The Impact of Creatives on Performance Marketing Campaigns
Your performance marketing campaign's success is not attributed to how fat the budget is. Several nuances, like ad copy, audience targeting, ad creatives, and landing pages, form the secret sauce behind a great campaign.
A Nielsen study shows that 47% of a brand’s sales lift from advertising came through creatives alone.
So in this article, we’ll understand the impact of ad creatives in performance marketing campaigns, what makes ad creatives successful, and how marketers can optimize them.
Impact of ad creatives on campaign performance
Most ad experts believe creatives are the conductors of advertising. They make sure every aspect of an ad campaign comes together to set the ad apart.
Although many elements like copywriting, competitor analysis, and landing page optimizations are necessary to make an ad campaign work, creativity is what truly makes ads attention-grabbing in a saturated marketplace.
Here are more reasons to prove how impactful ad creatives are in campaign performance:
- Ad creatives can directly affect your click-through rates, the number of people seeing your ads and taking action, and the overall campaign budget.
- Creatives get more attention and can lead to positive customer attitudes towards the products being marketed.
- Creative ads make campaigns more memorable and could build a fan community faster by leaving a lasting impression.
It’s now safe to say that quality ad creative is the first step to powering up your performance marketing campaigns.
Yet to be convinced? Take the below image:
It’s from the iconic ad campaign, “Got Milk?”. Most of their success derived from the clever creative of famous actors with milk mustaches. The impact of these creatives can be hardly disputed with them reviving the then declining sales of milk throughout the United States.
The structure of successful ad creatives
Defining quality ad creatives is no easy task. However, a definite structure, like a framework, makes the job easier for you.
Did you know the average consumer attention span is around 8 seconds and sometimes even 1 to 3 seconds in younger users? That’s how much time you’ve got to attract attention.
So our structure starts with a strong hook - the first step that grabs and maintains the audience's attention. It can be a head-turner like a compelling headline, an attractive banner/tagline, or a catchphrase in a video.
Next comes the story. The biggest contributing factors to quality creatives are understanding customer preference nuances, what can make them unique, and of course, effective storytelling for reliability. Your storytelling elements can make people pay attention and influence their decision-making – all this while creating a deep and lasting connection.
Finally, it’s time to introduce your offer after building the story. Here, you can encourage the audience to initiate action, such as purchasing the product/service, requesting a demo, etc.
The AIDA model is a popular advertising and marketing framework that pinpoints the four main stages an individual goes through while purchasing a product or service. AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action.
Brands can use the model to define how to structure their ad creatives and distribute them to their target audience at each stage of the buyer’s journey.
Let’s understand how this hierarchy affects building ad creatives:
1. Attention
The first step in advertising is to attract the target audience’s attention and maintain it with deep engagement. You can use:
- Eye-catching headlines, humor elements, celebrity endorsements, and more to ensure they deeply engage with your creatives.
- Fresh and provocative visuals or imagery to grab attention. For example, infographics, abstract art, and holographic elements.
- Hyper-personalization to deliver a targeted message with a tagline, banner, or catchphrase.
Visual content in performance marketing can immediately catch a target user’s attention and spread awareness about your brand, product, or service.
2. Interest
Once you’ve hooked the audience in the first stage, it’s time to sustain their interest. Use your storytelling skills to offer valuable information that resonates with your target market. For example, explore your product/service’s features and benefits that solve their pain point or satisfy their needs.
Don’t be boring while doing so. Engage them with interesting storytelling elements, such as captivating subheadings and illustrations. If you’re breaking down benefits, ensure they are broken up into bite-sized chunks that are easier to read.
3. Desire
The desire and interest stage overlap as you’re still building up interest in the desire stage. But it’s time to create a strong desire for your product or service at this stage.
You can be slightly salesy and persuasive by showcasing your product/service’s unique selling proposition that sets your brand apart from competitors.
Emphasize more on benefits and paint a picture of what it’s like using your product or service and how it solves their problems. Take the emotional route by stitching in social proof where customers loved your product/service to create an urgent need among potential buyers.
4. Action
The last step of the AIDA model is to instigate action. The ad creative should end with a call to action (CTA) - a phrase designed to drive immediate action, such as purchasing the product, booking an appointment, requesting a demo, etc.
You can use urgency/FOMO or persuasive text as long as they are easy to read, concise, and direct. Whether it's to make a purchase, place a call, or book a meeting, ensure your CTAs are easy to spot and relevant to your target audience.
Why are teams lagging behind with ad creatives?
Marketing teams are constantly under pressure to deliver innovative, high-performing campaigns, leaving no time for creativity. This could be one reason why most teams are still taking the traditional route for advertising.
For example, you create an ad campaign and a brief for designers. It takes them some working days to deliver a few versions.
Next, you run each version to A/B test them, see what worked and what didn’t, and eventually, go back to square one.
Unfortunately, most managers end up spending more money and time than they should on several ad campaigns by relying on guesswork alone to find the perfect version that resonates with the target market. So a lack of performance optimization knowledge has been costing them heavily.
But thankfully, technology has come a long way for ad creatives. You can now use platforms to deliver text and image analytics and identify creative roadblocks to improve campaign performance while cutting costs.
Let’s explore them in the next section.
How can teams optimize for creatives that perform?
Let’s discuss some ways to optimize ad creatives for a higher ROI:
Using artificial intelligence (AI) tools
AI has shown immense potential in processing and understanding large amounts of data to detect patterns and help marketers make data-led decisions for improved ad campaigns.
Eacel is one such AI-powered performance optimization platform for ad creatives. Here’s how this works:
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- Eacel seamlessly integrates with your ad platform.
- The platform’s AI will analyze your image and text ad creatives and alert you of anomalies, if any.
- Eacel auto-creates multiple ads that resonate with your target audience in minutes and helps achieve a higher ad CTR, thus eliminating guesswork.
- Eacel constantly monitors your ad performance and offers suggestions to improve it.
- Scaling is quick with Eacel, as it can learn from your creatives and generate better suggestions as replacements.
Due to a constant shift in consumer behavior, AI’s powerful predictive and generative capabilities are key to making informed choices. Tools like Eacel can help you learn from your mistakes and successes to maintain a high ROI across marketing campaigns.
Using analytical tools
Analytical tools like Google Analytics and Google Data Studio have been transformative for many marketers in optimizing ad performance.
For example, Google Analytics Insights offers deep insights into your ad creatives' performance. You can track ad campaign goals and measure them by tracking conversions. Further, you can track metrics like overall traffic and user behavioral flow (drop-off/conversion points) to refine ad targeting.
Using design collaboration software
Design collaboration software helps creative and marketing teams work together. They can share performance marketing ad design feedback, solve problems, review ad creatives, and meet deadlines – all from a single place.
It can help teams work faster and more efficiently. You can use cloud-based tools like Visme, InVision, and Asana to foster creativity within your team.
Wrapping up
Creative fatigue is real. Marketing and design teams are expected to deliver more in less time, leading to a diminished focus on the creative aspect of ad campaigns.
Meanwhile, we saw how traditional and run-of-the-mill advertising serves no purpose. They can be time-consuming to show results and cost heavily on the pocket.
That’s when AI-powered tools like Eacel offer a guiding hand in generating high-converting ad creatives and continuously striving to improve your performance marketing campaigns for full potential ROI.
So forget pointless ad creative iterations and work with data-derived insights to optimize the impact of creatives in performance marketing campaigns with Eacel.
