For a while now, a perfect storm of industry forces has battered the perceived value of creative in online marketing:
- Media planning and buying, which was the way much of traditional creative was sponsored, hasn't had the same economics in online advertising. ("We can't pay for creative.")
- Google's minimalist interface for search—and search advertising—didn't leave a lot of room for creative. ("We have no place to put creative.")
- In text-only search marketing, anyone can buy a keyword and put up an ad. With so much low-hanging fruit initially, many of these initiatives did just fine without the input of creative professionals. ("We can do the creative ourselves.")
- Testing and optimization technologies have positioned creative as the combination of elements that can simply be systematically tried—if you experiment with thousands of possibilities, one's bound to be the winner. ("The software will pick the right creative.")
- Social-media marketing, currently the hot topic in online marketing, eschews the very concept of marketer-produced creative. ("Our audience is its own creative.")
Yet running counter to this "Creative? Ha, how quaint!" undercurrent is a simple and powerful truth: Online advertising, email marketing, and the landing pages that they drive traffic to are measurable. This is the foundation of "performance marketing."
You can compare ad A against ad B and see which attracts the most click-throughs. You can compare landing page X against landing page Y and see which generates the highest conversion rate. You can quantify exactly how much more effective one is over another.
And which wins? Other things being equal, the one with the best creative.
You know this from your own experience. Which ads catch your interest? Which landing pages stand out and make a great impression? They're the ones that give you what you want, but they do it in a way that's clear, easy, engaging, intelligent, relevant, original.
The power of great creative is that it over-delivers. It gives respondents what they were looking for, but it also exceeds expectations. It signals that you care about and respect your audience—and that you approach your work with quality and craftsmanship. It affects your brand when you need it most: the formative moment of a prospect's first impression of you.
How much of a difference does this make? You can measure precisely.
Put a mediocre ad and a cookie-cutter landing page up against a professionally designed challenger that's deftly executed, crackling with creative electricity. Compare the results: click-through rate, conversion rate, return on advertising spend (ROAS), overall ROI.
The difference quantifies the first-order effects of how much good creative is worth. (The second-order effects of brand building are a substantial bonus, albeit harder to measure.)
Armed with this performance marketing proof, creative is ready to take the field and push back:
Paying for creative. Creative must cost-justify itself directly—and thanks to this measurability, it can. If you spend $20,000 per month on search advertising and you have a 3% conversion rate, then how much is it worth to double your conversion rate? How much is it worth to triple or quadruple it? Great creative can do this, and its value equals real money—often more than what you're spending on the keyword bids. These economics can enable professional creative services to thrive.
Finding a place for creative. A skillful master of search engine ad writing can make your three-line text ads sing. But the real space for creative begins after the click, on the landing page. Almost every case study showing major improvements in conversion rates features overhauled landing pages—and for good reason. They are what people experience when they click on your ad. The better your landing page, the better your campaign performance. And the creative canvas is wide open: from simple landing pages to elaborate microsites. This "post-click marketing" is where you can harness technology—as a seamless part of the creative—to engage and enchant respondents.
Leveraging creative on the front-line. Creative productions used to be immutable. Once a professional made them, all you could do was run with them, all-or-nothing. "New creative" is much more granular. With landing pages, designers can provide both the whole and the pieces: beautiful page templates, a library of campaign image and video assets, configurable widgets, parameterized Flash animations. Front-line search marketers can then reuse and remix these elements to try new variations in the campaign and target niche audiences more specifically. This reusability further helps the economics of great creative. Instead of "we can do the creative ourselves," it's "we can customize and remix the creative ourselves."
Testing and optimizing creative. Sure, testing is important. But it's only as good as the creative you feed into it. (Remember GIGO: garbage in, garbage out.) The real value of testing is having a platform that facilitates creative experimentation with the capacity to determine which ideas resonate with which segments of your audience. You don't need a lot of expensive software. The big wins almost always come from simple A/B testing to try bold, new ideas, rather than more complicated multivariate testing (MVT) to squeeze incremental improvements from individual page elements.
Creatively engaging your audience. Social media marketing and professional creative can complement each other. Genuinely listening to the social media sphere inspires new creative ideas. Some of the best creative executions will incorporate ways for respondents to participate, network, and contribute on landing pages and microsites. Even bolder creative concepts will extend remixability to respondents, enabling them to co-create their experience and the experience of others.
For non-creative marketers and businesspeople, there are two takeaways here:
- First, no single technology will be a silver bullet in your online marketing. While you should stay apace with industry trends and best-practices, leveraging technology where you can, don't expect a "black box" to make marketing work. The competitive advantage will always go to firms with the best marketing strategy and creative over those with just the fanciest software.
- Second, don't skimp on the creative. Hire excellent creative professionals, whether in-house or outsourced, to contribute their part to your marketing vision. Creative design and production are skills and talents that not everyone has. The best people in the field have spent years honing their craft. You wouldn't do your own dentistry, would you? If professional creative can cost-justify itself and give you a competitive edge, it would be economically irrational not to employ it.
For creative professionals, there are two complementary lessons:
- First, "new creative" must assimilate online marketing technology. All these new tools and delivery channels are additional colors in your palette. They shouldn't be sprinkled on as an afterthought, but incorporated in the core concept and execution. Delivering reusable and remixable components to your clients is part of this next-generation creative mission. For many creative agencies, achieving this seamless blend of creative and technology will mean bringing more marketer-technologists on to the team.
- Second, creative must directly cost-justify itself. You need to frame your pitch and your services accordingly, and you absolutely have to track the results. Web analytics are the heart of your accountability, the proof of value to your clients, and the differentiator in your market.
The new golden rule of online marketing: The creative that generates the most gold, rules.
