If you’re an individual, influencer, or brand who works regularly with creatives and have the need to build creative content, you know that it's a challenging process. Stalled or slow workflows, quality, and personalization needs are tough to tackle.
Know that you are not alone. Brands around the world are facing just the same challenge and are experiencing setbacks.
That’s why we decided to address the issue and create a usable guide for content creation and how to create content automatically without much effort. We will also cover how to personalize such content. This elaborate article helps creative professionals in easing their workflows.
Read on!
What is Creative Automation and Why Use it!
- Creative automation uses technology and tools to drive results.
- It lets you create personalized content at scale.
- It lets you create/design creatives and engaging content with limited resources.
- It is a cost-effective solution that drives better conversations and engagement!
With creative automation platforms and tools, you can create amazing content, design marketing campaigns in quick turn-around time, meet deadlines, increase the productivity of the team, and also encourage team collaborations.
Creative Automation Explained
When it comes to marketing, content is the king. Content drives engagement thereby generating leads. So, brands need to produce engaging, personalized content that continues to drive conversations.
Lets the marketers of brands/companies and their teams design campaigns effectively. Having content ready and in hand will give your brand a huge mileage over your competition.
But how to create a large number of videos and dynamic creatives with less effort? And how to personalize such large volumes of content without vesting too many resources?
Your answer is creative automation!
The creative automation process involves techniques and tools to produce, build, edit, scale, and publish content.
For example
You are planning to launch a marketing campaign in 2 days. You want to create a simple graphic creative with your brand logo and every customer’s name (imagine 1000 customers on the list) in that creative (to personalize), it will be a nightmare for your design team to create a 1000 creatives for each individual, that too in 2-days.
But, creative automation makes it possible. You can create variations of the same content copy and add text, images, or brand elements to your copy. All this is done within hours, if not minutes.
You can also make small changes like the file size, format, banners, texts, and add CTAs, and graphic elements to your content copy.
In a nutshell, creative automation helps digital marketers, advertisers, and companies create personalized content in high volumes and at scale to plan marketing campaigns and drive engagement.
Also Read: How to Automate Your Creative Process: Step by Step Guide
Why Creative Automation?
A study confirmed that 64% of creative and design teams spend about 10 hours a week on mundane design activities like editing and resizing the content.
1 Launch Campaigns Faster
Users of creative automation tools will find that it can help them launch campaigns quicker for different audiences and goals. Automating your marketing efforts is an effective way to drive results.
Whether you’re running a personalized email marketing campaign or retargeting prospects using ads, you'll be able to customize content in thousands of copies and create personalized templates using data-driven customization tools and plugins
Most content versioning platforms also have the functionality needed for approvals/ internal reviews and also allow users to directly share on social channels without any delays.
2. Brand Consistency
Marketing teams spend hours upon days fine-tuning their marketing assets. They often forget about the time spent on manual editing, which can be a huge waste of time and money.
Creative automation offers many benefits for companies and marketing workers alike; here’s another reason why!
- Reduces overall costs to manage & optimize marketing campaigns
- Reduces the processes of continuous edits in your master copy by automating changes in your content copy.
- Creative automation helps you scale your production
- Increases team productivity by eliminating time-taking tasks and repetitive tasks and creates scope for team collaborations.
- Increases brand engagement and maintains brand consistency
- Creates personalized and customized campaigns in real-time
- Reaches your audience quicker and provides for faster brand recall
- Cost-effective solution that is easier to implement by using in-house design to make multiple creatives
- Automation solutions for your ad-campaigns
- Drives better conversations in the team and creates collaborative workflows
How To Use Creative Automation?
There are multiple tools available in the market to implement creative automation in your workflow.
For Example:
You might have a product launch in a week on digital platforms. You are working on an advertising campaign to publish across channels to engage your target audience.
Your campaign content, designs, and other digital assets need to maintain consistency and follow a theme for the sake of your brand’s image. You will also want to add personalized elements to your messages and content to engage better.
Hence, you need variations of the same content because one size doesn't fit them all.
Now your design team has a lot of edits to do and also customizing content for every customer is a herculean task if done manually. It might take the whole week but you don't have the luxury of time.
Here comes the creative automation process. It involves using personalization tools and plugins to make required edits to your original content to personalize the content.
All these personalization tools do is make minor edits or changes like change the size/format of your original content and add elements like text or personalized messages or brand elements to your content. You can make hundreds and thousands of copies of your campaigns online.
