How Creative Variety Unlocks Powerful Marketing Opportunities

Variety is said to be the spice of life. In a marketing context, this also rings true. Having a high volume of creative variety is one of the best ways to spice up your campaigns. 

In addition to helping showcase your full range of products and better connect with audiences through personalization and localization; creative variety opens the door to a number of powerful opportunities that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. 

In this article, I want to highlight three of these: (1) testing and learning from different creative concepts, (2) stronger omnichannel campaigns, and (3) avoiding creative fatigue.  

Let’s dive in.

1. Test & learn from different creative concepts

How do you determine the best approach to take with your ad creative? What combination of visuals and messaging is going to resonate best with your audience and deliver the strongest performance?

Audience information, past campaign data, and platform best practices are just some of the factors that you’ll likely turn to in order to inform these decisions. But theory will only take you so far. Your creative has to be live and running to get a proper picture of how it will perform. 

This makes it risky to put all of your eggs in one basket. If you go all-in on one creative concept, it might fall flat, leaving you in a tough spot. Or maybe it’s delivering decent results, but if you were to only tweak the copy slightly, you could see a significant performance boost. 

To give yourself the best chance of maximizing performance, you need to test a variety of creative concepts.

There are many ways to go about this. For example, you might want to do some simple A/B testing to see what call to action (CTA) yields the best results. Or, in the case of the Heinz examples above, the structure of the creative remains consistent; however, each concept features different visuals and copy. Another option is to diversify things further by testing a set of concepts that each have a unique visual approach. The level of variation will depend on the type of campaign that you’re running, and the objectives you’re looking to achieve.

Turn insights into action

Testing different creative concepts will provide you with valuable data, helping you identify what your audience resonates with. Use these insights to refine your creative going forward. This should be a continuous process. Test and refine. Test and refine. As you do this, your creative will become more and more optimized, leading to a better return on ad spend (ROAS). 

2. Stronger omnichannel campaigns

When ‌running omnichannel campaigns, it’s essential that different creative variations are built for each platform. We call these variations platform-optimized creative. When you have these platform-optimized creative variations, it enables you to better connect with audiences at different touchpoints across the digital purchase funnel.

Each platform – whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Amazon, Pinterest, or Snapchat – has a unique set of creative best practices that need to be adhered to if you’re looking to maximize performance.

The variations between platforms range from subtle formating differences through to more obvious visual techniques that tailor the creative for the platform. You can see this in the Clarins example above. For example, in the TikTok creative, the ad copy is approached in a different way to the others. It uses a platform-native font to match the style of text in organic TikTok content. In the Pinterest example, a border is used in the video to add texture – a technique that has been identified to work effectively on the platform. 

Prioritize platform-optimization

It can be tempting to take a shortcut by skipping these optimizations and using the same creative across multiple platforms. This often results from marketing teams having insufficient production capacity or capabilities. 

However, the power of optimized creative shouldn’t be underestimated. Make this a priority. You never know how much performance your campaigns could be leaking due to your creative being unoptimized. 

3. Avoiding creative fatigue

Creative fatigue – the decline in ad performance that occurs when audiences are repeatedly exposed to the same creative – is one of the major challenges being faced by today’s marketers. 

The shelf-life of ad creative has become shorter and shorter over the past few years. Audiences are now accustomed to being presented with endless feeds of new content. Ads that outstay their welcome will be punished with massive drop-offs in performance. 

There are two main ways to counteract creative fatigue. The first is to give yourself a continuous supply of fresh assets by producing creative in an always-on manner. The second, and the one that is relevant to the topic of this article, is by running a high variety of creative.

The more creative variety you have, the less exposure audiences get to any one individual asset. This means audiences are likely to stay engaged for longer as they aren’t viewing the same thing over and over again. 

In this case, it’s best if your variations aren’t too subtle. If you only make minor changes, audiences aren’t likely to register the fact that it is a new piece of creative.

Shuttlerock makes it easy to get all the creative variety you need

Each of the opportunities discussed in this article can make all the difference in elevating the performance of your ad campaigns across digital. This is why it’s essential to be able to produce creative in high variety. 

Shuttlerock can help you do exactly that. Our Creative as a Service (CaaS) solution is set up in a way that enables marketing teams to quickly and easily produce creative content in high volume and variety. If you would like to learn more, please feel free to request a demo or get in touch with a representative in your area.