The marketing world is undergoing a massive shift at this point. Brands are now leveraging data to better analyze and design effective marketing strategies. Data-driven marketing strategies are more likely to increase both return on ads-spend and return on investment. With creative analytics, you can improve your storytelling and engage audiences more effectively. You can better visualize the performance of ad assets through such solutions. 

What is creative analytics?

Creative analytics is the process of gathering insights into the performance of your marketing collateral or creative elements in an organized and systematic manner. Using creative analytics, brands, particularly the marketing and sales departments can visualize and analyze creative assets to take data-driven decisions.

It involves analyzing customer data to better understand their behavior, preferences, and interests. Finally, brands can create targeted and effective marketing messages and experiences.

The primary goal of adopting creative analytics is to create more effective campaigns that resonate with their target audience and drive results. By using data to inform the creative process, businesses can create messaging and experiences that are more relevant, personalized, and engaging for their customers.

Creative analytics can help track the effectiveness of the changes a brand is going through. It can also help with rebrands, a strategy that has often saved (or destroyed) brands. 

Here’s an example of how creative analytics can help. The Korean car manufacturer brand Kia suffered bankruptcy in 1997 but bounced back through branding changes in 2021. They also shifted to a different target audience and focused on EVs. Here are the old and new logos. 

However, the new logo can also be confused as KN and this may backfire for the brand. How confusing is the new logo? To understand that you need data analytics. Here’s a simple analysis from Google Trends. As you can see, right after the rebranding in 2021, more people started searching for KN on Google.

While this volume of the search may not be significant, it’s an indicator that the logo was not quite thoughtfully designed. Creative analytics helps with issues just like these. You can understand how effective or confusing your logo is, or how well-received a certain marketing campaign is. This can also help you tune your future marketing campaigns for better reception.

Why is creative analytics important?

As a business owner, you must understand the effectiveness of how well your marketing campaigns are performing. However, tracking them is not an easy job. Often, they require sifting through large volumes of data from multiple sources, making sense of metrics, and then translating the insights into better marketing campaigns. It’s a constant loop of deploying, analyzing, and improving the existing marketing campaigns. But why would you want to do this in the first place? 

Here are some of the reasons why you would want to adopt creative analytics in your business:

#1. Better insights into consumer behavior

By analyzing consumer data, businesses can gain a better understanding of their target audience's behavior, preferences, and interests. This data can be used to create more targeted and personalized marketing campaigns for their customers.

#2. Improved customer engagement

You can gain insights into your target audience by analyzing data and metrics, allowing you to create more engaging and relevant marketing campaigns.

#3. Improved campaign effectiveness

Creative analytics helps businesses to create campaigns that are more effective in achieving their marketing goals, such as increasing brand awareness, driving website traffic, or generating leads. By using data to inform the creative process, businesses can create messaging and experiences that are more likely to resonate with their target audience.

#4. Increased ROI and ROAS

By using creative analytics to create more effective campaigns, you, as a brand, can achieve better results from your marketing efforts, resulting in a higher return on investment (ROI). Since the advertisements are more effective, you also get more returns on ad-spend (ROAS). This can enable you to operate more effectively on constrained advertising budgets. 

#5. Competitive advantage

Finally, by leveraging data and creative strategies, you can create campaigns that stand out and resonate with your target audience, leading to increased brand loyalty and customer engagement. 

How to use creative analytics?

Implementing creative analytics for businesses can vary according to the nature of the business. However, there are certain steps that you can follow, no matter the operation or scale of your business. 

Step 1: Define your goals.

To begin a creative analysis, it is important to establish well-defined goals for your marketing campaigns. These goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). Clearly defining your goals will allow you to evaluate the success of your marketing endeavors and assess whether you are making progress toward your desired outcomes.

Step 2: Gather data.

To perform creative analysis, you must gather data on website traffic, social media engagement, and email campaigns, among others. You can use tools like Google Analytics, social media analytics, and email marketing platforms to collect this data.

Step 3: Perform your analysis.

Following the collection of data on marketing efforts, the next step is to analyze the data to determine which strategies are effective and which are not. To assess the performance of your campaigns, examine metrics such as impressions, click-through rates, conversion rates, and return on investment. Brand asset management software can make the process easier by providing a centralized platform for data collection and analysis, ensuring brand consistency across all marketing materials.

Step 4: Incorporate the feedback.

Upon analyzing the data, it may be necessary to modify your marketing strategies. This could entail adjusting your messaging, targeting a different audience, or reallocating your marketing budget. Implementing changes based on your analysis can enhance the efficacy of your marketing campaigns.

