How to Drive Engagement & Results with Performance Creative: 4 Pillars for a Winning Strategy

When it comes to vying for consumers’ attention, the competition has never been more fierce.

According to Forbes, the average person sees between 6,000 and 10,000 ads per day. As the human brain filters out information that we don’t consider valuable, many of these advertisements are quickly forgotten.

Creating value for your customers is the key to standing out and building trust with them. The data you collect can show you what they’re interested in, their pain points, and what types of content they resonate with best.

When this data is used to shape the development of ad creative, it’s following a Performance Creative marketing strategy. Using this approach, marketers use data-driven customer feedback to determine which types of ads and placements are the most effective for driving engagement, allowing them to tweak their advertisements accordingly for better results.

Keep reading to learn the four pillars that make up a strong performance creative strategy:

1. Formatting and Placements

Diversifying your ad formats can help you to expand your reach by connecting with audiences who have different viewing behaviours and habits. Using a combination of asset types tends to work best, with mixed-format campaigns outperforming static-only by 82%.

Understanding your audiences’ viewing behaviours is key to choosing the right ad placements and formats that resonate with them. Continuing to monitor their engagement with different types of assets and tweaking your approach responsively is a great way to improve their effectiveness and drive engagement.

2. Messaging

An effective messaging strategy is a combination of serving up the right content, to the right audience, at the right time. But different types of messages will be more compelling at every stage of the purchase funnel.

For example, product benefits and education may be crucial during the awareness phase, while a testimonial can help with building credibility, and a promotion or discount can drive conversions. Testing out different types of messaging in your posts can help you to understand which messages will be most effective at each stage.

Diversifying your messaging can also help you to support motivators or barriers for your brand.

For example, a promotional post offering a 20% discount can be used to attract new customers, while leveraging benefit-driven partnered content with a digital creator could help your current followers picture themselves with your product in real life and lead to a purchase.

3. Creative Styles

Using a combination of visually distinct creative assets can not only help you unlock brand new audiences, it has been shown to increase efficiency by as much as 32%.

You could choose to use a combination of creative styles, including testimonial, lifestyle, and product-focused posts for your campaign to increase opportunities to catch users’ attention.

A format that tends to perform well is user-generated content (UGC). When brands partner with a specific content creator for sponsored content, it’s an immediate way to leverage the trust and influence they have with their particular audience in order to build credibility with users who prefer a more authentic content. This is also a way to experiment with how your audience engages with high vs. low-production videos and branded content.

Pay attention to which types of creative resonate with different segments of your audience to drive your desired action.

4. Ad Fatigue

Did you know that click-through rates diminish drastically after just four impressions of the same ad creative?

Creative loses efficacy with every exposure, making creative differentiation necessary to maximize ROI. You can keep your creative exciting and compelling for your audience by refreshing your campaigns and ad sets frequently to drive better performance.

Our team uses these four pillars to determine the effectiveness of ad creative and find ways it can be improved to drive incremental performance. You can think of each pillar as levers that you can pull individually and in combination with one another to progressively mature your creative mix and improve overall ad diversity over time.

If you’d like to test them out against your own ads, you can save this infographic to come back to.

Embed this on your site:

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And if you want some expert guidance from our in-house team on your performance creative strategy, contact Northern to get started.