How to Scale Personalized Dynamic Content with Creative Automation

Everyone wants to feel heard and important. It’s fundamental to the human experience—and to the marketing world. You could spend the rest of your life crafting individualized ads, though, and still be unable to speak to each segment of your audience. That’s where creative automation comes in.

Creative automation offers an individualized experience that encourages:

• Identifying and speaking to a customer’s needs
• Offering messaging that appeals most to multiple customer groups
• Offering appropriate incentives and discounts by location, time of year, or customer preference
• Providing the product details that matter most to a customer group
• Speaking to a customer in a tone and language that matches their personality and preferences

With creative automation, you design dynamic templates to scale. This allows you to switch out elements without redesigning the entire creative, allowing you to speak to thousands of personas in different locations and with a wide range of preferences and needs.

Critically, this approach ensures that any data source can inform the individual personalized content version. By employing first-party data, behavior on your website can inform the ads they see elsewhere. A person’s in-store purchasing history determines the email content they receive in their inbox, and whether they click on those offers may affect the coupons they see on a store receipt or how you deliver future video ads.

Creative automation allows you to realize the full potential of your data, switching ads and components around rapidly based on real-time, real-world data.

You know that your customers want high-quality personalized content, and you worry that your competitors are already offering just that. Creative automation bridges the gap. It is the only practical way to offer an exceptional dynamic content at scale. The benefits of this approach include: 

• A streamlined approach to orchestrating  omnichannel content: Most companies are juggling seemingly endless platforms to manage different creative assets, campaigns, locations, and target customer groups. Creative automation simplifies your work while scaling up your productivity. 
• Less stress: Endlessly juggling dozens of platforms is exhausting. You may need to hire more people or invest more money in managing each campaign. Creative automation lessens stress levels. 
• More collaboration: Creative automation workflows bring together departments—legal, design, creative, and more. Work is no longer siloed to different departments that produce different products, making communication less stressful and more collegial. 

Consider this common scenario: A clothing retailer has different apps managing online sales, social media, and in-person communications. Each department has its own agenda. The legal team is concerned about compliance and is constantly editing creative briefs. The marketing team then has to re-edit them, and every single creative change must go through this process. It wastes endless hours every week. They may even have to hire more team members to manage the ballooning workload. 

With creative automation, it’s easy to change content while still remaining in compliance and without shifting the fundamental branding or messaging. This reduces conflict and miscommunication and streamlines the entire process. Creative marketing becomes fun again—a chance for innovation instead of an exhausting and expensive task to check off of your to-do list.

The labor market is tight, and budgets are even tighter. Your resources are already stretched. Yet many companies feel pressure to continue buying more one-off tools to compete. This means less room for growth and fewer resources where you need them most. Brands are left in a constant tug-of-war between the need to innovate and the demands of delivering world-class dynamic content at scale. 

Creative automation offers an alternative, empowering you to do more with what you already have. The result is a less stressed team. And instead of hiring more people to oversee marketing, you can focus on building a healthy environment for the staff members you already have. Here’s how creative automation streamlines your marketing: 

• Dynamic feeds ensure customers always only see what you want. Items that are out of stock never slip in, and full-price items aren’t mistakenly marked as on sale. 
• Customers can easily shop for exactly what they want because you have anticipated and addressed their needs using machine learning, collaborative filtering, or other algorithmic approaches.
• Your creative team can keep up with the speed of market demands, offering consistent personalized content across touch points. This empowers them to redouble their creative efforts rather than burn out attempting to endlessly monitor various platforms and thousands of customer experiences. 

“While solutions we looked at before Innervate were product-dynamic, creative couldn’t (easily) be adapted and individualized by the marketing manager. 

For the first time, we were able to gain deeper insights into which [product recommendations] in combination [with the number] of products displayed pays best for conversion. We were able to gain insights into which creative concepts best pay off, and how different KPIs are [achieved] in respective periods of time.” —Alexander Brandt, Online Marketing Manager at OTTO

A piece of content is really just a collection of elements: text, images, pricing, personalized information, recommended items, and more. Creative automation maintains fidelity to your branding by switching out key elements without disrupting the integrity of the content. 

There’s more than one way to automate things, though, and a thoughtless approach can increase your workload and frustration. It begins with choosing the right platform to streamline the process. Most marketers are already juggling dozens of apps and platforms. Adding another one that only offers one additional feature is not the solution. Instead, you need a platform that does more with less, allowing you to scale. 

Some hallmarks of effective ad creative automation include: 

• Leveraging disparate data sources: If you only optimize based on data from one siloed channel, you’ll end up with a skewed portrait of your customers and will fail to speak meaningfully to many key personas. Instead, you need to cast a wide net, then bring it all together to offer seamless dynamic content. 
• The ability to set rules for brand compliance so that certain ad features never change: Lock text, images, or other key aspects in place. This is especially important if you’re in an industry where legal, regulatory, or compliance issues figure prominently. 
• Easy visualization and simulation of ads: You can compare them side by side and assess which option works best. 
• Real-time response based on new data or other new insights: You need to be able to change your content in the wake of a local disaster, sudden weather change, or any other swing that may shift customer demand and preferences. 
• Developing preapproved assets: Create content specifically for certain personas or groups of customers. 
• Offering a multilingual content without changing branding: Simply translate your ads into the local language. 
• Compliance with company accessibility policies: For example, you may need to insert image descriptions into some website creative, provide closed captioning for videos, or eliminate certain ad elements. 

When you manually change content, it’s easy for your brand identity to steadily deteriorate, even if you’re able to take on the Herculean task of continuously altering your marketing materials. Creative automation protects your brand, your time, and your bottom line. It’s indispensable in a modern marketing environment that demands rapid innovation. 

Trying to automate using a panoply of mismatched platforms is an exhausting proposition. You don’t have to do it this way (and your team will thank you if you don’t). 

Innervate has helped some of the biggest brands grow their marketing reach. Check out our case studies to see how we were able to help Nordstrom and OTTO succeed.