It’s no secret that creative is a key part of marketing performance. It’s the last experience a customer has before conversion—and one of its biggest influencers. When it comes to contributing to sales, creative still leads the way among different advertising elements, according to Nielsen. Ad creative contributes 47% to sales, followed by reach at 22%, and targeting at 9%.
The perfect mix of creative messaging and design connects your marketing content and strategies to your prospects’ emotions and desires. In today’s “attention economy,” where everyone is vying for your customers’ attention, you need great creative, that not only stands out, but out-performs. Here are common opportunities for marketers to improve the performance of their creative:
Bring creative into marketing processes and digital strategies
Sometimes marketers isolate creative development from the rest of their marketing processes (such as segmentation, offer development, and CX) and from their digital strategies (such as media, search, and SEO). A better approach is to make creative performance a key part of your digital strategy and help content creators understand how their creative performs in the digital marketplace.
Use your entire marketing process to inform and direct creative development
Brands can find the sweet spot by connecting their complex digital marketing strategies with their creative to focus on performance.
In this approach, your creative teams are no longer separated from data and media. And their efforts are measured and directed by data-backed performance. That way everyone is informed, working together on the same page, and oriented to results. You’ll elevate the potential of your creative because it’s now truly in sync with your strategic efforts. You’ll make creative into more than just a great design and a powerful message. You can do this by following three important principles:
Optimize your creative for the media it will appear on: Repurposed TV doesn’t work on social, reworked social doesn’t work on search, and so on. Develop your formats, graphics, messages, fonts, and images with the specific media and viewer in mind.
Bring scientific and data-led processes into your creative: Apply your targeting and segmentation for audience selection to your creative. Dynamically create your creative content, and test many variations to find what works. Make your creative work with algorithms (not just people!) to ensure that it wins the auction, and gets chosen to be displayed in the right context.
Move your customers with inspired creative: Reach into the hearts and minds of your customers through well-designed, clever, entertaining, or otherwise compelling creative content and messaging. Help your creative team bring their creative brilliance into the context of media and data to truly out-perform.
Making new moves
In closing, it's time for creative to make some new moves. Some marketers will pull their creative minds into the larger digital marketing process, and others will bring their digital comms and campaign planners to new creative heights. The key is to bring the best of creativity, media, and insight to work together. At iProspect, that’s what we help brands do. If you’d like to learn more about bolstering the performance of your creative, visit iProspect.
About Brittany Richter: As Senior Vice President, Head of Products and Services, Brittany Richter leads the vision, development and activation of iProspect's Products & Services offerings in the US. Brittany is a regular byline contributor to Adweek, has been featured in industry publications in the US and abroad and regularly speaks at conferences across the country.