Some business processes can be more intuitive when fewer tools are involved—but that’s not the case when issues in creative workflows are at play. As these problems rarely resolve by themselves, creative automation tools may be the solution you’re looking for. Without creative automation, the consequences of poor creative processes may go beyond mere bottlenecks, spilling into a loss of market share and weakened competitiveness.
Not sure what creative automation is? Here’s a quick refresher:
Creative automation uses technology to speed up content creation. It helps you automate the production, personalization, and updating of your creative assets to reduce repetitive tasks and increase productivity.
But how do you know if creative automation tools are what you need?
If you’re…
- Struggling to scale creative assets to meet demand
- Having to create more personalized assets
- Needing to create more using fewer resources
- Dealing with brand inconsistencies across channels
- Facing slow turnaround times
Then creative automation may be the missing piece to your creative puzzle.
Let’s unpack these issues further to see if they resonate with your business.
1. Struggling to scale creative assets to meet demand
Is keeping up with the increased need to scale creative assets an issue for your business? You’re not alone. Adobe revealed that 89% of senior executives agree that the demand for content has increased significantly. And despite this, only 28% of practitioners consider themselves able to deliver as expected.
The main reason is the rise of cohesive omnichannel customer journeys, which is now the norm and fully expected by customers. Businesses need to delight customers across a wide range of channels if they’re chasing conversions: social media, website, apps, search, as well as offline. Keeping users engaged, therefore, requires you to create and distribute assets in various formats and sizes at scale. And if you struggle to do so, you risk losing a large portion of market interest.
2. Having to create more personalized assets
Crafting personalized creative assets has become increasingly laborious—even for the most experienced creative professionals. The rapid, ongoing data collection cycles, segmentation, multi-version draft creation, testing, distribution, and optimization can be tiring. Especially when considering the many sides of customer-centric data: preferences, demographics, behavior, and even real-time interactions. But with customers’ shortening attention spans, solid expectations for consistent personalization, and competitors’ widening reach, your business has no choice but to prioritize customer-centric assets—especially when successful personalization efforts can bring about a 250% increase in conversion rates.
3. Needing to create more using fewer resources
Another sign of needing creative automation is being expected to create the same amount of assets—or more—using limited resources. Many businesses are trying to make significant strides with their advertising and marketing initiatives. But if ongoing cuts in marketing budgets are limiting you, there’s only so much you can do before you hit the ceiling of creative asset production head-on—at least without compromising quality.
“CMOs are living in an era of less. In the four years preceding the pandemic, average marketing budgets were 11% of overall revenue. In the four years since, they’ve dropped to an anemic 8.2%.”
— Ewan McIntyre, VP Analyst and Chief of Research at Gartner Marketing Practice
4. Dealing with brand inconsistencies across channels
As mentioned, customers expect to see your brand in many places for an omnichannel customer journey. But if you can’t advertise your brand using a united front, you may do your brand more harm than good. Promoting inconsistent or conflicting brand colors, logos, and voice and tone affects your company’s credibility and recognizability across touchpoints. Often, this challenge is brought on by a lack of centralized systems for brand assets.
Without a single source of truth for all branded assets, contributors may end up with off-brand outputs that disrupt the customer journey. And since only 46% of marketers somewhat agree that they provide customers with a consistent experience across their engagement journey, staying ahead of the competition may be as simple as sticking to your brand guidelines and moving as one.
5. Facing slow turnaround times
If creating assets takes too long, you may be dealing with persistent delays and overdue deadlines. Even worse, you may end up deploying a creative asset only to realize it’s misaligned with changing market dynamics by the time of implementation.
More often than not, the culprits of these drawn-out creative processes are the manual aspects of asset creation—resizing, format adjustments, and feedback approvals. In fact, 74% of CMOs think creative teams spend too much time on automatable menial tasks like asset adaptation. A lack of integrated creative workflows and a limited tech stack is what can further aggravate this issue, with operational silos impacting creatives’ ability to share, update, and finalize assets in due time.
How creative automation helps
Automated creative optimization tools like Creatopy can help you scale branded and personalized assets faster and with fewer resources, keeping the dire consequences of not doing so at bay. Read more on the seven Creatopy capabilities that enable creative automation.
Here’s how creative automation platforms can help you tackle these five challenges head-on:
- Scale creative assets to meet demand: Creative automation takes over the tedious process of resizing and reformatting creative assets for different channels. You can use it to create hundreds of variations and meet the rising demand for content without increasing your headcount.
- Create more personalized assets: Creative automation tools help you launch dynamic creative assets powered by timely customer data. Using these, you can create compelling assets for each target group, resulting in personalized experiences that deliver the right messaging, localized approaches, and language tweaks to drive conversions.
- Produce more using fewer resources: Creative automation allows you to delegate creating assets to non-designers using templates. For example, Creatopy enables cross-functional employees from marketing and HR to chime in and make ads while staying true to their business’s brand elements. See how Creatopy can help you achieve this.
- Make your brand consistent across channels: Creative automation tools can make Brand Kits a core part of the creative process. This adheres your assets to brand guidelines, ensuring you use the right colors, logos, and stylistic elements to keep your visuals coherent.
- Speed up turnaround times: Creative automation links all your creative tools using integrations while limiting the time-consuming, manual tasks typically associated with creating an omnichannel campaign. This helps you finalize assets quickly to stay ahead of looming deadlines.
Get started with creative automation
Creative automation platforms like Creatopy are designed with these challenges in mind. Creatopy uses generative AI and automation to help you build, manage, and scale branded ad creatives with one click of a button. Not only this, but it breaks down barriers to ad creation by empowering non-designers to jump in and create ads. As a result, Creatopy helps you remove design constraints, speed up production, and make your brand well-known across channels with ease. Learn all about Creatopy’s features here.