Nearly two and a half years after iOS14 killed brands’ ability to scale via hyper-specific audience targeting, most marketers have realized that producing killer creative is the only real way to scale their campaigns successfully. (If this is news to you, check out this blog post, and then come back to this one, trust us!!)
With this in mind, the question we have to ask is why are so many marketing teams and agencies still operating like it's 2020?
It’s not enough for creative teams to go with their gut when it comes to campaign ideation, strategy, and production. And it’s not enough for media buying teams to hoard performance data…or to only focus on analyzing data pertaining to bid amounts, placements, and audiences. Google and Meta’s machine learning algorithms are doing that work better, anyway.
This operating model — where creatives and media buyers are essentially siloed — can lead to a lot of wheel spinning. Sure, creative teams may still produce campaigns that pop, but if the media buyers are keeping key performance data from them (or worse, are not tracking creative metrics at all), there’s no way for them to optimize that winning ad formula for future campaigns. They’ll only know that something about the ad worked, but not why it worked.
There’s a better way to work: enter, performance creative.
In the new era of digital marketing, the most successful teams are the ones who have figured out how to bridge the gap between data-driven media buyers and art-driven creatives. They’ve combined these often separate teams into a single performance creative unit that works in lockstep towards creating the most efficient ads possible.
Creating a shared language of metrics and empowering creatives to understand how to apply analytics takes creative strategy out of the realm of art and instinct and into the realm of science — resulting in campaigns that are actually iterative.
That’s where Motion comes in. The app makes it easy for media buyers to extract data from Meta and quickly spin the most important insights into actionable plans for creative teams.
To see Motion’s ability to bridge the gap between creatives and media buyers in action, let’s take a look at a Motion report from ROADiD.
Before they began working with Coast, ROADiD had been running the two static ads below for an extended period of time.
With ROAS of 1.82 and 2.64, respectively, it was clear to the media buying team that these ads were underperforming. Through Motion’s analytics and our creative auditing process, the Coast team was able to create fresh versions of these ads, that improved Hook Rate and Hold Rate, as well as increasing ROAS by nearly 250%.
Using Motion’s dashboard, the team is also able to compare which versions of the new ads perform best, which powers further optimization. For example, the ad on the bottom left has a much stronger thumbstop rate than the one on the right, which tells the creative team that a direct-to-camera approach to creator content may be better than something more action-focused. That said, the ad on the bottom right has a higher CTR, which may point to it having a stronger CTA variant. So, for a future iteration of the ad, the team could test combining the top-performing CTA with a direct-to-camera video style to boost ROAS even further.
While leveraging tools like Motion can go a long way toward building a successful performance creative team, they are not a silver bullet. Here, the experts at Motion and at Coast Digital have compiled their top tips for pivoting to a performance creative mindset and process.
Creative strategists have quickly emerged as one of the most important roles in modern marketing teams. These are the people who are fluent in data and analytics, but who understand the unique workflow and demands of creative production. They are the ones responsible for determining what data is the most important for creative teams to know, and helping chart a course for how to leverage that data into iterative ad creation.
In today’s digital marketing landscape, speed is the key to success. It's one thing to find a winning ad after three months of testing, and another entirely to find a win after three weeks of testing that can then be scaled and optimized over the next two and a half months! Every part of the process needs to be built for speed — from data gathering and analysis to creative production.
Hint: Motion’s got the data side of things covered, while adapting a modular creative approach can help supercharge the speed of ad creation.
One of the key roles of creative strategists (and media buyers) is to work with their creative counterparts to identify what data they need to know. For example, if your team is currently focused on optimizing thumbstop rates, you’ll want your creative team to understand which hooks are doing well and which are underperforming. But just sharing metrics on which ads had high thumbstop rates and which didn’t isn’t enough to arm creative teams with the information they need to produce higher performing ads.
The most successful teams will have a framework for sharing data alongside the story the data is telling — or the why behind the performance. For example, they could use naming conventions to be able to compare which creators audiences are responding to, which messaging is resonating, which product is enticing customers the most, among a whole host of other variables. Armed with this information, creative teams are able to quickly make informed decisions about what types of new ads should be created.
If you’re only leveraging on-platform reporting to understand your ad performance, you could be missing out on the bigger picture. Layering in tools like Motion allows teams to view aggregated performance quickly and easily, empowering them to make decisions that can optimize the performance of not just one ad, but that can help all campaigns scale more successfully.
Looking to take your performance to the next level?
With cutting-edge creative strategies and relationships with the partners your brand needs to succeed, Coast Digital takes the guesswork out of producing scalable campaigns. Set up a time to chat with our team today to learn more.
Simplify your growth today. Kickoff within 2 days.
.webp)
.webp)
.webp)