Using data-driven creatives to enhance ad personalization

Studying your audience and generating data-driven creatives is not a new concept. In fact, it is probably a strategy which has existed for as long as marketing has. While previously marketing was about intuition, it now involves utilizing tools to identify trends and understand user behaviour. However, there is a critical gap in the marketing process – over 97% of programmatic creatives lack personalization for their target audience segment. In other words, once an ad has reached it’s intended demographic, the creatives are largely untailored towards them.

This is highly suboptimal, and marketers have stated that delivering more relevant communication is one of the most important factors in their data-driven marketing efforts. In order to make best use of their insights, businesses need to learn how to activate their data and generate personalized content for their audience.

Data-driven creatives enable optimization of marketing efforts to an unprecedented degree. Programmatic creatives have opened the door for marketers to engage with potential customers and tap into segments that were previously impenetrable.

In this blog, we will understand how data-driven creatives can solve this problem along with strategies to help you optimize your creative campaigns.

What is a data-driven creative?

A data-driven creative or programmatic creative is a way of leveraging customer insights with the help of artificial intelligence in order to create and execute personalized ads. These efforts have proven to generate higher conversion rates and maximise ROI for businesses.

By activating your data, you can cut through the noise and appeal to your audience by providing relevant ads. Data-driven creatives use customer insights to generate variants of ads and tailor creative campaigns depending on each user. For example, some data points that may enhance the appeal of your ads include audience demographics, customer journey stage, CRM data and more.

How to integrate data-driven creatives with your technology stack

By harnessing the power of your DSP and DMP data, you can generate countless ad variants that are tailored to your audience. Such ad technologies enable marketing teams to improve their efficiencies and campaign performance by building, testing, tailoring, and optimizing creatives at scale.

The two main tools used to implement data-driven creative campaigns are Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) and Creative Management Platforms (CMP). Both Dynamic Creative Optimization and Creative Management Platforms create opportunities to boost the impact of the creative.

Feeling overwhelmed with so many abbreviations? Don’t worry! We’ve got you covered from the very basics of ad personalization. You should check out our blog on Dynamic Creative Optimization if you are just beginning to explore ad personalization for your brand.

3 Strategies for Implementing Data-Driven Creatives

Using audience insights

One way of maximizing the impact of your creatives is by using audience insight to build out a creative concept. Using an audience insight tool (like Facebook’s Audience Insights), a creative developer can identify characteristics that relate to the target audience or sub-segments of audiences. These insights can lead to either new creative developed upfront and tested or new creative developed as you go with your campaign and seek to keep things fresh and continually searching for micro-optimization within audiences.

Next, you can implement A/B testing to identify what works. You can then take those insights to improve future creative development, or simply show the most effective creative more often.

Creating a content matrix

Another effective strategy is to make a content matrix. This is essentially a table consisting of your targeted audience and the data touch points you may have.

In a content matrix, you list out in the rows the defined audience segments that you have (or data on from your data management platform.) You then write in the columns all the places you may have a moment to deliver a message.

For some closed loops marketers who can track a full customer funnel, the data touchpoints may be the moments when someone may enter a different stage of the funnel (example: lead, page visitor or converted visitor). With these sections, you will now have intersecting areas where unique communication can be brainstormed by your steam so that your audience gets a highly relevant message.

Predictive Creatives

If you are not keen on creating an exhaustive planning grid in a content matrix, you can experiment with a less methodical (but resource-saving) approach for personalized messaging. One such alternative is a “predictive creative” strategy.

If your data management platform or DCO solution can track what audience segments see which creatives, you can build a model of what audience segments engage or respond already to a baseline creative. Based on the data, you may then choose to invest further in specific creative development for high reach, high response, or high-value targets determined by the model. As a result, you can use data to choose where to invest in further creative development.

Additional data-driven creative tactics

By implementing tactics to cause your creatives to resonate with your target audience you are guaranteed to see an improvement in conversions. Let us look at certain ways you can do so:

Product Retargeting

Advertisers may be interested in show explicitly what they know about a customer they are targeting, including what they were previously looking at or had added to their shopping cart. This form of data-driven creative is known as product retargeting.

By displaying such information, it generates recall in the mind of the consumer who may have got distracted or forgot to make their purchase.

Using Data Feeds

An interesting tactic is to incorporate data in the content you are displaying itself. Being creative and putting dynamic fields (such as time of the day, the temperature in the area, etc.) in relevant creatives might just pique the interest of your audience and make them engage with your ads.

The future of data-driven creatives

Data-driven creatives empower you to create personalized ads which target your customers throughout the marketing lifecycle. In order to create value and increase engagement for your customers, you need to not only provide relevant ads but also track them to see what works. 

By implementing data-driven creative, businesses can provide tailored solutions and increase customer loyalty. It is key to invest in such technology to provide an optimal experience for users as well as increase conversions.