9 game-changing tools creative strategists are using in 2025
Creative strategists sit at the crossroads of data and creativity; and the right tools make or break their workflow. This guide highlights 9 must‑have tools for 2025, including Superads, the AI‑powered creative analytics tool used by thousands of teams. From trend forecasting and social listening to project management and collaborative design, these tools help strategists cut through noise, optimize faster and scale winning ideas with confidence.
The role of creative strategist has evolved dramatically. You're no longer just brainstorming catchy taglines or selecting color palettes: you're the bridge between raw performance data and breakthrough creative execution.
Your success depends on turning complex metrics into actionable insights that drive real results.
But here's the challenge: data lives everywhere. Your Facebook ads manager shows one story, TikTok Ads Manager tells another and LinkedIn Campaign Manager speaks a completely different language.
Meanwhile, you're expected to deliver rapid-fire insights that keep campaigns profitable and creative teams inspired.
This comprehensive guide highlights 9 essential platforms and tools that will transform how you analyze creative performance, manage workflows and scale winning strategies. Let’s get started!
Why creative strategists need specialized tools
Creative strategists operate at the intersection of art and science.
You need to understand why certain hooks perform better than others, which visual elements drive conversions and how to scale winning creative concepts across different platforms and audiences.
Without proper tools, you face these daily frustrations:
- Scattered Performance Data: Jumping between Facebook Ads Manager, TikTok Ads Manager and LinkedIn Campaign Manager wastes valuable time and makes it difficult to spot cross-platform trends.
- Manual Reporting Bottlenecks: Pulling data from multiple sources, building reports in spreadsheets and trying to identify patterns manually means insights arrive too late to impact active campaigns.
- Trend Blindness: Without real-time monitoring of competitor activity and emerging creative trends, your strategies risk becoming stale and ineffective.
The right tools solve these problems by centralizing data, automating insights and providing the creative-specific analytics that platform tools simply can't deliver.
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9 best tools that every creative strategist should use
Finding the right tools can be overwhelming, so we’ve rounded up the best platforms creative strategists rely on to analyze performance, streamline workflows and turn insights into winning campaigns.
Research tools
1. Kimola Cognitive – audience feedback & sentiment analysis
Source: Kimola Cognitive
Great creative grabs hearts, but world-class creative speaks your audience’s exact language. Kimola Cognitive is like having a research department on speed dial: it mines reviews, comments and social chatter to show not just what people are saying but how they feel about your brand and campaigns.
Why creative strategists need Kimola: Its AI-powered sentiment analysis can sift through a mountain of audience conversations in seconds, surfacing the emotions, triggers and key phrases that get people to act. Planning a new campaign? Go straight to the language that builds trust, urgency, or excitement. Multilingual support means you’re not stuck with US-centric insights. Strategists can see what resonates in any market or vertical.
2. Talkwalker – robust social listening & trend alerts
Source: Talkwalker
Culture shifts overnight. With Talkwalker, you catch those waves before they hit everyone’s newsfeed. This intelligence tool is part early warning system, part intelligence hub, tracking what’s trending, who’s talking and which competitor campaign is about to steal your lunch.
Why this tool is indispensable: It tracks conversation across every channel that matters (social, news, blogs, forums) so no potential threat or opportunity slips through the cracks. The killer feature? Visual analysis. Talkwalker assesses not just text, but also images and videos, alerting you to that new meme format or viral hook before it’s yesterday’s news.
Planning tools
3. Xmind – visual brainstorming & creative mapping
Source: Xmind
Every great campaign starts with messy, creative chaos. Xmind transforms that chaos into clarity, taking scattered ideas, stray Post-It notes and half-formed hunches and turning them into living, breathing maps you can build on.
Think of it as a strategist’s GPS: you know where you are and more importantly, where you’re going.
Why strategists like Xmind: Its mind mapping power is like a creative whiteboard but with more structure and zero risk of someone wiping away your best work. Unleash campaign flows, map out customer journeys, or wireframe your A/B tests. Not only does it make planning enjoyable, but you also spot gaps, duplications and wild new angles in minutes.
Collaboration is smooth. Share your maps live or export them to every format a modern team uses—PDF for that client deck, PNG for Slack debates, or live links for workshops where you co-create in real time. You can color-code, cross-link and organize at whatever level of nerdiness gets your team pumped.
4. Notion – centralized knowledge & campaign documentation
Source: Notion
Sick of knowledge silos killing campaign momentum? Notion is your antidote.
It’s the digital headquarters where creative briefs, performance breakdowns and hard-earned playbooks finally live in one, easy-to-find place.
Why Notion wins for creative strategists: Templates rule here. Standardize your creative briefs, post-mortems and asset trackers so nobody’s hunting through old docs or losing wisdom to long-abandoned Slack threads. Build living libraries of top ads, learnings and competitor moves, all tagged, searchable and available to the whole team—no accidental gatekeeping.
Collaboration is where Notion shines. Drop stakeholders from media, creative, or analytics into any workspace and watch silos disappear. Everyone’s working from the same source of truth and feedback loops shrink from days to minutes.
Making tools
5. Figma – real-time collaborative creative design
Source: Figma
Figma gives creative strategists, designers and copywriters a shared playground for mocking up campaign visuals, experimenting with rapid iterations and turning feedback into live updates.
Why Figma is a strategist’s best friend: You can jump into a concept, tweak a headline, swap a color, or move an image, all in real time with your team. No more bottlenecks or email chains, just creative momentum that actually matches your campaign pace. Prototype ads, demo sequences, or visual flows and share them instantly. Clients and stakeholders can click, comment, or approve without a single download.
