To run a successful media campaign, it’s important to first answer a few key questions:
- Who is your audience?
- When and where do you want to connect with them?
- What do you want to communicate?
If your creative is not optimized to address these questions, then overall campaign performance will suffer.
The importance of creative in marketing, and especially in the retail media industry, is often overlooked. Just as strong creative can have a positive impact on campaign results, the opposite can be said about the lack of testing, optimization and measurement. Here are five strategic tips to maximize your retail media campaign results.
1. Keep the campaign goal in mind
At the heart of retail media is connecting with customers at different stages of life and the buying cycle. Where you target these customers may vary but the goal for each campaign is always to nudge them farther down the purchase funnel, to create an intent to buy and eventually encourage a purchase. Each creative deliverable on every marketing channel must align with your ultimate goal—to drive sales.
2. Leverage consumer insights and data
With so much rich data available to advertisers from retailers, retail media networks must take advantage and meet the customer wherever they are with exactly what they want to see. Messaging and creative should be tailored to the targeted audience, leaving generic awareness campaigns to other marketing channels.
3. Develop a testing strategy to inform creative
How do you know if you have the right messaging, imagery, product assortment or even colors in an ad? Creative is subjective—something you or your team likes won’t necessarily resonate with a target customer.
Developing an ongoing testing strategy is the only unbiased way to effectively identify what is working and what might not be. By continually testing different creative elements, you can gain a better understanding of what works best with your target customer, or in some cases, if you are even targeting the right consumer group.
4. Become a creative scientist
As with any good science experiment, you must start with a hypothesis—an idea of how you think the test might go or a question you want answered. Next, you need preidentified elements you can adjust—messaging, imagery, color and product assortment are a few examples.
By adjusting one element at a time, over a pre-determined testing period, you can understand how that element may be affecting campaign performance—positively or negatively—allowing you to make changes on the fly and adopt key learnings into future campaigns.
5. Use tools for faster, easier optimizations
By implementing an ongoing creative testing strategy, you can gain greater learnings at the return on ad spend (ROAS) level. This strategy should be a living, breathing process, where you are continually testing, learning and adjusting elements within the campaign.
Through creative tools, like Clinch, you can dynamically adjust elements in your creative to implement necessary changes easily and quickly. Copy, images and background colors can all be updated in real time to adjust to the learnings, and even the smallest of changes can lead to massive insights.
Creative can be an incredible optimization lever that will help maximize campaign performance. By implementing a testing strategy, you can ensure your messaging and creative are resonating and, ultimately, driving sales with your target first-party customers.