Challenges faced by the marketing team in ad creatives

Online advertising is an extremely competitive vertical. 90% of people using internet search have not made up their minds before the search. Searching online is often an act of brainstorming. With the increased adoption of large language models, generative AI, and conversational AI in search, this landscape is changing rapidly. Advertising is a vital component of any business and here are some of the challenges that marketing teams face.

#1. Lack of understanding of AI technologies.

Marketing teams are great at what they are trained for – designing collateral, creating marketing campaigns, and engaging with the audience. However, at present, nearly all brands are jumping onto the AI bandwagon, and often, the teams have little or no idea of how they can use AI to simplify their work. However, by using AI as an assistive tool, marketing teams can speed up their work drastically and build better content for the next generation of the internet.

A better understanding of AI systems can also allow them to know when they will use AI-assisted or -generated solutions and when they will not. AI tools can provide a boost to the collective creative intellect of marketing teams. AI-enabled solutions can greatly help marketing teams running on constrained budgets by simplifying their work, such as simplifying asset organizations, complying with regulations, or building effective workflows for teams. 

#2. Difficulties in reaching out to the right audience.

With brands like Apple making tracking changes on their devices, reaching out to the right audience can be a challenge. In such cases, you need to rely on other advertising methods and focus more on the metrics associated with those advertising channels. By constantly monitoring those metrics, you can get an idea of the creative performance of the collateral. Again, in such cases, AI-enabled software solutions can be a great help. 

#3. Using only one marketing channel.

A smart marketing team knows how to diversify its marketing campaigns. However, small businesses often rely on social media like Facebook and Instagram. Outages, although not common, happen occasionally and you would not want one to align with your marketing campaign. Using multiple marketing campaigns and generating creative insights across different channels can be a challenge without the right tools. 

#4. Lack of tools for measuring the effectiveness.

Measuring the effectiveness of advertising creatives can be difficult. Marketers must employ appropriate metrics to assess the effectiveness of their advertising creatives and make data-driven decisions to improve their campaigns. Creative analytics can help marketers measure the effectiveness of their ad creatives by tracking and analyzing key metrics such as impressions, click-through rates, and conversion rates, allowing them to make data-driven decisions to improve their campaigns.

#5. Difficulties in keeping up with trends.

Marketing teams struggle to keep up with trends because consumer preferences and trends are constantly changing. Identifying and understanding the latest trends, implementing them effectively, and adjusting their creatives accordingly can be difficult. To ensure that marketing campaigns remain relevant and engaging to consumers, constant research, analysis, and adaptation are required. Failure to keep up with trends can lead to campaigns that feel out of date or out of touch, resulting in lower effectiveness and ROI.

How does Artwork Flow’s creative analytics help in these challenges?

Creative analytics is indispensable if you are trying to gain a competitive edge while optimizing costs. However, with all the challenges that marketing teams are facing, you need dedicated tools to implement creative intelligence in your business. Creative intelligence software solutions like Artwork Flow help you visualize the performance of your creative assets and provide you with AI-driven insight into how you can improve your marketing strategies. 

#1. Generate better content.

Use AI to understand how your creatives will perform in your next marketing campaigns. With data-driven insights, you can understand which marketing collateral are performing well and which are not. Using historical data, you can make informed decisions, allowing you to optimize time and cost. However, one must understand, that while AI can help, they are not a replacement for human judgment and creativity. 

#2. Maximize your ROI.

With better content, you can be sure that the marketing creatives you are generating will help more with conversions. You can stop relying on intuition and use concrete data-backed insights to create your marketing campaigns. 

#3. Understand customer behavior.

 With Artwork Flow, you can easily find the creative assets that your customers love. By using marketing collateral that generate a positive response, you can create more effective ad campaigns. Such an AI platform for creative insights can examine data related to audience engagement, such as click-through rates, conversion rates, and social media shares. This can assist in identifying the most effective types of content for engaging the desired audience.

#4. Reduce guesswork with the help of AI.

An AI creative insights platform can identify creative trends and patterns that are effective in engaging audiences, inform future content strategy and ideation, and provide insights into audience demographics, interests, and behaviors to inform future content strategy and targeting.

Conclusion

Creative analytics has its challenges, but it can be very effective when implemented correctly. Want to see how you can harness the power of AI to implement creative analytics and improve your brand performance? Click here try out Artwork Flow's 7-day free trial.

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