If you’re a marketing professional, you know how many details happen before the “starting gun” for a campaign. If you’re managing an omnichannel campaign, you’re thinking about content and video development. Installing new events on landing pages, developing the KPIs, and noting that will be measured for reporting. One of the things that makes campaign development most rewarding is the visual elements — seeing how the campaign comes to life in display, social media and other visual assets.
These are all important creative components, worthy of meticulous consideration before launch. But what happens after launch?
1-2 Weeks Post Launch
After your campaign has deployed, you’re watching each piece in isolation, measuring performance carefully. And as you do, you can see that some of your creative is performing well, garnering attention, clicks, maybe even driving conversions. But others are doing less well. They’re getting, well…crickets. This isn’t a bad thing. It’ll teach you something!
If you see creative separation in performance like this, don’t respond with knee-jerk efforts or look for ways to make it do better by opening up more impressions or serving in different platforms. Instead, see this as your audience telling you which messages and visuals they like best! If your creative is getting attention, make more like it! Act quickly to replace underperformers with those that are doing the job and driving your audience.
3-4 Weeks Post Launch
At this stage, you’ve “optimized your creative” by dumping what didn’t work, and adding more of the kind that did. At four weeks you’re watching conversions to best understand which pieces of creative are driving the most conversions. UTMs and Google Tag Manager are a great way to see these outcomes, watching traffic from specific units drive form fills, calls, or purchases. GTM can also tell you how many ‘false starts’ you had, treating form fill incompletes like cart abandonment.
But also important at 4 weeks is to look carefully at your remessaging campaign. For the audience that returned to your site multiple times and converted (or didn’t), you should perform a remessaging creative optimization at this stage. Just like what you did in week two, this is the time to ensure that those you’re “chasing” from an initial visit are responding. If they aren’t converting, even after repeated messages, consider how long you’re keeping them in the audience, or what you can do with the visuals or messages to change that outcome.
3 Months Post Launch
You’ve learned a lot at this stage, but it’s time to carefully examine signs of audience fatigue. Same creative getting you the same amount of clicks? Great! Keep doing what you’re doing. But if your clicks, engagements, or conversions diminish, this isn’t a sign that the marketing doesn’t work. It’s a sign that the creative has become “ignorable.” Refresh colors, or add new pieces of creative into the mix, emulating what you learned in the first 4 weeks of your campaign.
See just how much difference a creative refresh can make, by visiting this case study for one of our clients in Michigan.
Ad Choices
