Here's how you can position yourself for a promotion in Creative Strategy.

To position yourself for a promotion in Creative Strategy, constantly produce high-quality work that exhibits creativity, strategic thinking, and measurable outcomes. Proactively seek out opportunities to lead projects, interact well with cross-functional teams, and demonstrate your ability to tackle complex challenges through inventive solutions.

The skills I’d recommend honing to set yourself up for promotion as a creative strategist: - behavioural psychology, and understanding how to tap into human desires - copywriting, and turning human desires into snappy text overlays/scripts - design principles, and knowing what will grab and hold attention in a busy newsfeed - data analysis, knowing which metrics to look at and why. Also being able to interpret the data to know how to turn data into next steps. - research, and understanding the market you’re operating in. What do buyers want and need? What are their problems? Desired outcomes? Failed alternatives? - putting together comprehensive case studies to show how your creative strategies have improved performance.

To position yourself for a promotion in creative strategy, flexibility and adaptability is very important in all aspects. From offering clients customizable options, to flexible work timings and structures, every little bit adds to making you stand out. On the top of all this, the ability to highlight your abilities and USPs play a very important part for potential clients to notice your selling points.

Building a portfolio of case studies will really help you to stand out, as well as clearly demonstrating your capabilities as a creative strategist. Start with the problems being faced by a brand you’ve helped. Why did they need a creative strategy overhaul in the first place? Provide details of the diagnostics you carried out to identify the cause of the problem. Data analysis? Brand positioning? Testimonial analysis? Outline your recommended steps and actions. Explain why you chose these steps and your hypothesis. Show how you implemented your recommendations with examples of creatives. Share the performance/results of your recommendations. Was it what you expected? Finish with your conclusion and summary of findings.

Make sure to position yourself as someone people WANT to work with. Even if you’re in a remote role, are you the type of person people want to sit next to at a desk? Bring solutions, speak positively about others, don’t complain in open forums/inappropriate situations. Share your findings as a creative strategist across departments to raise your profile. Will that new winning angle you found help the email team? Or the website team? Share it! Always be proactive in your role and with other teams. If you see a potential issue arising, don’t wait for it to happen - step in, raise awareness of it, suggest solutions.

Networking at work and in your industry is super important for getting promoted. Get to know the right people who can help you move up. Join projects across different departments to get noticed and show you can work well with others. Remember, it’s not just who you know but who knows what you want and what you’re capable of that really matters.

This industry changes exceptionally fast, especially in terms of trends. Stay ahead of trends by actively using the platforms where your creative strategies will be tested. Follow thought leaders in your space, and see what they predict for our industry and learn from their wins and losses too. Is there anything useful you can suggest for improving my performance for your own brand? When you find niggles or challenges with workflows or processes - consider how they could be improved, and proactively make suggestions. One of the quickest ways to promotion is to make the jobs of everyone around you easier! Either by bringing efficiencies or improving effectiveness.