Creative Automation for Lower-Funnel Assets

Preparing for Peak Season: The Evolving Role of Creative in Growth Marketing

As the holiday season approaches, growth marketers are preparing for a period of heightened activity. While e-commerce businesses increasingly rely on social commerce and digital advertising, a significant portion of consumers – 62%, as reported by Celtra – intend to shop through a combination of online and brick-and-mortar channels.

The Challenge of Creative Demand

The current marketplace is highly competitive. Effective digital marketing necessitates a substantial volume of creative assets that consistently reflect brand identity. Producing these assets rapidly, without sacrificing brand integrity or compelling storytelling, presents a significant hurdle.

Despite the proliferation of marketing channels, many creative production processes remain unchanged for decades. Marketing’s demand for creative content is constantly increasing, requiring more assets each quarter.

The Importance of Brand Impression

Every paid advertisement also functions as a brand impression, offering an opportunity to differentiate oneself within the market. Indeed, paid impressions frequently represent the sole chance to influence potential customers. Consequently, the quality of creative – encompassing brand representation, design, and messaging – is paramount. Success in growth marketing, encompassing traffic generation, subscriber acquisition, direct-to-consumer strategies, A/B testing, and ultimately, revenue, is fundamentally dependent on compelling creative.

The Creative Gap and its Impact

Lower-funnel marketing materials often lack the branding sophistication found in awareness campaigns, and are frequently uninspired. Teams are struggling to meet the demands of an expanding channel landscape, resulting in a decline in creative quality. Brands often lack the resources to prioritize design and storytelling at scale.

Currently, many creative automation solutions lack the capacity to deliver high-quality, brand-focused creative at the necessary scale. This disparity creates a creative gap, where content and asset requirements grow rapidly while team resources and budgets remain static or diminish.

Rethinking Workflows and Investment

There is no single technological solution to overcome this challenge. Simply purchasing creative technology will not bridge the gap. A fundamental reassessment of workflows and team collaboration is essential. Investing in tools designed for both scalability and brand governance is crucial for elevating growth marketing creative.

Bridging the Gap Between Awareness and Performance

Historically, brands have invested heavily in building brand equity through awareness campaigns, but have not extended the same level of investment to performance marketing. Marketing tools have mirrored this division, offering sophisticated creative options for upper-funnel activities, while lower-funnel tools typically support only basic elements like logos and product images.

The Impact of Brand Consistency on ROAS

This inconsistency negatively impacts performance. Large-scale e-commerce brands have experienced ROAS increases of up to 50% when testing enhanced performance creative against standard product advertisements. These richer, branded lower-funnel assets were created using creative automation software.

Beyond revenue gains, automating digital marketing assets also delivers cost and time savings. One international enterprise brand achieved a 48% reduction in time-to-market and a 55% reduction in costs by leveraging creative automation for a campaign launched across ten markets.

Implementing Automation: A Change Management Process

Successfully integrating automation into creative workflows requires careful change management within the organization. Several initiatives should be undertaken concurrently:

• Shifting the creative production strategy to prioritize a design-first, modular approach.
• Carefully planning the activation and technology implementation with stakeholders from design, creative, and marketing teams.
• Establishing an automated testing framework to generate actionable insights.

The Power of a Modular Approach

A modular approach utilizes a digital ad design system based on templates divided into independent, modifiable components. In growth marketing, this means developing brand templates tailored to specific performance-marketing use cases, such as re-marketing, promotions, and audience-specific campaigns.

During the template creation phase, define which elements will be dynamic – headlines, CTAs, product images, and pricing, for example. Connect these templates to product catalogs to generate lower-funnel campaign assets that deliver rich, on-brand experiences.

Fostering Collaboration and Communication

Automated creative production necessitates increased collaboration between media and creative teams, marketing and design, and writers, photo editors, and campaign managers. A phased activation plan, with key stakeholders from each team acting as implementation champions, is recommended.

Encourage close collaboration between creatives and growth marketers to ensure that designer-created templates align with performance marketing needs. Empower growth teams to make certain changes independently, such as updating messaging in content feeds, without requiring extensive creative briefs or re-trafficking of assets.

Maintain open communication between growth and creative departments, allowing designers to analyze campaign performance data and refine future designs accordingly.

Leveraging Automation for A/B Testing

Once implemented, teams can utilize automation to streamline A/B testing. A modular approach allows for easy duplication and modification of existing templates to test variations in lower-funnel creative. Limited production capacity is often a major obstacle to comprehensive testing, a challenge that automation can resolve.

By automating versioning, you can test granular elements like messaging, subcopy, CTAs, models, poses, and product shots in diverse design layouts.

The Shift to Brand-Centric Growth Marketing

Historically, growth marketing has placed less emphasis on visual storytelling, relying instead on advanced optimization and targeting capabilities. However, evolving privacy regulations are poised to change this dynamic. As reliance on third-party data diminishes, marketers must return to a brand-centric approach.

A Dynata survey of 1,000 U.S. shoppers in Q1 revealed that 85% are more likely to trust brands with high-quality, well-designed advertisements. Consumers do not differentiate between large-scale brand campaigns and everyday social ads; they will engage and convert if lower-funnel creative reflects the best your brand has to offer.