Optimizing the creative for long-term growth

30-second summary:

• By leveraging unique creative assets, advertisers can meet the personalization demands of consumers down to a target market, and improve the campaign’s overall effectiveness.
• Advertisers need to ensure their creative approach mirrors the successful content on the given platform they’re leveraging. The best way to achieve maximum scale on social is with native creative assets — all while ensuring the ad is unique.
• Advertisers should run statistical analysis to determine if the differences in engagement are coincidental, or if they’re caused by deliberate changes introduced in the test variants. Put simply, analyzing the effectiveness of a specific advertisement across large and differing audiences sheds light on what specific factors resonate best in a campaign.
• By testing and then optimizing an ad to the most granular of levels, marketers can ensure their ad spend achieves the best long-term results.

Brands find themselves at a unique moment in time; the industry is coming off a period where ad-buys were at an all-time low, given pandemic-related marketing cuts. This results in a flood of open advertising inventory across channels and considerably lowers CPMs across the board.

By capitalizing on lower impression prices and putting aside the notion of short-term monetization, brands can lean on testing for increased long-term engagement.

Additionally, testing and modifying relevant message points that let consumers know why their offerings are necessary helps brands remain top-of-mind as consumer spending slowly increases and subsequent marketing budgets begin making their return to normalcy.

Test creative to deliver the best personalized experience

A report from Instapage found that marketers experience an average increase of 20% in sales when using personalized approaches. And this makes sense; people are exposed to ads across just about every device and channel, so personalization helps cut through the clutter.

By leveraging unique creative assets, advertisers can meet the personalization demands of consumers down to a target market, and improve the campaign’s overall effectiveness.

Essentially, advertisers should be breaking down their ads and creating multiple versions by adjusting and optimizing every aspect of the experience, such as duration, skins, background music, messaging, etc.

This lets the ad take on several new forms and ultimately encourages different segments of users to engage with it, therefore leading to a new cycle of user growth.

Let’s take mobile games, for example — hyper-casual games are simple to play and they tend to match the short duration of short-form content apps such as Snapchat.

Snapchat’s immersive experience is easy for users to try the game and get a feel for the real thing through playable ad formats. The developer or game studio can test gameplay retention and purchases by experimenting with changing the creative style, and other parameters within the playable ad.

Through different variations of this across a wide sample set, developers will learn what experience works best for consumer engagement, conversion rates, and long-term retention.

From a development perspective, multiple versions of the same ad can be made quickly, without having to render and export the results each time.

Sticking to the theme of social media — there are a number of major social channels marketers leverage daily. However, as each platform evolves and new trends arise, it’s important advertisers take a unique approach to each platform.

For example, Snap recently released Minis, which allows third-party applications to run inside Snapchat. This evolution underscores the evolution in social media accessibility, and advertiser’s expanding options.

With this in mind, advertisers need to ensure their creative approach mirrors the successful content on the given platform they’re leveraging. The best way to achieve maximum scale on social is with native creative assets — all while ensuring the ad is unique.

Game developers should ensure their ads utilize unique creative, have background music that is perfectly synced with actions in the playable ad, and illustrate the main gameplay to highlight its unique selling points.

Additionally, a surprisingly effective creative strategy is to show how players failed a game or level.

As custom ad units are created, advertisers should run statistical analysis to determine if the differences in engagement are coincidental, or if they’re caused by deliberate changes introduced in the test variants.

Put simply, analyzing the effectiveness of a specific advertisement across large and differing audiences sheds light on what specific factors resonate best in a campaign.

From there, marketers can identify what changes lead to higher success rates and double-down on those specifications to maximize the results of their efforts.

By testing various ad creative styles and strategies, marketers are able to find relative certainty in a market full of ambiguity, especially when the competition for traffic is increasingly fierce.

By testing and then optimizing an ad to the most granular of levels, marketers can ensure their ad spend achieves the best long-term results. By utilizing this strategy advertisers can learn what experience works best for improving consumer engagement, conversion rates, and long-term retention.

source https://www.clickz.com/creatives-and-optimizing-for-long-term-growth/263754/