What are the benefits of dynamic creative? And how can it help you be more relevant when communicating with customers at different stages of the lifecycle?
Joshua Wilson shares four key benefits to dynamic creative, and demonstrates how it can work powerfully throughout the lifecycle with a successful example from Vittoria Coffee, an Australian coffee brand.
What is dynamic creative?
Dynamic creative – also known as dynamic creative optimisation (DCO) – is the ability to change your campaign creative on the fly based on different data inputs. Your changes can be based on weather, geo, time, language, product, behaviour, or really any other element that is ‘dynamic’.
With DCO you can change the ad copy, image, CTA and so on of your ads in real-time to convey the most accurate and relevant messages to the people viewing it.
Simply put, dynamic creative allows you to send the right message to the right consumer at the right time, in the right place. It’s all about creating relevancy.
Four key benefits of dynamic creative
There are four key benefits of dynamic creative.
1. It’s more scalable
When you run a static ad campaign, you need to create each of your ads manually. Imagine you’re running a campaign targeting 40 markets, in six languages, multiple target audiences in five different creative sizes. That would mean you would need to create more than 1,000 creative variations!
With dynamic creative, it’s simple. All you need to do is to create a template, ensure that your data feed is clean and accurate and then, based on your audience, pull the relevant information together to serve the right messaging, language and creative automatically, in real time.
Not only do you save time and money in building your ads, but it’s far easier to scale a dynamic creative campaign as you can serve tens of thousands of variations of your ad from a single template.
2. The messaging is relevant
Having access to quality data is important in ensuring that your campaign is effective. However you need more than just the right data if you want your ads to resonate with your audience. After all, as we are browsing online, regardless of the device or channel that we are on, we are always seeking a seamless experience.
In a GWI research report, it indicates that less than 20% of consumers find ads to be relevant. Especially with customers’ shorter attention time, it’s clear much more can be done. Dynamic creative allows you to combine data and creative to deliver a more personalised and relevant experience for your customers.
For example, if it is raining in a particular city, you can serve ads for umbrellas that day. And if it’s sunny, you can serve ads for sun shades. When ads are highly relevant like this, performance improves significantly.
3. The insights are powerful
Ever wondered which ad image generates more clicks and conversions? Or if consumers are more likely to click on ‘Add to cart’ or ‘Buy now’?
With dynamic creative you can run tens of thousands of variations of your ads. So, within a short amount of time, you will understand which variation converts best. Is it the red or yellow sunglasses? The hotel exterior or rooms? And which call to action copy works better?
In addition, you can immediately put these learnings into place, and focus your ad budget on creative that performs best.
4. You can maximise efficiency and ROI
Why would you retarget potential customers with a banner for something they already know about? Why would you spend advertising budget on a user who is going to convert anyway? Wouldn’t it be more efficient to engage with that customer in a different way to maximise ROI potential?
In a static display ad campaign, very often only one variation of the creative is used. That means your campaign is targeting solely based on data, and nothing is done on the creative side to make it relevant to your audience. Not to mention it’s not optimised from a media buying investment perspective. Dynamic creative helps you be more efficient with where you need to allocate your media spend.
Dynamic creative and lifecycle marketing
Dynamic creative was primarily introduced to help create product retargeting ads at scale. The ad content would be based on a number of behavioural aspects a consumer makes on an advertiser’s site. These include their website browsing history, the products they have already viewed, purchased or added to a shopping cart.
However, there is so much more that we can leverage dynamic creative for. Not only can it be used for users who have already been to your site and are getting ready to make a purchase, it can be used for other parts of the lifecycle.
Every brand has their own customer lifecycle, and when you use dynamic creative across the customer lifecycle effectively, you essentially have a well oiled machine that is constantly driving new customers to site, prospecting them to conversion and growing lifetime value.
For example, in the new stage of your lifecycle, you are prospecting for potential customers, to ignite interest in customers and make your brand known to these potential buyers who would ultimately recall your brand when they are ready to purchase.