Creative Automation Process
In a world where time is money, this process removes the need for the repetition of tasks and reduces the manual effort in creating customizations at scale.
The creative automation process encourages team collaborations and enables teams to produce hundreds, if not thousands of high-quality videos and graphic designs or variations of the content using base templates in a matter of minutes.
You don't have to depend on a resource anymore or depend on hand-generated content.
You can still do all the traditional production of content like ads, explainer videos, business communications, demo videos, and live-stream captures but with creative automation, you can create multiple personalized copies of that content to share with every customer or to suit a particular platform or to do a particular campaign.
Automating the process of producing all these additional personalization makes business more efficient and functions to drive better results.
Creative Automation in Action
Creating, Optimizing, and Managing visual content is easier with creative automation tools.
Usually, this process involves creating dynamic content using a base template. The base template can be both static and video.
By automating production and creation, to ease creative operations and team collaborations, you’ll have better oversight, improved results, brand conformity, content production at scale, and high utilization of resources.
To learn how creative automation can help your team efficiently, here are the processes explained in 3 steps.
1. Create
Adopt the “template-thinking” mindset and build your visual assets using the creation tools like Adobe; You can create a base template.
2. Collaborate
Manage your asset production in one platform like VideoForm, to create, publish, collaborate, personalize and manage
3. Automate
Speed up the production process for your entire team using the creative automation management tools and personalization plugins
Work With Templates in Creative Automation
1. Designing Tool
Video ads are a great way to show your business's personality and oftentimes need more than just text. Adobe After Effects allows you the opportunity to use cool templates that can be customized with different graphics for each ad video project, which means no design skills are required!
2. Add Dynamic Elements
Templates are great for beginners because they save time. They allow you to use someone else's design instead of creating your own from scratch, which is both laborious and inefficient!
Next time we want to do something new like this (or any other project), try using one of these pre-made designs first so that everything goes smoother in the beginning - then once things get going there won't be as much pressure on us anymore since all those pieces have been done by others.
3. Easy to Use Templates
The templates and video creation tools in AE make it easy to produce professional-quality videos without having any previous experience. With these features, you can be confident that your work will turn out great time after time!
4. Link Your Template to CTA
Creative teams have more flexibility when it comes to outputting their work with the use of templates. They can generate multiple versions in one go without having open After Effects and rendering files from desktop computers, which saves them valuable time!
By linking data sheets to the variables within their templates, creative teams can output all versions they need in one go without reopening After Effects or rendering out assets from desktop computers.
You can link the CTA to one sheet and link pricing to the pricing list. This is what Creative Automation is all about.
How to Create Personalized Content at Scale Using Creative Automation
Step 1:
The first step involves adding your base content or creatives or designs like images or videos to the tool. You can upload your base content.
Step 2:
Upload the CSV data sheet with data specifying the required changes you like to see on your creatives/content. Mentioned some key aspects of your campaign.
You’ll need to provide the data you want on your personalized content like names, logo, overlays, CTAs, language, etc., to each asset or content, to personalize it better.
You can add any elements to your images or videos like logos, names, etc., and build on-brand custom content.
Step 3:
Produce dynamic content at scale and in bulk with specifications implemented. Download your personalized creatives and start launching your campaigns.
The end creatives now have the desired personalized elements or messages on your base content.
How VideoForm’s Creative Management Platform Will Help With Personalizing Your Content?
VideoForm came up with a new creative management platform that will revolutionize the way you create video content and share them. VideoForm makes it easy for anyone to create professional-quality videos with an intuitive platform.
You don't have to worry about complex algorithms or learn to use any confusing editing tools or content creating tools. VideoForm is a one-stop-shop for all your creative needs.
It is a great personalizing tool that enhances video messages and greetings. You can add personalized elements, text, images, and brand logos to all your videos and share them with your audience.
It's unique and capable of producing high volumes of content in one go! Here is a sneak peek into the features of VideoForm’s creative management platform that is coming soon.
1. Builder tool
You can build creatives, designs, and mock-ups using this tool.
2. Scaling tool
Helps you scale your creatives in large quantities.
3. Publishing tool
Let's publish your scaled creatives with network integrations. You can publish data-driven dynamic content using this tool.
4. Analytics & Optimization tools
Work on multiple creatives and multiple markets with the help of analytics and optimization tools.
