Presented by yellowHEAD
In digital marketing, there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all creative for all platforms. To really perform, you need data. Learn how to use data to optimize your creatives for every channel, align your strategy with user demographics, and get results in this on-demand VB Live event.
Access free on demand right here.
Digital marketers face a singular challenge: trying to educate and win customers over and unlock loyalty in an increasingly fragmented media and advertising landscape, says Courtney Lawrie, global head of brand and integrated growth marketing at Wayfair. At Wayfair, they’re well positioned to tackle this challenge, however.
“We’ve taken a data-driven and performance-oriented approach in our personalization and relevance initiatives since day one,” Lawrie says. “We make that happen at scale by leveraging our in-house software programs, our machine learning algorithms and analytics, to ensure that we’re serving every customer the optimal content at the right time on any touch point across all different types of platforms.”
In the home category, she explains, customers are driven by inspiration, and often have a unique vision for their home. With data, they’re working to anticipate their customers’ needs and to create a shopping experience uniquely tailored to their tastes, which directly informs content and creative asset creation efforts.
At Burt’s Bees, says Melissa Culbertson, associate manager of brand engagement and social strategy, they look at engagement and reach from an organic social standpoint. However, they’ve started to pay closer attention to the data on deeper levels of engagement, particularly around comments and shares. It’s easy for people to tap to like a video or an image when you’re scrolling through TikTok or Instagram, but comments and shares take a bit more effort, and that’s a better gauge of engagement.
But when measuring content performance, they drill down to content pillars — for instance, a values-based piece of content, such as organic social for Earth Day wouldn’t be measured against a product-based piece of content. They’re also able to compare content formats against one another. They know from data that GIFs and video-based content on Instagram, for example, don’t perform as well as static assets.
“That doesn’t mean we don’t do that, because sometimes for the story you need to tell you need a longer-form piece of creative than just an image,” she says. “But we would measure video-based content against video-based content to get a better idea of whether it was successful or not.”
At Wayfair, they’re exploring the opportunity to increase awareness in other emerging home categories, like home improvement and renovation, large appliances, and housewares. Those emerging categories lend themselves to some of these subcultures. In the home improvement space, for example, they’re leaning in and looking at DIY enthusiast subcultures, particularly during the pandemic.
“Subcultures can spread your brand’s message to a whole new audience with already ingrained loyalty, which is kind of amazing,” says Kinney Edwards, global head of Creative Lab at TikTok. “But you have to do the work. You have to learn their language, speak to them in a real and authentic way. It takes more effort to craft your message creatively. But the reward is in the way in which the subculture community will adopt your messages and become brand ambassadors for you in an organic and passionate way.”
There’s an opportunity to tap into these communities and tell engaging stories across social platforms. The key is to remember that each social platform serves a purpose in a user’s life, says Noa Miller, marketing creative strategist at YellowHEAD, and that information is as essential to the creative concept as drilling down to a user’s demographic information. On each platform, a user is consuming content very differently.
“We believe that we need to come up with a strong creative concept, and then have that concept be translated to fit what a person is doing once they arrive at these different platforms,” Miller says.
For example, on TikTok, the first thing a user sees is a video with sound on. On Facebook, they’ll be scrolling through videos with no sound on.
“I need to understand, as a marketer, what’s the way that our audience is consuming their media on each platform, and then create creatives that are a perfect fit for that,” she says.
YellowHEAD worked with Tinder to create a campaign around their new video chat feature, creating three different ads with the same concept, but each from a different platform’s perspective: one for Facebook, one for Instagram, and one for TikTok.
Facebook scrolling time is about three seconds, which requires a catchy opening to make the audience stick and want to see more of the ad’s story. On Instagram, they cropped the video into three story ads, each highlighting a different fact about why video chatting is a great idea, to keep the consumer skipping from one to the other, and see that there’s a storyline. For TikTok, they filmed the ad with real people, and designed it to look as native as possible to the platform.
“We try to instill in brands and marketers that there are best practices to getting to that quality creative,” Edwards says. “Understand the ecosystem by engaging with it, playing around, putting that mindset on, because as you’re creating content for these users, you want it to feel like it’s for them and not for you.”
That means building a narrative, and approaching the platform with an audience-first mindset, he adds. The community respects when you’re direct and to the point, but delivering that message in a way that demonstrates you get the platform.
However, Culbertson says, her best piece of advice is that while the platform’s best practices are an excellent guide, not to rely on them solely.
“Use that as a starting point, but then test different creatives, see what works and what doesn’t. It’s very individualized to your brand, your company and so on,” she explains. “Based on that data, you can iterate and build better creative as you go along.”
“Don’t try to be perfect and overthink it,” Edwards adds. “Action drives action. Trends, culture that happens so quickly, you don’t want to get caught up in doing it perfectly. You want to be part of what’s happening. Just dive in.”
For the performance-oriented marketers and brands, Lawrie adds, “Don’t get too bogged down by short-term metrics. Make sure you also look at your creative over a long-term horizon. Make sure those short-term metrics are a proxy for long-term outcomes.”
And Miller notes that creating different creatives for each platform shouldn’t break your budget. “It doesn’t always have to be a big production — things can be done easily,” she says. “Today everyone is a content creator. Try to make it fit to the platform without additional big productions needed.”
For more about creating authentic brand stories that really work, across every platform, accessing and leveraging data to ensure your message is on target, and more, don’t miss the rest of this VB Live event
You’ll learn:
- How to optimize your digital marketing strategy through creative optimization
- How to leverage user data to create content that really performs
- How to develop a successful creative strategy for all your social channels
- Best practices for creative on every platform
- How to incorporate influencer content into your assets
- And more!
Speakers:
- Courtney Lawrie, Global Head of Brand and Integrated Growth Marketing, Wayfair
- Melissa Culbertson, Associate Manager of Brand Engagement, Social Strategy, Burt’s Bees
- Kinney Edwards, Global Head of Creative Lab, TikTok
- Noa Miller, Marketing Creative Strategist, yellowHEAD
- Dave Clark, Moderator, VentureBeat