At this stage, it is all about educating your soon-to-be customers about who you are. One example of a brand doing this successfully is Vittoria Coffee, a decades old, family-owned Australian brand who pride themselves as Australia’s number one pure coffee brand.
While putting together their prospecting banners, we focused on their unique value proposition in the market, and used a creative that would grab the attention of coffee lovers. That is the finest sourced 100% pure arabica coffees, blended to perfection over generations.
In the convert stage, you want to encourage new prospects to purchase from you by using relevant creative messaging. In this stage, it is typically known as retargeting. But let’s go one level deeper into retargeting. A customer might go to your brand’s website, browse different categories, show an interest in a few products, and may even add some to their cart.
In the case of Vittoria Coffee, we split out the potential customers based on their level of interest, and where they are on their purchasing journey – Top Level Viewers, Category Viewers, Product Viewers and Abandoned Baskets.
For Top Level Viewers, or viewers who had just landed on the site, the type of banners that we showed to them are about brand recall. Three things that we would like interested customers to remember are:
- Premium coffee blends
- Exclusively available online
- Free shipping over $49
For Category Viewers, we want more than brand recall. For Vittoria Coffee, you will see the range of categories they have (shown in the image below). For the purpose of explanation, we’ll dig deeper into Espressotoria and Cups.
The Espressotoria Piccolo machine is a practical coffee pod system that delivers cafe-quality coffee at the touch of a button. People who have clicked on this product category will be shown ads that are specific to the Espressotoria, a reminder that customers will be able to “enjoy barista-quality coffee at home”.
The Cups category viewers are probably coffee lovers who want to feel like they are always at a cafe, drinking premium coffee. People who have clicked on this product category will be shown ads of the different types of cups that Vittoria Coffee sells, to give them a little bit more push to “start your cafe at home”.
When potential customers click into a specific product, it is more likely that they will buy that item. However, there could be reasons why they didn’t complete their purchase. Maybe they were distracted by something else at the time, maybe it wasn’t specific to their needs at the time. With dynamic creative, you can show complimentary products, or best sellers to incentivise a purchase. But with so many products, how can you run a programmatic display campaign at scale?
Dynamic creative has the capability to do this by pulling information from your product feed to show the last product that the potential customer has seen. Below is an example from where we included the product image, price and offer to drive conversion.
Did you know, almost 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned? Imagine if you are able to capture all those sales instead of losing them – that would be a huge increase in revenue. For Vittoria Coffee, we showed potential customers the products that they had left in their cart, and a cheeky note of “you left this behind”.
The grow stage is where you should look to drive incrementality from your existing customer base. It is important to remember that it costs five times as much to attract a new customer, than to keep an existing one. But how do you constantly re-engage with your customers? This can be done through up-sell, cross-sell and lapse prevention.
For Vittoria Coffee, we included products such as “premium coffee and accessories” that would add on to the existing customers’ range of coffee products.
The key to a successful dynamic creative campaign
The marriage of data, investment and creative are the key elements to a successful campaign, but the real secret to success relies on the execution. At Crimtan, our platform has the ability to integrate media supply, data and dynamic creative, reducing inefficiencies that arise from running data, creative and media in platforms that are siloed.
The powerful combination of reach, scale, personalisation, speed and detail of insights makes dynamic creative a no-brainer for advertisers today. To learn more, read our step by step DCO guide here.
Ready to launch or improve your dynamic creative campaigns? Get in touch and we’ll be happy to help.
About the author
Joshua Wilson started his career in digital marketing in 2013 when he started his own affiliate marketing business promoting brands on social networks and mobile DSPs. From there, he moved into content and worked with brands to help build their online presence and communities.
Joshua started at Crimtan as a client services manager in 2015 working on the APAC business leveraging his knowledge for the market and Japanese language skills. In 2018, Joshua moved to Tokyo to build and open the Crimtan Japan office. Now in the role of Commercial Director, JAPAC, Joshua oversees the operation in the region promoting Crimtan’s local and international capabilities.