In 2020, 97 percent of marketers1 told Salesforce they were putting more effort into the customer experience by increasing or maintaining their personalization budgets. Today’s consumers demand personalized content. They don’t want generic, boring ads that annoy them and intrude on their day. They want you to speak to them, offer to solve a problem, and then actually solve the problem.
If creating personalized content that speaks to customers’ needs was easy, everyone would do it. But it’s not—especially when done at scale. It can be extremely demanding for marketing and production teams, involving significant increases in production time and connecting multiple data sources. For many, it’s an impossible task. Most businesses simply lack the resources to build—let alone test—thousands of ads for various personas. The good news? It doesn’t have to be this difficult.
Dynamic creative optimization makes it easy—and fast—to switch creative elements in your ads, test the results, and refine the end product. Here’s what you need to know about using it to improve your ad campaigns.
What Is Dynamic Creative Optimization?
Dynamic creative optimization focuses on serving the right ad content with the right message to the right customer based on your data. This could be data collected on the customer or target market segment, past engagements and purchases, time of year, weather, and/or numerous other factors. Using a systemic approach, individual ad components, such as prices, color schemes, images, and videos, can be tailored based on that data.
This makes it faster and easier to customize ads, change them for sales and various seasonal campaigns, then test the results in the real world.
Benefits of Dynamic Creative Optimization
No marketer has an unlimited budget and infinite resources. Even when budgets are large, it’s important to allocate them toward innovative strategies and recruiting the best possible team. Dynamic creative optimization preserves your time and your budget by:
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Reducing human power. Customize ads at scale and test the results without all the work. You’ll never again need to individually design and test each ad version.
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Helping you test individual ad components, such as headlines, prices, images, or color schemes.
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Reducing the costs of advertising and testing by automating some of marketing’s most time-consuming tasks.
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Offering a personalized experience that speaks more meaningfully to your customers.
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Testing various offers. For example, does free gift wrapping meaningfully increase revenue? Do customers spend more when you incentivize them to come into the store?
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Empowering you to make effective ads even more relevant by changing sales prices or adapting ads to accommodate new merchandise.
Getting Dynamic Creative Optimization Right
Optimizing your advertising budget requires you to embrace dynamic creative optimization. What are some effective ways to use this technology?
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Design geo-targeted ads that draw on customer data. You might market winter coats to customers in northern regions and sundresses to those experiencing a heatwave. This also works well when marketing to customers near your various stores or locations for a seamless hybrid experience.
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Target specific personas or demographics. You can even target a specific customer and tailor ads based on past purchases, abandoned carts, or social media interactions. Customers don’t want to feel like you’re speaking to a generic crowd, so get specific. Dynamic creative optimization empowers you to use audio, video, images, and copy that appeal to specific dynamics and behaviors, generating more brand loyalty and sales.
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Experimenting with different pricing strategies. Advertise a sale without changing an entire ad. Or test how various pricing schemes affect buyers’ decisions. You might advertise a buy one, get one deal to one group and a gift or percentage discount to another.
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Developing dynamic social media ads. Social media carousels and videos can draw in viewers and ultimately generate new business. Dynamic creative optimization allows you to quickly test what works and what doesn’t.
Data rules the world of advertising. You must know your customer and understand how they respond to your brand. To stay competitive, you must be agile, and you must stand out in the crowded ad space. The ability to quickly update and test ads and speak to numerous customer personas can help.
The right ad server platform ensures you can do the ongoing testing today’s marketing world requires. Learn why ad testing is critical for getting the right data by downloading our white paper, Beyond Basic Ad Testing: A Proven Framework for Perpetual Digital Creative Optimization.
