How performance creative can boost your digital marketing ROI
Performance creative has a key role to play in enhancing return on investment (ROI) and is key for achieving successful digital marketing strategies and delivering business growth.
Essentially the meeting point between creative and KPI-driven campaigns, performance creative ensures digital assets are fit for purpose to support campaign delivery. By underpinning audience data with channel-specific insights, marketers have the opportunity to have better products and services that can help drive ROI. In short, performance creative can enhance your campaigns and drive results for a brand.
This is a solution that will no doubt appeal to a growing number of clients who want to see further enhancements in their marketing strategies and combining creativity and technology will help them do that. To ensure clients stand out from the digital noise and speak to their target audiences in the most effective way, performance creative is key and has led to brands investing time, money and effort into boosting their digital creatives through a performance creative lens.
The benefits of performance creative and generating impact
Performance creative acts as a bridge between campaigns that are driven by KPIs/ROI and those that lead with innovation and creativity. Traditionally, brands focused on one or the other, but today many are merging the two to create successful campaigns.
Performance creative concentrates on perfecting the end result, which is typically the call-to-action that an ad supplies for audiences. However, if an ad is praised for its creativity but doesn’t actually lead users to take the desired action, it can’t be considered a success under the performance creative model.
Therefore, when it comes to effective marketing focused on ROI, it is the strategy advertisers turn to as it incentivises measurable results and makes metrics easy to track. Five benefits of performance creative include:
- The ability to track performance
- Paying for results
- Connecting with new/harder to reach audiences
- Being able to optimise campaigns as they progress
- Budgeting and setting spending limits
The importance of understanding key messages
Marketers may live and breathe the products and services they provide, but their audiences only have a fraction of the same interest. That’s why it’s crucial for brands to take a step back and take a walk in their audiences’ shoes.
This way, they can work to identify the most important factors that can catch a customer’s attention and make them want to stop and learn more via messages that are visible within a few seconds of seeing the ad.
A brand’s message should highlight the personal benefits an audience will achieve from its products or services. When possible, striking an emotional response can lead to better results as consumers prioritise their personal emotions over information, features, and facts.
Becoming a trustworthy brand through performance creative
Once your creative has captured a reader’s interest, the next challenge for brands is to address and overcome the barriers that stand in the way of a call to action.
Customers are unlikely to invest in something that requires unnecessary effort, so if engaging with a brand is going to be a hassle, over-complicated or come at a cost, audiences are likely to avoid it.
Another great way to identify problems is collaborating with your brand’s other departments. For example, customer service teams are on the front line of the business, so are well-positioned to discuss and troubleshoot the most common questions and pain points that potential and current customers experience on a day-to-day basis. Their insights act as great fuel when it comes to outlining a creative approach.
Customer testimonials are also very beneficial to campaigns, with 93% of consumers saying that online reviews influence their purchase decisions. This is where social media comes in, as it allows brands to see what customers are saying about its products or services and incorporate the positive feedback into its creative strategies.
Knowing your audience and how to interact with them
A harsh reality for most marketing channels is that up to 90% of your audience will not perform a call to action. However, that doesn’t mean they will never be interested in what your brand has to offer. It can often take weeks or months to transform interested non-responders into customers, with a well thought out performance creative approachable to ensure that campaigns appeal to them every step of the way.
The key to long-term, sustainable ROI is making sure that you’re constantly treating both your audience and your brand with respect. Staying true to the brand’s values and leveraging trust ensures that prospective customers feel more comfortable and will therefore be likely to return.
So the next time you are looking for a reliable, measurable boost to an upcoming digital campaign, think twice before investing money into more media when the right creative strategy and execution can provide a shorter-term, more cost-effective and greater boost to your digital marketing initiatives.
Performance marketing channels
There are many performance marketing channels available to brands, and most performance marketing tactics can happen programmatically. In these cases, the content is delivered strategically to platforms and individuals so that marketers are paying for valuable impressions or clicks.
Other reliable strategies for performance in digital marketing are high-impact visuals and formats. At a time where most online users try to avoid ads, it is imperative to make designs stand out in order to increase views, clicks and conversions. Formats for advertising should also be varied and engaging, with videos, mobile-first designs and digital audio ads all able to ensure that brands can develop a rich, omnichannel online experience. Engaging formats ensure that after ads find the right viewers, those audience members will be excited to learn more, with social media advertising, search engine marketing, high-impact mobile advertising and videos just some of the ways brands can achieve this.
Patrina Fallon, Senior PPC Account Manager, Loud Mouth Media
