Creative teams are under a lot of pressure. On top of coming up with new ideas for campaigns, they also need to conduct the production process and deliver on time. Often with limited resources.
As a result, scaling visual content creation has become a growing issue. Creative variety is essential in advertising, but how do you scale production to meet demand?
Through creative automation.
1. What is creative automation?
2. What are the major benefits of creative automation?
3. How do creative automation tools work?
1. What Is Creative Automation?
Creative automation technology focuses on reducing repetitive tasks when creating marketing assets and helps teams scale campaigns in the most efficient way. They spend less time on manual work and deliver a high volume of visuals in a short amount of time.
This process allows you to scale visual content production without sacrificing brand consistency and its visual identity, personalization, and quality.
This way, you can make space for more creative ideas while the production itself is handled by technology. It’s the key to coming up with memorable campaigns that are on-brand and getting noticed.
2. What Are The Major Benefits of Creative Automation?
According to Hubspot, marketers who are successful in their efforts are 46% more likely to use automation compared to those with ineffective strategies.
That’s mainly because, thanks to creative automation software, marketing teams can tap into creative variety and meet their customers wherever they are.
But there’s more to it than that. Let’s break down the benefits of this technology:
2.1. Ensure faster production
Creative automation allows marketers to shorten the time it takes to get campaigns ready.
It’s especially important when deadlines are pressing, demand is high, the resources remain limited, or you need to respond to a particular market event or adapt to a new context.
Even if you have a single campaign running, you still need to take advantage of creative variety to attract your target audience with the right combination of imagery and message.
Instead of spending way too much time creating tens of design iterations manually, you can use an ad design automation platform such as Creatopy to speed up production and be done in minutes.
Probiotic soft drinks company Sorted said that using Creatopy amplified their design capabilities 5x. What would have otherwise taken two weeks to do now takes about 2-3 hours.
2.2. Maintain brand consistency
Brand consistency helps you build trust and encourage recognition by ensuring your materials are aligned with your brand identity.
When you produce a lot of visual content, using your brand assets to maintain a cohesive representation is vital, especially if you’re running campaigns across different markets or channels.
Thanks to automation tools like Creatopy’s Feed Ad Builder, you can do this without the repetitive work, and the materials will require minor variations in terms of size, format, text, and language. Moreover, your team won’t need to go through every asset and change each element manually.
2.3. Scale your work
Imagine your marketing team has five people—a social media manager, a PPC specialist, an email expert, a content marketing manager, and a graphic designer. Christmas is just around the corner, and you know there’s going to be a lot of work for the upcoming campaigns.
So naturally, you start thinking about how you and your team can juggle this period without working extra hours and making sure you’ll finish your campaigns on time without new hires.
The smart thing to do is to use creative automation for those repetitive tasks that take so much of your team’s time. That way, you can scale your work without requiring more resources.
Almost all creative automation tools, including Creatopy, have resize functionalities that help you multiply ad designs instantly. Your team only needs to create one or a few master designs, which they can resize on various dimensions to cover all the platforms in your advertising strategy.
For major changes, you can bulk edit all creatives and save a lot of time and resources.
However, true ad production automation comes through batch creation via CSV. All you need is a file with design information to create high volumes of ad variations within minutes. But we’ll discuss this in more detail later and see how our Feed Ad Builder works.
2.4. Personalize campaigns
When running campaigns, you probably have different buyer personas you want to reach. Since they have particular characteristics and/or interests, you require different messaging for each one.
For instance, if you’re addressing both teenagers and adults, you want to keep the messaging distinct and relevant in order to appeal to both target audiences.
On top of that, personalized ad experiences are a must when creating localized campaigns. You can easily translate the text and replace it on the ads you’re using while keeping the other elements as they are. Alternatively, you can use dynamic ads that change their content based on the viewers’ location.
Personalization is key. And creative automation allows you to do it without sacrificing your visual identity.
2.5. Reduce errors
Humans are inclined to error, and when your team has to produce thousands of creatives in a short amount of time, the chance of making mistakes is likely to increase.
To avoid that and make sure that your campaigns will look perfect every time, you should turn to creative automation.
