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A year is a long old time in the marketing landscape, especially us lucky lot that get to call social home. In the last year alone we’ve seen Metaverse’s come and go, new platforms (hi Threads 👋), entire name changes (I’m still not over typing “formerly Twitter'' to every conversation X is mentioned), and new features galore.
But the most impactful of these changes to brands is the advancement of AI to power media platforms algorithms. Paid social media buyers usually see extremes on either end of the spectrum when it comes to creative output - brands investing into big campaign ideas and moments, with social being one of many battlegrounds, and brands neglecting creative entirely, focussed instead on growth driving paid media tactics. But with this change in how social algorithms operate, being on either end of this spectrum will be leaving you exposed to plummeting performance.
The very nature of how creative is used on social media advertising has changed. It’s not about turning up in the right place, at the right time with outstanding creative that wins hearts and minds. Today the creative asset itself determines where, who and how you show up at all. And because so much of a good paid social strategy is dependent on the content itself, your approach has to be formulaic enough to measure its performance, without compromising on that creative edge that makes a user actually care to stop from scrolling. Content is hard to measure, but paid social is built to be measured, so identifying a way of combining the two can drive real, insightful learnings that unlock incredible potential.
A formulaic framework:
For brands that are starting out on this journey, step one is to apply a formulaic framework for creative testing to establish a foundation of learnings to build from. When working with video, applying a modular approach to creation can yield great analysis on paid media creative. Slicing the components of your overall messaging down into segments - whether it’s pain points/desires, social proofing, the proposition as the solution, scarcity - and then building multiple asset variations with each section's orders mixed up.
Measuring their performance from your primary KPIs, and additional storytelling metrics like hook and hold rates help you learn about messaging hierarchy, who your ideal customer is and what motivates them. The same theory can be applied to other ad formats, although storytelling metrics are less rich, so isolating each testing variable is doubly important for learnings. (There’s even ways to give your catalogues a boost through creative learning taken from your strategy, but stay tuned for part 2 to learn more on that…)
Creative diversity:
Step 2 involves applying the knowledge you gain in step 1 about your community and their behaviours a level further. Using the insights gained to inform new creative styles, formats and innovations that unlock and engage new audiences, without needing to change anything else in your media strategies. Remembering that ad content signals the algorithm and determines how it’s used, so neglecting step 2 and leaning too far into formula and rules and data, i.e. “statics talking about pain point 1 worked well, let’s brief more of those” can actually lead to negative results, shrink your audience pool down and stop you from being able to effectively scale performance. Ultimately, creative has to be creative in order to retain relevance, authenticity and excitement to the human on the other end. That shouldn’t be compromised in the endeavour to gather data and influence performance.
In summary, creative is not just the key; but the entire vehicle to success. Marketers who fail to embrace this idea, and continue to rely too heavily on their strategic media buying smarts, risk being left behind in a rapidly evolving landscape. So too do marketers and brands who fail to approach creative strategically, with a long term and dynamic lens. Paid social is a unique medium that can teach us so much about our customers; how to capture their attention, engage them, convert them, retain them and make them lifelong fans, on and offline. When used correctly, the opportunity for brands to succeed is endless.
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