Digital Marketing Insider (171): 7-5-24

Howdy Digital Marketing Insiders!

Welcome to another edition of our insightful Friday newsletter, where we bring you the latest in digital marketing strategies straight from the experts at our agency.

This week, we're excited to feature a groundbreaking new piece on our blog. Dennis Zechman, our seasoned Creative Director, lifts the veil in his blog: "What Is Performance Creative? & How it Transforms Digital Marketing Strategies."

Dennis packs the blog with valuable insights and practical tips that promise to revolutionize your digital marketing approach.

Dennis dives deep into the world of performance creative, a data-driven strategy that combines creativity, data, and testing to optimize your marketing efforts. He reveals how this innovative approach can enhance your advertising, engage your audience more effectively, and boost your campaign's overall impact.

Whether you're a digital marketing novice or a seasoned pro, Dennis's guide offers actionable strategies and tips that can reshape your approach to digital marketing. Don't miss this chance to gain a competitive edge in your campaigns!

Join us as we delve into the intersection of data analysis, creativity, and strategic testing. Let's dive in and uncover the transformative strategies that await you!

Stay tuned for more updates, insights, and expert advice to fuel your digital marketing journey. Here's to unlocking new possibilities together! 🌟

What Is Performance Creative? & How it Transforms Digital Marketing Strategies

Performance creative has emerged as a key component in digital marketing, bringing a fresh perspective to how we approach advertising and test creative. It relies on in-depth data analysis to inform creative decisions, employs a rigorous creative testing framework to identify winning ads, and scales the successful campaigns to maximize impact. This approach, which combines creativity, data, and testing provides a more nuanced and effective way of reaching and engaging with audiences in the digital space.

What is performance creative?

At its core, performance creative is a data-driven strategy that leverages a variety of techniques and methodologies. It's not just UGC ads, testing ad colors, or incorporating CTA buttons. It’s that and so much more, including:

• Exploring different ad formats

• Scaling winning ads

• Crafting converting landing pages

• Penning benefit-driven copy

Beyond that, there are many directions to incorporate while concepting and designing ads to help grab the users attention:

• Customer stories, reviews, and testimonials

• Problem / solution or before / after visuals

• Visual cues like arrows or pointing fingers

• Bold and unexpected visuals or expressions

• Checklists

• Hand-drawn visuals or hand-written notes

• State-specific copy and/or visuals

• Text heavy ads

As noted in an article by MarketingDoctor, these varied inputs provide valuable insights that can be harnessed to measure and optimize performance.

Data and creativity: the new power couple

While there are plenty of techniques that help determine creative approaches — the key to success is learning from and leveraging data. It’s important to have a team that can seamlessly blend data analysis with creative thinking.

Enter creative strategists who have the ability to dissect performance data, formulate hypotheses, and craft strategies and briefs that yield success. Highlighting a crucial insight from MotionApp, successful creative strategists integrate data-driven decision-making with innovative creative processes, ensuring that every campaign is both artistically compelling and strategically grounded. These strategists collaborate closely with paid media teams to make decisions that are both data-informed and beneficial to the account.

The intersection of creativity and data analysis is pivotal to the success of performance creative. The ability to use data to guide creative decisions ensures that every ad  is underpinned by purposeful insights. It's this unique fusion of data and creativity that distinguishes performance creative from other digital marketing strategies.

How to Get Started with Performance Creative Marketing

Embarking on a performance creative marketing strategy involves a blend of creativity, data analysis, and continuous optimization. Here are some steps to get you started:

1. Setting Up

The initial phase of performance creative marketing involves thorough research and clear objective-setting. Start by defining what you hope to achieve with your campaign, such as increasing website traffic by 20% or boosting lead generation by 30%. These specific, measurable goals will guide the direction of your creative efforts and help you monitor progress effectively. It's also crucial to gather relevant data that not only ensures these goals are attainable but also reveals what your target audience is looking for. This data will form the foundation of your strategy, enabling you to tailor your creative assets to meet the audience's needs and preferences.

2. Tracking

To effectively measure the success of your performance creative marketing efforts, you need to set up the right metrics and tracking systems from the start. Determine which key performance indicators (KPIs) such as conversion rates or engagement levels, will help you gauge the success of your campaigns. Utilize tools like Google Analytics to set up real-time dashboards that provide insights into how your ads are performing. This setup is crucial for understanding the impact of your creative decisions and making informed adjustments.

3. Develop a Creative Brief

Creating a comprehensive creative brief is essential for aligning your team's efforts with your marketing objectives. The brief should include detailed audience personas, key messages, and the desired actions you want your audience to take. This document will serve as a guideline for your creative team, ensuring that every piece of creative is strategically designed to resonate with your target demographic and drive the campaign’s goals. Include both the rational and emotional appeals that the creative should evoke, ensuring that all outputs are cohesive and effective.

4. Test Creative

So how do you ensure that creative strategists get conclusive and actionable data? By building out a methodical creative testing framework.

To read the rest of this article and other great ones like it, go check out our WebMechanix Blog. See you there!

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