This way, you won’t have to adjust each creative manually, and you’ll only need to focus on making sure you created your CSV file the right way and the information is accurate. Thus, significantly reducing the probability of making mistakes.
2.6. Eliminate unnecessary costs
In many cases, creative processes prove to be not only inefficient but also extremely costly.
The good news is those costs can be significantly cut down when choosing a single solution that helps teams create ad campaigns with ease, and it’s also the place where they can store, manage, oversee their brand assets, and collaborate with other team members.
For example, in Creatopy, you can use the Brand Kit feature to upload brand assets, such as logos, fonts, templates, imagery, and color palette. This will allow everyone in your team to access and use them during the ad creation process.
2.7. Collaborate with team members
Real-time collaboration is often a struggle for mixed or fully remote teams, but luckily, it can be achieved through creative automation tools such as Creatopy.
The issue that occurs when teams collaborate across many different environments is that it can be a roadblock to the creative production process. So when you think you’re being productive, you’re actually spending time doing things that can otherwise be automated, like constantly replying to emails.
Creative automation allows you to send visuals for approval, even to people outside your team. All on a single platform, with zero friction in the feedback process.
2.8. Do more A/B testing
Consumers react differently to certain text and imagery combinations. Having one message, using a single image, and one call to action for an ad will potentially limit your chances of increasing conversions.
That’s why it’s essential to test variations of the same ad against one another to see which one performs better. This method is commonly known as A/B testing, and it involves splitting your audience into different groups.
Creative automation platforms allow you to generate creative assets for A/B testing in minutes.
Instead of having one message, create at least ten distinct ones. Moreover, you don’t need to stop at the text. You can come up with several calls to action and use various product images or even colors.
3. How Do Creative Automation Tools Work?
While each creative automation tool has its capabilities, most of them follow the same principle: allowing marketers to manage the entire ad production in one place.
To help you get a better idea, let’s take a look at how Creatopy works. It’s easier than you’d think.
First off, you need a template or a design to start with. You can go ahead and create it in Creatopy from scratch, use a template, or upload a design you previously created.
Second, you need to create a CSV file, which is really easy to do. You need to include only two main things:
- A column header row
- The list with each item that includes what the ad variation is all about
Note that the file should reflect the ad variations you want to create. This means that you can have fewer columns than the ones presented in the example below. Or you can have tens of rows instead of just a handful. We’ve added those just to get an idea of how you can create the file for your needs.
Feel free to go through our help article for more information about how to create and upload the CSV file.
Once you have these two things settled (the design and the CSV), you can get started and generate the ad variations in Creatopy.
Here’s how it works:
- Upload your design in Creatopy/personalize a template from our gallery.
- Go to Feed from the left-hand menu, click Create new Feed, upload the CSV file from your computer, then click Continue.
- Next, you can see the Bindings screen, where you link the information from the CSV to elements in your design.
- Bind the information and use the Row preview to see how your designs look based on the data you just fed.
If everything looks OK, then the only thing that’s left is to download the variations.
There’s also another cool thing you can do with the Feed Ad Builder, but you also need to have the Ad Serving add-on enabled. If you activate the sync between feeds and designs, you’ll be able to make changes directly in your data feed, which will reflect in your live ads.
For this to work, you must upload your data feed as a URL rather than a CSV file. Make sure each element of your design is linked to the corresponding data in your feed, choose your desired syncing frequency, and get your live campaign set in no time.
Watch the videos below to see how the Feed Ad Builder works in the Editor and in the Generator.
All things considered, marketers should go for an all-in-one creative automation solution that not only accelerates the rate at which they design new creatives but also allows them to serve their ads.
This way, they can manage the entire ad campaign lifecycle from ideation to execution on a single platform.
Final Thoughts
Remember that ad creative automation doesn’t eliminate human and manual intervention in the production process, but it reduces the time spent on repetitive tasks, helping you focus more on the ideation and design stages.
Ultimately, it’s not about doing things better but doing things smarter.
Is creative automation something want to try out? If the answer is yes, sign up for a 7-days free trial in Creatopy to see how it can improve your workflow.
