Supercharge Your Creative Performance, The Myth Of Manifestation, 5 Tips to Increase Your Conversion Rate
‘Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your inputs’
James Clear wrote about this and it’s something I think about often. It can be applied to everything in life and business. Overnight successes are the result of years of work. A six pack is the result of sustained healthy food choices and exercise. Scaling a brand is the result of many iterations of product development and marketing failures turned to successes.
Too many people give up on the pursuit of something because they don’t see immediate results. The question to ask yourself… is what you are doing today aligned to and getting you closer to what you want tomorrow and can you be consistent and patient enough to see it pay off?
Supercharge Your Creative Performance
Of all the variables for achieving marketing success, outside of the actual product, creative is the #1 variable. We’ve all heard that ‘creative is the new targeting’.
In a world of complexity, marketing in its truest sense is a combination of creative and copy to illicit the desired response. Whether that is awareness, conversion, engagement, your success will rise and fall based on how good the creative is.
In his position at Motion, a creative analytics platform, Evan has the benefit of seeing a huge amount of data and insight on what creative is working, how are brands and marketers setting themselves up for success and how to empower your teams with the best tools to inform strategy and optimization.
Let’s start from the top.
One of the key challenges many face in getting disproportionately successful creative is less about just creative performance, it’s getting the different teams who touch creative aligned and bridging the gap between the brand teams, performance teams & creative teams. You need a process that ties it all together.
Evan uses what he calls the ‘creative sprint’ method to framing up effective creative strategy and bridging that gap.
Research: Before you start building your creative you have to understand who you are building it for. Your research phase determines the consumer personas you are targeting and what combination of creative and messaging you are going to use. Don’t fall into the ‘everyone is y consumer’ trap; get specific in your persona development to provide specificity in your creative production.
Ideation: Once you have your defined personas, the ideation stage is the development of the hooks, angles, value props that match what the persona is looking for. Put this into a prioritization model, whats the #1 thing, the #2 - this starts to build a framework for actual creative testing.
Briefing: Arguably the hardest part of the creative sprint. Translating your research and ideation into a brief to your creators or creative team to produce the assets. What we see work is clear shot lists, do’s and don’ts, visual examples - more information is better in your creative brief.
Content Creation: Worth their weight in gold, finding creative teams and creators who know how to translate a brief into a killer asset is key.
Evaluation: Before going live, evaluate each asset. Does it meet the criteria set for each persona? Rank and kick back anything that doesn’t.
Launch: We use a creative testing campaign. All new creatives get launched into a broad creative testing campaign to find the winning creatives.
Analysis: Creative is subjective to all but data. Using Motion Metrics, we can analyze creative performance by funnel stage.
Below is an example of an ad creative using the custom funnel stage metrics in Motion: the traffic light color coding gives you a benchmark against the avg.
In this example you see this specific ad is over indexing on capturing attention and engagement, but under indexing on click through and conversions. While showing a strong ROAS, it tells you where to look to increase performance.
Potentially its the CTA not being strong enough or the landing page environment. Having this type of reporting is a game changer in knowing where and on what to spend your time on optimizing creative. It takes the guess work out of creative performance.
I loved having Evan on the podcast. One of the sharpest minds out there so be sure to give the episode a listen, I guarantee it will help you get better creative performance.
Also covered in the episode:
The right structure for your brand or agency to align your brand, creative and performance teams for the best results.
How to use data to inform not just creative strategy, but creative iterations.
The RIGHT way to analyze creative to get better performance and why you might be doing it wrong.
What role will AI play in creative in the future.
Check out the full Episode with Evan on the below links. NOT one to miss.
Learn more about Motion and how it can help your teams save time and supercharge your creative performance HERE
The Myth of Manifestation
We’ve all been sold on the idea that if you manifest something, it can happen. I strongly believe in the power of manifestation but strongly disagree that just speaking into existence something you hope happens, will result in it being handed to you from purely external forces.
Arnold Schwarzenegger had three goals: win the Mr Olympia, be the highest earning movie star and be the governor of a US state, preferably California.
He puts manifestation at the core of what helped him go on to achieve each of those goals. But he didn’t simply wish them into existence.
He spent hours in the gym for years to build a Mr Olympia winning physique. He took acting classes, elocution lessons and forged his way into Hollywood, built a network in the political arena surrounding himself with people to learn the world of politics.
He had a vision of what he wanted to achieve and put in the work to achieve them. You need to have a clear vision of what it is you are pursuing, what it will require of you to achieve those things that backs into a set of beliefs, behaviors and actions.
The power of manifestation isn’t aimlessly wishing, it’s a clear vision of what that informs your how.
George Mack talks beautifully about optimism, skepticism and manifestation in a recent podcast episode with Chris Williamson. You can listen to it here.
5 Things To Increase Your Conversion Rate
Across the agency, conversion rate optimization has been one of the biggest things we have focussed on to increase media performance, alongside optimized creative. Next weeks newsletter is going to be dedicated to everything Conversion Rate Optimization, but for now here are 5 simple tips to get started on skyrocketing your conversion rate, decreasing customer acquisition costs and delivering a great consumer experience!
Align your landing pages with your ad creative. As explained above, creative is your targeting and depending on the personas, your landing pages will need to align. Re-enforce and build on what got someone to the landing page in the first place.
Load up on social proof. People trust the opinions of others. It’s digital word of mouth. Use your influencer/creator content on the page, showcase reviews, PR - stack up the proof that this product, your brand is trusted by others.
Mobile first design. On avg 79% of your traffic will be from mobile. Slow load times, broken frames, wrong sized images and videos, miss-aligned product is begging for someone to click the exit button.
KISS. If someone lands on your site, they are at least considering purchasing. Make it easy for them. Prioritize function over aesthetic. Use bold fonts and colors to accent the most important information, use language thats easy to understand and intuitive. Don’t make people click or scroll around to find information they care about or how/where to purchase.
A simple framework to get started:
Headline - aligning to the ad creative that got them here in the first place
Social Proof - validation and confidence from others who have purchased
Product Options / Offer - depends on the structure, but either your single product and offer or low, medium, high AOV options. Consumers want to know they are getting value.
Why you? Need more convincing? Visualized benefit charts, Us vs Them, make it clear they they’ve come to the right place against competitors.Easy checkout process. When a consumer is ready to buy, one click, 2 clicks max. Remove as much friction in the process as possible.
Don’t leave media $’s on the table by spending money to drive people to a poor performing landing page.
Content Recommendations:
Is this thing on? While many have left the platform there is still a big opportunity to being ‘early’ in the Threads game. They recently rolled out new features to expand engagement including polls and GIFs. Read more HERE
In the ongoing battle of the platforms for incentivizing Creators, YouTube rolled out new features to help creators make more money from shoppable videos. Get the scoop HERE
Thats a wrap for this week! The next month will be a big one for every brand and marketer with BFCM promos launching. It’s where months of planning comes together! Wishing everyone huge success and remember, stay calm amongst the chaos.
Thank you so much for subscribing and reading!