According to research from Google Media Lab, 70% of campaign performance comes down to creative, this means organisations that take a data-driven mindset to the execution of their creative will not only create better ad experiences and creative, but also a competitive advantage over competitors and develop their organisation’s Digital Marketing Maturity.
What is Data-driven Creative?
As a subset of Data-driven Marketing, Data-driven Creative (or DDC) leverages customer insights to personalise an ad creative’s look and feel for different customer segments and deliver more effective digital advertising campaigns.
How does Data-driven Creative work?
Data-driven Creative uses a Dynamic Creative ad shell to display different asset elements based on a Dynamic Feed, serving a personalised ad creative in the programmatic or media buy.
Data is then collected, and over time, asset elements that are served as part of ads are then optimised based on what achieves the best performance. This process is continuously fuelled by the media rules and the audience strategy you select, allowing data to drive personalisation for your campaigns and creative ongoing.
Data-driven Creative Workflow
Why use Data-driven Creative?
- Creative development efficiency - By designing and developing one DDC ad shell for your campaign, it allows you to scale your creative and use the Google Marketing Platform tools to rotate content in your ad based on the rules and audience strategy you select, in real-time. This can save countless hours in creative execution, campaign set up, ongoing management and reporting.
- Trafficking efficiency - By serving the right creative to the right person at the right time, this ensures maximum efficiency of your media budget. With growing expectations of customers for personalised experiences, this efficiency can also enhance and drive strong customer relationships and loyalty.
- Higher conversions - According to research by Google, 90% of leading marketers say personalisation significantly contributes to business profitability. By providing personalised ads to people who are displaying signals they are ready to purchase or convert, you will maximise the conversions from your media spend.
- Enhanced Customer relationships - According to the Salesforce ‘State of the Connected Customer’ Report, 80% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products or services. DDC allows you to do this at scale by efficiently providing the personalised experiences your customers expect through your ad creative.
- Increased loyalty - Through the scalable personalisation of Data-driven Creative, you’re able to create a more seamless, frictionless experience across the customer lifecycle, leading to happier customers and increased loyalty for your brand.
- Leverage your own first-party data to create better performance - according to 2017 research from McKinsey, "organisations that leverage their customer behavior data to generate insights outperform peers by 85% in sales growth and more than 25 percent in gross margin." The latest research from Boston Consulting Group also backs this up with "77% of connected brands have their first-party data mostly or fully embedded in their marketing campaigns."
- Create more relevant experiences - additional research from the Boston Consulting Group has identified that "more than half of the brands (56%) (in APAC)...(said) they’re 'below average', 'average,' or 'average at best' at using their first-party data". With only 5% of brands believing they are using data to create more relevant experiences for their customers, this further reinforces Data-driven Creative as a major opportunity for brands to differentiate and create more personalised brand interactions than competitors. We explore this in more detail in our Chow Sang Sang case study.
6 steps to create Data-driven Creative in Google Studio
- Review initial data and insights - what does your current analytics tell you about your audience and their interactions with your brand or creatives? By gathering insights across all data signals, you will better inform your campaign and creatives from the outset.
- Develop a digital brief and campaign timeline - building a detailed, high quality brief and timeline at the beginning of the process allows you to consider all options your customer could take along the journey and plan for personalised content to inform your feed. Importantly, campaign KPIs and how they will be measured in your account(s) will also be determined in this step.
- Design your Dynamic Creative template (in Google Web Designer) - By building a Dynamic Creative template to populate your Data-driven Creative, you can realise significant time efficiencies for your creative development, only requiring the development one dynamic creative shell in a tool such as Google Web Designer, compared to designing and trafficking multiple time consuming variations. If you are using Google Web Designer, there is a built in integration to Studio and the Google Marketing Platform.
- Set up your dynamic rules, feed and data signals in Studio - one of the most important steps in the process, implement the audience strategy and rules that your Data-driven Creative will run on in-market, including the different elements that will display in your placements, based on your feed. This can be set up and managed in Studio ongoing.
- Launch & traffic your creative in Campaign Manager 360 - set up your campaign(s) in Campaign Manager 360 (DV360) based on your trafficking plan and begin trafficking prospects to your ad placements.
- Test, learn and optimise - take a methodical, scientific approach to your campaigns, test and update different elements within your feed to drive maximum results from from your Dynamic Creative template.
For support, consultation or more information on Data-driven Creative strategy and implementation, please get in touch with the FiveStones team in your local region today.