Who can use Creative Automation
1. Digital Marketing Teams
You have more opportunities to create advanced ad strategies and increase the performance of your current ads and build a more data-driven approach for your target market
2. Creative Teams
You regain time spent on doing nitty-gritty work like versioning, re-sizing assets, and creating hundreds of variations of the same template. Just think about all the time you could be spending on the creative process instead.
3. Tech Enthusiasts and Early Adopters
Empower yourself to be both highly efficient in your workflows but also hyper-personal to meet and exceed the demands of modern customers.
4. Facilitators
As a global marketing or brand leader, you’ll no longer be burdened by the effort required to create and maintain complex workflows that power your organization. Think of automating the biggest sources of frustration caused by both lacks of efficiency and the right platforms.
Industries That Can Benefit From Using Creative Automation
The industries that can benefit from creative automation are those that can't depend on manual work and that have limited resources. Automation is an excellent way to increase productivity and make the most out of your investment in content as these systems adapt quickly.
- Industries that use creative automation want to make a difference in the market and market their products and services differently.
- Services industry generally needs a lot of content to reach their audience over a traditional manufacturing industry. Hence investing in content production for services and products is more beneficial.
But there is no limit to who should use the creative automation management systems. Any Industry, brand, or company that requires designs, graphics, marketing materials, or content can use these processes.
Here is an example of a personalized video screenshot created for healthcare industry:
Personalizing has no limitations in usage and applies to every and any industry and so does automate the process. It's the need of the hour.
Use Case
How Creative Automation can help an “XYZ” company with reduced campaign lead times by 5X
About “XYZ” Company
“XYZ'' is a company providing home services in the USA. XYZ is a place that connects home services, professionals/vendors, with end customers/consumers. XYZ’s platform offers home services ranging from cleaning, repair, beauty to fitness, etc. "XYZ" company has built a huge network of vendors or service professionals and a large customer base across the US and abroad.
Challenges Faced by “XYZ”
To continuously engage the customer base and maintain brand value, increase sales, XYZ needs to put in the marketing and advertising efforts continuously, for the same it needs content, graphic designs, engaging creatives, marketing materials, collateral, and a huge amount of personalized content on a day to day basis.
The creation of a large number of graphic designs, banners, and video content at once and in bulk is imminent for XYZ and its marketing, advertising, and design teams. The teams are always busy with promotions, social media marketing, and performance marketing campaigns, so they are left with little time to come up with box ideas and catchy ideas. There is a creative gap.
The biggest challenges
- To create a large number of designs, personalized campaigns, and engaging creatives over quick time frames.
- The need for creatives increased during seasonal and holiday seasons and put a lot of pressure on design teams
- High turnaround time of one week/ 7 days in creating volumes of visual creatives to launch marketing campaigns
- Design bottlenecks. Hyper targeting customers and launching hyper-targeted campaigns required a lot of images and videos to personalize content
- Heavy dependence on design teams to create minute changes of the same content copy when launching personalized campaigns
The Solution is the Creative Automation Management Platform
- "XYZ" company turned towards creative automation solutions and this process transformed the way their marketing & design teams collaborated to create massive volumes of content. They even were able to personalize their content using creative automation tools.
- Their design teams could make on-brand content templates and video templates for multiple use-cases using VideoForm personalization plug-ins.
- Marketing teams used a simple tool to edit and scale content in high volumes of the same content copy, like changing the name of a customer, changing the file size, or adding brand elements to the already existing content.
- XYZ could simplify its creative production process using VideoForm’s Creative automation management platform and personalization plugins.
- The Marketing teams of XYZ now focus on publishing the created content, while the design team can make creatives in minutes with VideoForm.
The Outcome
- Reduced lead time by 5X in launching new campaigns.
- 3X times more creatives produced and 2X more personalized campaigns launched using personalization tools
- Hyper-targeted campaigns are being launched with ease
- Reduction in creative production cost
Concluding word!
In a world where everyone is jockeying for position, you must be always one step ahead. That means being able to not only produce high-quality content at the right time but also engage with your audience so they stay interested in what information or products are offered through marketing campaigns.
Automated processes are the way of today's content producers. If you want an edge over your competition, cut down costs and increase productivity with creative automation that saves time for more menial jobs in producing good quality material.
Creative automation can be a win-win for organizations. It saves time and money while empowering your team to generate better content than ever before!
Creative automation is not here to replace your resources. On the contrary, it empowers your employees to produce better content.
Talk to us about how to implement creative automation in your workflow.
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