In today’s overcrowded marketing landscape, rich media creatives have become an essential component of successful digital marketing strategies. It’s no longer enough for brands to rely on broad campaigns—as clever as they may be—to attract, convert, and retain customers.
In order to inspire meaningful interaction across all platforms, digital marketers must make their customers feel recognized and understood, and that requires hyper-personalized ad content that’s engaging and data-informed.
In other words, if you’re not leveraging dynamic, targeted creatives to make marketing assets with intention—and customizing your campaigns according to consumer behavior, location, and other key trends—you’ll most likely get left in the dust.
Leveraging the Power of Data-Driven Creatives
According to a report from Instapage, lack of content relevancy generates 83% lower response rates in the average marketing campaign. At the same time, marketers say they see an average increase of 20% in sales when using personalized experiences. It’s easy to understand why this is true, as consumers are bombarded with advertising on virtually every digital channel they visit. The more aligned an ad is to their goals and interests, the more likely they are to respond to it.
But data-driven creatives do more than simply cut through the noise of information overload. From a psychological standpoint, studies show that personalized content makes customers feel more in control of their journey, which naturally drives engagement. Data-informed ads also increase brand loyalty by consistently providing customers with tailored experiences they know they will benefit from.
In fact, most consumers have come to expect a high level of personalization when interacting with brands, which is why companies that use data to drive their creative marketing campaigns see increased return on investment and faster time to revenue. If a customer doesn’t feel like they’re being treated as an individual or have a personal connection to your brand, they’ll look to your competitors to find an experience in which they do.
Building creatives based on data that’s shared across teams can also help boost business alignment. A recent study revealed that a whopping 80% of content created by marketing goes unused by sales. That’s a staggering statistic when you consider all the money and man hours wasted on untapped materials.
Diving Into Dynamic Creatives
Dynamic creatives are incredibly valuable because they optimize ROI automatically by serving relevant content to individual customers. Thanks to advancements in data and targeting, along with today’s user-friendly creative management platforms (CMPs), it’s simple to generate these high-performing creatives at scale.
Geo-targeted campaigns, for example, are more important than ever in a post-COVID world. The shutdowns necessitated by the pandemic have made hyper-local messaging the norm, and now that consumers know they can do almost everything from home, they expect the options to be at their fingertips. In order to successfully deliver this relevant content to individual iPhones, tablets, and other personal devices, brands must have a deep, granular understanding of their audience and target customers on a geographic, rather than solely demographic, level.
And with a CMP, you can literally create hundreds of ad variations based on user location—without having to configure each version individually. Whether the intent is to advertise an area event or suggest products based on local tastes, geo-targeted creatives allow you to serve hyper-relevant content to your audience wherever they are. And the best part is, the more campaigns you run in various areas, the more data you can collect to use in the optimization of future creatives.
Playing the Game with Interactive Creatives
Interactive creatives give users the opportunity to physically interact with brands in an instantly immersive and engaging manner. Rather than passively observe a campaign’s message, customers are invited to become a part of it, which can have a direct impact on their likelihood to convert.
We’ve seen interactive ads explode in recent years, particularly in the wake of the pandemic. In addition to increasing engagement and building brand awareness, interactive creatives allow you to gather tons and tons of valuable user data. Highly detailed user data, such as the information you can mine from consumer surveys and quizzes, as well as time-spent data and other key behavioral insights.
Playable creatives, for example, can be extremely data-rich because they have so many interactive elements. They can collect info that can be used to enhance creative performance and optimize future campaigns, such as how long a user interacted with the ad or what objects they most frequently engaged with. This is no doubt why more than half of all app developers in the US and UK employ playable ads in their app release, and why 28% of US agency professionals find playables to be the most effective in-app ad format.
To Sum It Up...
In conclusion, leveraging dynamic, data-driven creatives in your marketing strategy is a must if you want to keep up with the competition.
Mass-appeal is a thing of the past—today’s customers want authentic and relatable messaging that’s tailored to them across all devices, locations, interests, and experiences.
There’s no shortage of tools available to help marketers create this content at scale, which is why brands must learn how to deliver these hyper-targeted creatives in order to stand out from the crowd.