Creatives as the key to success in Growth Marketing

Over the last 5 years, unlocking growth on Facebook ads has been more and more correlated to one factor: having amazing creatives. In the early 2010s, CPMs were cheap, advertising on social platforms was a much more manual process where constant optimizations of budget allocations were as important as building strong creatives. As Facebook’s algorithm got smarter and smarter, manual updates had a more limited impact. On the other end there are more and more creative formats to show your brand through different angles and your ads need to be relevant for each format (for example your Instagram story ad shouldn’t be a square image!). More broadly, it’s helpful to know which high-level strategies (like certain creative approaches or imagery) are convincing your customers, so that you can tailor your strategy accordingly.

With so many creative possibilities, it is essential to try to extract the most insights out of your campaigns as quickly as possible.

At Superbolt, our creatives come from the collaboration between our creative, marketing and data teams, who have built a two-level structure to gauge performance. We drive insights at both the macro account level and the micro ad level. Let’s take a look at each in turn:

You can think of macro testing as giving broader insights into the brand as a whole and their target consumer. Macro testing is about understanding the strategies that work best and which can then inform long-term decisions such as website content or ad shoots.

For macro testing, we usually want to test what works best among different categories: for example, which creative approach, what type of imagery, or which product resonates and converts best. Using our data platform, we “tag” all different ads with labels that allow us to see - across ad sets and campaigns - what works best.

With this cross-campaign data, we can see which strategies are successful and which have potential to scale.

We generally divide our creative strategies into prospecting and retargeting. Prospecting is higher in the funnel, with most approaches being about brand awareness, whereas in Retargeting we generally explore specific value propositions.

For example, for one of our clients, this macro-level testing allowed us to see that of all prospecting approaches, ads that showed the Press/Testimonials of the product performed best, whereas Practical Use creatives did not perform well. This testing also highlighted a large opportunity to expand our Brand Ethos creatives.

In contrast, micro testing is what most people have in mind when they think about A/B or multi-variable testing in marketing. It’s about how you apply higher-level learnings and creative expertise at the level that reaches the consumer by testing several different ad formats, placements, visuals, and copy options. The goal is to iterate and optimize campaigns on a daily basis to get the best ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) possible.

The key to acquiring learnings you can count on is to keep things simple and test a minimum of variables at a time using a clear testing structure. Once you have a winner, you can iterate on new combinations - in this typical test example, we tried a couple of visual and copy options the first round, and then stacked the past winner against new iterations for the second round.

The potential for innovation and scaling is virtually endless with the various combinations, visuals, copy options, and even themes available.

Coupled with a solid marketing strategy, data-driven creatives can make all the difference in your growth.