Get Inspired by These Learnings from Smartly.io Customers

We have gathered insights from brands around the globe to help you learn how to leverage data in briefing and explore actionable creative insights that, in most cases, drive performance.

After reading this you’ll learn how to:

• Use data for precise creative briefs
• Interpret and design with behavioral cues
• Understand different KPIs in the creative context
• Design for action
• Leverage seasonal and organic content in your creative

The Data and the Creative Brief

Vague or non-descriptive briefing is the most common culprit to unsuccessful campaigns. Our creatives have had the most success with briefs that include at least:

• The audience profile
• Marketing challenges
• Campaign objective and KPIs
• Insights from previous campaigns (best/worst performing ads)
• Budget for the campaign
• Design and copy guidelines
• Creative hypotheses from previous campaigns
• Testing plan

Next, learn how our creative team uses actionable insights to design beautiful digital advertising.

Go beyond KPIs – Look at Behavioral Clues

When you analyze campaign performance through the lens of a specific objective your data can tell you much more than just how it is performing against that singular KPI. Take a look at how the audience behaves and base your creative decisions on the bigger picture. For example, while working with an app advertiser and analyzing what happened after the audience downloaded their app, from driving purchases within the app to repeat purchase behavior or lack thereof. We realized that while the app rose to the top of its category in terms of downloads, only 10% of the users completed in-app purchases. Our team the gathered data to produce specific creatives in order to drive purchases up in retargeting campaigns.

Beware the tradeoff between different KPIs

Look at your KPIs across the different stages in the funnel to decipher what they can tell you about your creative; for example, app install campaigns with high click-through-rates may not always turn into a high volume of installs. Use the data to make the right decisions.

Don’t make decisions based on the first data point but look at the context. If view-through is good (= your ad is interesting) but conversions are not there (= consumer is not convinced), iterate your creatives so that your offering is clearer. If your creative communicates your value proposition well, you are more likely to convert those clicks to installs. Combine eye-catching motion and a clear value proposition.

Create Seasonal Content

Another way to look at context with data is when the click-through-rate of high performing ads starts going down. In these cases, the best way to drive engagement and avoid ad fatigue is to create seasonally relevant content.

Relate to how your audience is feeling during the season (holidays, summer, fall, local celebrations, and events) and produce creatives that convey it. Creatives with seasonal elements are likely to beat that much-feared ad fatigue and improve clickthrough- rates compared to generic and static content.

Make Your Value Proposition Clear

Different industries call for different approaches when it comes to highlighting your value proposition, ie. why should a user download your app, buy your product, book your service, and so forth.

For example: gaming brands convert users better with actual gameplay videos compared to more branding-focused content. For brands in other industries, such as e-commerce or travel, we have seen that clear and concise copy describing the main value proposition or offering has driven better conversions than long and fuzzy texts.

Suggest the Action You’re Driving in the Creative

Use visual and verbal cues to encourage users to take action. In Carousel ads, your creatives should encourage users to swipe right to move to the next carousel card. In Instagram Stories, try adding a “swipe up” arrow or message to your video.

Asset Optimization: Create for a Variety of Ad Placements

To drive performance, consider diversifying your campaign creatives. Adapt assets to the variety of ad placements the Facebook family of apps offers – Facebook’s Create to Convert studies show that combining video with still assets within the same campaign leads to better performance for DR objectives and results in more conversions than video-only or static image-only campaigns.

According to Facebook, mixing and matching assets is key to engaging audiences and driving results.

Support and Combine Direct Response with Branding

Unless you are a category leader or very well known in your industry, chances are that your audience needs to be introduced and educated about your company and brand before they feel comfortable enough to purchase your service or product. Running direct response and brand video campaigns simultaneously for the same audience can nudge consumers to trust you and thus, convert.

Likewise, combining branding and DR tactics has shown positive results for some of our customers.

Personalize Creative with Technology

Adding a localized element to your ads will help them capture attention and stand out from the rest. Producing localized creatives manually is cumbersome and slow – there are solutions that automate localization at scale, all you need to do is have all the ad building blocks in a feed format.

Localization is particularly effective for retail, travel and education advertisers, or restaurant chains and other franchises. Any service which availability is tied to location, or products for which there is local inventory or availability data.

Build for Mobile Viewing – Always

Considering that ads have only couple of seconds to capture attention, you need to be interesting right to the bat. When driving action such as click-throughs and purchases, make your product the hero of the story and incorporate your brand identity early enough to build brand trust. Use engaging post copies, expressing yourself in the same language your ideal customers use. For video, consolidate your message to fifteen seconds or less on mobile.

Mobile Considerations:

• Remember Sound Off viewing:
  • Captions are key
  • Delight with sound design for those who do have sounds turned on
• Frame for mobile first / vertical
• Highlight key elements
• Create visual surprises
• Run with the shortest version that conveys your message
• The longer your video, the higher need for a narrative

Reflect Your Audience’s Realities in Your Ads

When designing content, you need to understand the mobile-first behavior many consumers are exhibiting:

• Consumers have higher expectations than ever for “right here, right now experiences”
• People are making on-the-spot decisions, can your creatives reflect that?
• People expect to receive products and services immediately, can they buy what is in the creative?
• People are increasingly making last minute plans
• The well-advised consumer: they will read reviews and research before purchasing.
• People expect to receive products and services immediately, can they buy what is in the creative?
• Can you incorporate reasons to trust and buy within your creative?

Marketing effectively to consumers means reflecting these realities back to them.

Create Consistent Design Experiences

Think about continuity and design all your touch points from ads to landing pages to convey a consistent aesthetic. If you run ads that differ dramatically from the next destination (such as your website), chances are that you might not drive the action you desire or lose people along the way. We’ve seen with our customers that design consistency correlates positively with engagement rates.

Place your price/discount in the top left corner for better performance

A considerable number of eComm and Retail customers have seen improvements in results when price/discount tags are placed on the top left corner of their image templates. This might be related to the common pattern followed by users' eyes when skimming through information blocks. This is a technique you can add to your testing framework in order to discover if it moves the needle for you.

Experiment to Learn, Plan to Test

If you’re first starting out in social video advertising or creating ads with for new formats like Collection or Instagram Stories, make a testing plan and assume you’ll be editing your creatives, especially videos, based on performance data. Elements to consider in your testing plan include alternative calls-to-action, different cuts and lengths, and copy versions. Only test one change at a time to determine what moves the needle. Read our ebook The Ultimate Framework for Creative Testing for more information.

Final Notes

With creative insights and best practices, it’s important to mention that they can only take you so far. Try to drill down and understand what these insights could mean for your brand, so you can apply them only when they fit your business and company.

If you want to go deeper into this subject, you can check our Actionable Creative Insights eBook by clicking the image below.