Content with benefits
With Valentine’s Day here, it’s time to fall in love with creative testing. Oh yes!
Good creative has always played a big part in how we connect with customers on social. But in the last decade, brand advertisers on social media have been guilty of not focussing enough on paid creative output. Instead, relying too much on tools and data. The old key to success was dividing your audiences into segmented groups and using targeting to get conversions. Creativity has taken on new importance.
A consequence of legacy privacy initiatives from Apple (and the European Cookie Directive) has meant a shift of focus. Meta’s connection planning director Peter Buckley suggests “creative is your targeting” and he’s bang on the money.
Forget targeting, think creative
Kick off the new quarter by creating a stringent framework for creative testing. It should be the cornerstone of your paid social strategy. We all know that creative has to be authentic or slick, or a combination of both. Enlisting the help of creators can make a huge difference to success.
Peter also talked about a compelling case study - a large retailer recently ran two promotional campaigns. Everything was identical: same targeting, same budget, same optimisation, same timing, same placements, same offer. The only difference? The creative. One campaign used standard promotion creative. The other used creator content. The result? 95% of the audience reached by the creator campaign were new. Yes, 95% new people - just from changing the creative. This proves that it’s increasingly your creative, not your targeting, that determines who you reach.
But content also has to be efficient and intelligent in helping you reach your goals. As a full-service social agency, this is how we create content with our clients every day. With an in-house studio team and expertise in distribution, we have a holistic view of the process. There are countless things that can enhance how people interact with your paid content. From UGC video reviews to behavioural science, quotes and third-party coverage, instead of making creative changes piecemeal and reactively, you need the plan to benefit your team, and help your brand to make money.
The road to success
A creative testing framework enables you to analyse the current performance of advertising creative, with a roadmap or testing framework that allows you to keep on iterating content as part of a continuous process, taking actionable insight from the current live ads and formulating new creatives to help improve CTRs and manage creative fatigue. Meta reports that 56% of a brand’s sales lift is due to the quality of ad creative, and this has likely only become more significant as targeting has become more challenging - it’s an area worth investing in.
Being fastidious with your testing will allow you to identify what actually resonates with your audience by comparing different combinations of elements and seeing what performs best, and where. There are subtle differences between split testing and A/B testing, so it’s important that brand and marketing teams collaborate with social experts to land on the approach that will work best for the business. In the right hands, it cannot help but spark exciting new ideas.
Taking a look from a more holistic brand perspective also makes sense. It is important for content to tell your brand story and showcase your distinctive brand assets. Not only does good creative improve click-through rates, but Meta’s ad auction prefers good creative, reducing the advertising auction cost and lowering CPM.
Show your brand some love
The beauty of creative testing is that it doesn’t just help you land your message in the best way today. It is a constant teacher that, over time, will help you define the look, feel and purpose of your brand in a way that will help cement you as the most coherent, natural, blueprint brand in customers’ minds.
Ultimately, creative is THE most influential aspect that connects who you are, what you do and why you do it, with your target audience. It’s key at every stage, whether it’s awareness, consideration or nudging sales - storytelling or documenting, changing perceptions or driving change. It’s already happening, but 2025 will see an even bigger emphasis put on testing and the continual evolution of creative approach. Embrace ongoing experimentation, take more creative risks and always be open to learning as much from the good as the bad – or risk leaving money on the table.
We’d love to chat more about showing some love to your creative output, get in touch.
Bryn Foweather