Component libraries keep your strategy scalable: grab reusable elements for different campaigns, keep branding rock-solid and speed up go-live times. It’s a living system for creative reporting and collaboration, not a static file graveyard.
6. Airtable – performance tracking & asset management
Source: Airtable
Airtable turns your creative assets and results into a living database you can cut any way you need: by asset, campaign or even “which video hook beat the average CPM last month?”
What makes Airtable such a force multiplier? It links every photo, video and bit of copy to hard campaign data: KPIs, test flights and outcomes. Want to filter by top-performing creative on TikTok vs. Meta, see how different audiences responded, or instantly locate an asset with the right call-to-action? Done. Custom views let you sort by date, performance, team, creative type, or whatever custom field matters for your process.
The approval workflows finally make asset signoffs painless. Creative bottlenecks disappear and your launches speed up—plus, no more mystery edits or endless version confusion.
Strategists love Airtable because it brings order to creative chaos and surfaces what works (and what doesn’t). That means smarter spend and more repeatable wins.
7. Descript – seamless video & audio creative editing
Source: Descript
If paid social in 2025 had a secret weapon, it would be Descript. This isn’t another clunky editing app; it’s the creative strategist’s shortcut to fast, collaborative, platform-ready video content.
What sets Descript miles ahead: Its AI transcription lets you edit video by editing text—yes, you read that right. Snip out bad takes, drop new calls to action and remix content in minutes, no edit bay needed. Team working remote? No problem. Everyone drops comments, makes edits and highlights reels instantly.
Testing tools
8. Mentimeter – live concept testing & audience insights
Source: Mentimeter
Stop guessing what your audience wants. Mentimeter lets creative teams run live, interactive polls and feedback sessions, inside your org or with key segments of your actual audience, so you can validate creative concepts, hooks and messaging before putting serious budget behind them.
Why this matters for creative strategists: Decision-makers aren’t just looking at pretty slides; they’re clicking, voting and surfacing real preferences, right there in the workshop. Need to settle a headline debate or test new UGC concepts? Everyone gets a voice and strategists get data-backed direction instantly.
Export the feedback to your creative roadmap, update campaign plans in real time and shrink the loop from brainstorming to launch. It’s not just input; it’s clarity that saves money and delivers impact.
9. Superads – AI-powered creative analytics & multi-platform ad analysis
If you’re tired of creative guesswork and spinning your wheels in endless spreadsheets, Superads is the wake-up call your strategy needs.
Built by and for paid social pros, this platform puts the power of AI and friendly visualizations squarely in your hands, so you never have to settle for vague ad reporting or gut-feel creative again.
What truly sets Superads apart? For starters, it gives every creative strategist the possibility to get, instantly, all their ad creatives in one place, to easily deep dive into any element they care about.
Oneflow, a Swedish digital contract platform, used Superads to solve a major pain point: tracking creative themes across Meta and LinkedIn in one place.
“When I connected LinkedIn and Meta, I saw the magic. Having a single view of channel-wise data was exactly what we needed to make informed decisions quickly,” says Anand Nambiar, Head of Growth.
Instead of exporting spreadsheets and piecing insights together manually, Oneflow now shares live dashboards that make creative performance easy to understand and act on.
“Superads is a game-changer for marketers and creative strategists… being able to measure creative effectiveness is critical,” adds Nambiar.
And besides the Superads product (which can be used for free), their separate free Facebook Ads Benchmark tool allows marketers to compare their results with others in their industry.
For creative strategists, Superads is your secret weapon. Less time untangling reports, more energy for smart, creative moves that grow your brand (and make you the hero on your team).
Improve your ad campaigns
With the only AI-powered creative insights tool
built for modern marketers.
Spotlight: Superads Facebook Ads Benchmark Tool
While our main Superads' platform provides comprehensive creative analytics, our free Facebook Ads Benchmark tool deserves special attention for creative strategists. This tool provides industry-specific performance benchmarks that help you contextualize your campaign results.
Why Benchmarks Matter for Creative Strategy: Most creative strategists evaluate ad performance against their own historical data or arbitrary industry averages. This approach can be misleading. A 2% CTR might be excellent for one industry but concerning for another. The Superads benchmark tool solves this problem with real performance data.
How to Use Benchmark Data Strategically: When your CTRs drop below industry medians, it often indicates creative fatigue rather than audience or budget issues. Similarly, if your CPCs spike above benchmark ranges, it might signal the need for fresh creative concepts rather than bid adjustments.
The Data Behind the Tool: We at Superads source this benchmark data from thousands in anonymized ad spend across major platforms, ensuring accuracy and relevance. The data updates regularly to reflect current market conditions, giving strategists reliable reference points for performance evaluation.
Facebook Benchmarks
Check out fresh CPC, CPM, CTR
Facebook Ads data.
Filter by industry, country or
campaign type.
Become a better creative strategist today
Creative strategy succeeds when data insights drive creative decisions.
The tools outlined in this guide solve the fundamental challenges that creative strategists face: scattered data, manual reporting and disconnected workflows.
The creative advertising landscape moves fast. The teams that win are those who can quickly identify what's working, understand why it's working and scale those insights across campaigns and platforms.
Ready to transform your creative strategy? Start with Superads' free plan to analyze your current ad performance, then explore how these additional tools can streamline your workflow and accelerate your results.
The combination of better data, smarter insights and more efficient processes will elevate your creative strategy from reactive to predictive.
Improve your ad campaigns
With the only AI-powered creative insights tool
built for modern marketers.
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