It's easy for performance marketers to overlook the storytelling and creative elements of ad campaigns. After all, marketing performance is measured through numbers, making cold-hard data the centerpiece for ad campaign planning and execution.
However, by omitting the creative and emotional factors of ad campaigns, you take away what connects with your audience emotionally, which in turn, makes your marketing materials less compelling.
As such, performance marketers and creatives need to start working together.
Aligning Performance with Creativity
Working in silos can decentralise media buying, creative, and performance marketing operations. And it can lead to misalignment and even remove the creative aspects of your marketing and ad campaigns.
To break down these silos, you need to optimise creativity and emotional resonance the way marketers do with direct response and behavioral targeting.
The solution? Leverage the power of creative data.
In this blog, we’ll cover the basics of creative data, its importance in digital marketing, and how you can use it to better inform your online ads and marketing campaigns.
What Is Creative Data?
Creative data is the information within your creative content identified on its own as data points or features.
For instance, a makeup ad consisting of multiple pieces, such as the product photo, picture of the model, colours, tagline, and effects that, when singled out, help you understand what specific content works well.
Creative data analysis helps uncover the colours, taglines, or models that get the most positive responses from audiences. It focuses on the parts of your advertisements that customers emotionally respond to.
This helps eliminate the guesswork from your marketing communication and campaign, which includes brand storytelling to data-driven advertising.
Creative Data and Content Atomisation
You can combine creative data with your engagement data to determine the elements that correlate with performance for each segment and audience through content atomisation.
Content atomisation is the process of breaking down creative content into individual aspects and viewing each as a crucial, stand-alone facet. It works similarly to image tagging, where algorithms show you more images with a specific tag based on other content you’ve frequently liked with the same tag.
However, content atomisation takes the concept further.
For instance, besides tagging images, content atomisation involves breaking down the facets into many aspects, including taggable components, such as facial features, smiles, mood, logo placement, lighting, and more.
Essentially, creative data can help you objectively determine if the creative you want to use for your marketing campaigns will have a positive (or negative) impact on performance before running them. And it can also help you break down the potential cognitive biases that influence your conversion rates.
Why Is Creative Data Important?
While data analytics is critical to see how well your ads perform, the information often only gives you a surface-level view.
You need to go beyond data analytics and further into creative analysis. Doing so allows you to turn the impact of creatives into data to extract insights from.
You can uncover what creatives and content work, or don’t work, for your target audiences, and in turn, your brand, including whether it can facilitate successful conversion optimisation.
Below are several statistics and figures that back up the importance of creatives and creative data:
The numbers don’t lie. Creative data helps you understand why creative works for your audience and how it drives conversions, sales, and ultimately, marketing success.
Creative data can shape your ad campaigns and other marketing efforts and fuel your creative ideation process to ensure you don’t waste vital resources.
How to Use Creative Data
There are countless ways to use creative data to fuel your ad and marketing campaigns; however, we’ll focus on three here.
1. Evolve With Your Customers
Customer preferences, especially when it comes to visual and creative content, are often dynamic and rapidly evolving. Humans can shift from happy to confused, or from fear to anger in a matter of seconds.
You can use creative data to get critical information and extract actionable insights to keep up with customer demands and preferences. It can help you deliver personalised content and customer experiences that are emotionally fulfilling.
This can increase your chances of achieving marketing success.
2. Understand the "Why" Behind Customer Behaviour
Remember, your data is more than just numbers. Your data represents people with specific needs and desires. So, you must analyse your creative data to learn customer content consumption and purchasing behaviours.
For instance, you can perform creative data analysis on your social media content on top of tracking and measuring engagement rates. You’ll get relevant insights to tailor and deliver data-driven creative that can encourage conversions and purchases.
3. Focus on the Most Usable Data
Businesses are flooded with data... and not all your data will be of use to you.
If you tried to adapt your ad or marketing campaigns to every ounce of data you receive, it’s likely the campaign will not work. Instead, you need to focus on the most important facets of your data.
Leveraging creative data allows you to cut through the noise and focus on the most relevant and useful information. You’ll get granular insights and avoid wasting time and resources while optimising them for marketing initiatives that drive results.
Final Thoughts
For too long, performance marketers and creatives have worked in separate silos. To be one step ahead of your competitors, you must start leveraging creative data.
Creative data could be the driving force you need to create more relevant, tailored, and personalised ad and marketing campaigns.
