When scaling marketing efforts, alongside the heavily increased budget that must be involved to produce more content, one of the most difficult aspects is getting everything done on time. Especially for small digital marketing teams which cannot outsource for an extra pair of hands, scaling a marketing campaign can be incredibly demanding.
To scale without overwhelming marketing teams while optimizing the entire process, digital marketers are now turning to creative automation. With creative automation, digital marketers can automatically produce new content, using AI tools in order to extrapolate new campaigns from old ones.
In this article, we’ll delve into the world of creative automation, exploring exactly what it is, how it works, and why so many marketing teams are using it to optimize their content production processes.
Let’s get right into it.
What is Creative Automation?
Creative automation is all about replacing the low-skilled – but necessary – parts of digital creation with automatic production. Let’s say a digital marketing team wanted to launch the same campaign in several different areas of the world. The base campaign would be the same in each region, but the text would be a slightly different size and be in a different language.
Instead of having to recreate the same campaign potentially hundreds of times, digital marketing teams would use creative automation to get a robot to do the manual task for them. They would provide the base creative elements, and then the creative automation tool would cover all of the repetitive tasks that are easy to do, but still take time.
With this, digital marketing teams can focus on creative, high-quality base content, with creative automation tools then scaling their content up and producing many variants of the same thing. This active use of AI allows teams to produce more content in a fraction of the time, all while ensuring continual quality and tone of voice across all variations.
How Does Creative Automation Optimize The Production Process?
Creative automation comes out of a need for mass personalization. 73% of consumers prefer personalized marketing experiences, citing this as one of the main reasons that they may decide to purchase from a brand. However, with the huge quantities of customers that brands have to deal with, it becomes almost impossible to personalize for absolutely everyone.
From this need to personalize but inability to do so at scale, creation automation arrives to streamline the whole process. Typically, digital marketing teams move toward creative automation as it helps optimize the production process in three ways:
- Reduces costs
- Launch campaigns faster
- Ensures brand identity remains consistent
Let’s break these down further.
Reduces Costs
When attempting to scale a digital marketing campaign, one of the most apparent barriers is total budget and cost. While producing one small local campaign may be feasible for a business, producing 100 local campaigns for different regions suddenly becomes a much more difficult task.
Without any external help, scaling a digital marketing campaign results in a proportional increase in the total amount that the campaign will cost. Especially for smaller businesses, not having enough budget will impede scaling their marketing efforts, resulting in a smaller scope for their business.
However, when businesses move toward creative automation, they are able to create campaign variations for all of these different campaigns without having to increase the budget. By paying for the creative automation tool, digital marketers can then get additional support, using the automatic tool to scale their campaigns without increasing the overall cost of the operation.
With this strategy, automatic creation allows both video and static content to become deeply nuanced for different audiences. Not only does this help to produce content at scale, but it eliminates the need to increase a marketing budget by huge amounts whenever a larger campaign is needed.
Launch Campaigns Faster
Alongside cost, one of the most difficult parts of launching a marketing campaign at scale is simply that the team then has to spend hours reproducing content to match the scale of the launch. A company cannot just reproduce the same exact advertisement, as this would lose effect and quickly become boring for the consumer.
With this in mind, marketing teams have to spend hours of their time each day creating new content. Although this is possible, if there is a hard launch date, this puts immense pressure on the marketing team, forcing them to go beyond their working hours to get everything done.
With creative automation tools, the marketing team only has the produce the initial marketing template, then using automation to produce the rest. From there, they can go in and tinker with the final launch for each region, instead of having to create it from scratch. This is much faster than producing everything by hand, allowing marketing teams to get more done in a shorter amount of time.
Over time, creative automation can work as a supplementary tool that supports marketing teams, helping them to get campaigns out the door faster than ever.
Ensure Brand Identity Remains Consistent
By using a template for creative automation, all of the variations that are produced will contain the same tone of voice and branding as the original. With this, marketing teams are able to produce content at scale, without compromising on their initial vision.
With creative automation, marketers are able to produce 1000s of close replications of original content, allowing them to create a coherent and consistent company voice across all of their marketing materials. Consistency is key in marketing, which is often the reason that marketing teams will always use an email signature designer to create a coherent email signature for all employees.
This is another example of using automated tools to produce a consistent quality, with tech allowing marketing teams to produce content at scale while maintaining the initial vision. Whether it be for external email campaigns or for international ad campaigns, creative automation tools allow marketers to keep everything consistent.
Final Thoughts
With the continual development of AI technologies, the working reality of automation creation tools is actively increasing. What was once seen as a future technology is now a working reality, empowering digital marketing teams with the ability to create personalized content at scale.
While creative automation is by no means perfect, it does give teams the draft content that they can then work to refine. Instead of starting from nothing, creative automation allows digital marketing teams to completely refine the production process, cutting back costs while increasing the speed of delivery.
Over the next few years, we’ll only continue to see how far AI technologies can continue to advance digital marketing.
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