unique with us 😎
