In a digital world full of channels, sizes, interactions, rewarded, displays, banners, natives, playables, gifs, videos, VR, AR & more, I promise your design masterpieces are going to make the difference ahead. Take them seriously.
A creative is not other than the endpoint in which your users begin their interactions with your brand; give it the attention and resources it deserves.
The best part of it is that everything is measurable, and using a proper tool and an objective and methodic work agenda, you can hack your strategy. Is not about what creative is “nicer” than the other one, it’s all about data, engagement, metrics. Work by the numbers, it’s easier. Let them tell you what it works and what doesn’t, don’t try to guess. And do you remember my first paragraph? You will be ahead from all the rest. Pretty fly huh?
In this article I’d like to share some key initiatives we use at Winclap in order to be successful in a creative hacking strategy:
1) Produce some versions of your creatives with small variations and test everything. Is this the right color palette the most engage it? Is this typography the one who catches the attention of quality users? What elements from my creatives are having the best impact on my campaigns metrics? And which the worst? Am I using the right message according to what I want to get? Creatives are composed of colors, elements, message, and call-to-action. Test variations and answer all the question about them. Be methodic on the tests.
2) Does your designer or studio know the metrics of the creatives produced? Do they know what was the CTR (%) of their last pieces? And the CR (%)? Here’s what at Winclap we call when creativity meets data. You need to involve your design studio with your performance team and here’s when you can align all your efforts. Move and let the numbers talk by themselves, being them who tell what works best and not leave a subjective opinion to ruin the performance of your campaigns. Be data-driven, for optimization and for creatives production.
3) Don’t let the branding kill the performance. Branding is a whole different world than performance. In the first one, you want people to recognize your brand, generate positioning, brand awareness, etc. At performance, we want people to take a specific action: an install, login, book a flight, order food, purchase something, and so many others. A creative what works amazingly on a branding campaign, might not have the desired results on performance. Please, don’t use the same creatives in both areas. Focus on what you want to gain with your new users and align your creatives production and strategy to that.
4) The campaign structure could be ok, but your creatives can be ruining the performance. You can use all the best practices recommended, apply perfect targeting and optimizations, but if your creatives are not aligned (objectively and data-driven) to that, the performance is not going to be good. Analyze them before discarding a channel.
5) Be constant and avoid creative fatigue. When was the last time you refresh your creatives? How long are you running your current creatives? What are the metrics trends of your creatives? The frequency of new creative matters. You don’t want to harm your audience with old and not engager creatives; and actually, you might not get any traffic because the advertising algorithm won’t promote you anymore if your creatives are out-of-date.
6) Analyze, Evolve and Scale... and start again! After testing, you need to be fast and accurate to follow this cycle. Based on metrics, evolve the production of the winnings creatives and scale your campaigns and your results. Then you start again.
Following these steps I’m confident you can have a successful creative hacking strategy and sky-rocking your campaigns, bringing a lot of users, in a profitable way.
You as a manager might think: “thanks Lean but I need a sophisticated 15 people team, between designers and account managers to run, test, analyze, identify elements, evolve, produce, optimize, scale, and start the cycle again... and doing it before the next campaign starts!” Well, the bad news is that yes. The good one is that you can work with an app first mar-tech company, which has a technology to do it faster, cheaper and accurate for you, allowing you to hack on your creative strategy and letting you time to think on more strategic decisions than campaign maintenance. This is what we do from Winclap and AdScience. Growth managers, specialists on multi-channel performance, and designers working together, powered by a strong technology, aligned together for one goal... your goal.