We often determine price of a product, just by looking at its image or ad, even before gathering any information. Thus, development of a core creative strategy aligning with brand and ideal customer profile is critical for building a brand and driving performance with ads
This playbook has 4 components
- Research
- Build Hypothesis
- Hard & soft signals/metrics
- Execution
- Iterate and learn
Research
Every creative strategy starts with a product-led approach while being customer-centric. Goal here to accumulate as many pain-points, product benefits, customer insights and
One main question this research should answer is
“In this product, what is the biggest value proposition a customer is looking for?”
- Go through customer reviews on website, look at reviews on competitors websites, competitor reviews on Amazon
- Conducat customer interviews and focus on asking about the industry rather than product-focused questions
- Keep a record of common phrases, words, and sentences which can then be later run through a word-cloud to be used in copy
Build Hypothesis
This part is usually skipped as there is documentation and principle based testing is involved
- Create a hypothesis on what angles, type of creatives customers are most likely to respond based on information from previous research step
- Have a dedicated template to track progress and results of each hypothesis with clear description
- Hypothesis testing follows this priority – Messaging > Type of creative > Small changes
- Messaging is tested first other elements next
- Establish tones and mind-space occupying positioning statements to reach audience
Hard & soft-signal metrics
Don’t just rely on absolute metrics like purchases, CPA, AOV these require more data. So, along with this also look into metrics tied to creatives – CTR, thumbstop ratio, hold rate, hook rate…..
Creative might not produce results initially hence you have to rely on soft-signals to decide to continue or stop the creative.
One of the creative might be bridging the gap between mid-customer journey which might not be attributed anywhere but actually contributing to the sale down the funnel. So, it is critical to asses soft-signals
Execute
This step is specifically kept frugal to burn less, but learn more
- Before creating creatives, define 3 to 5 audience segments you are targeting to capture
- Now tie your creative closely to each of the audience segment, than keeping a generic creative for all audience segments
- So, with each audience segment you are testing multiple messaging/angles
- Instead of building one ICP, create a subsets of 3 to 5 ICPs’ and each with their own messaging
Iterate and learn
Give qualitative insights more importance than quantitative insights. Numbers tell stories, find what is the qualitative customer data behind every number
- Look for hard and soft signals to asses performance
- With each test, you are building your knowledge bank about who your best customers are, more importantly who are not
Answer some hard questions
Extend the data gathering to define which cohorts of customers from which type of message stay longer with brand. Your responsibility is to build your message stronger based on this data
This is the way to test creatives
Research > Build hypothesis > Define metrics > Action > Test and learn
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