What Is Creative Performance & How To Get Started in 2024

Design isn’t just about aesthetics; it’s about delivering measurable impact. Compelling creative can significantly boost brand awareness, drive sales and help you achieve other marketing and business goals.

Struggling to reach your targets? Through our wide range of design services, Superside can help you optimize your marketing performance journey. We pride ourselves on delivering standout creative that also drives phenomenal results for top brands.

In this article, Miles DePaul, Director of Demand Generation at Superside, will help us explore factors that impact creative performance and talk strategies for ensuring your creative campaigns hit the proverbial bulls-eye every time. 🎯

What Is Creative Performance?

Creative performance relates to how effectively your ads and other creative assets achieve the desired outcomes. Unlike traditional advertising, which relies heavily on intuition, every element of an optimized creative performance approach is dictated by strategic goals and performance data to drive marketing and business results.

At Superside, we believe that the best creative idea is the one that works. Creative performance, to us, means more than just great ideas—it’s about ensuring that creative drives real results. While traditional creative work often emphasizes the initial phases—concepting, ideation, and execution—we also focus on what happens after the launch.

Miles DePaulDirector of Demand Generation, Superside

Traditionally, marketing and creative teams battle barriers, from mismatched expectations to different work styles. However, delivering high-performing creative campaigns requires close collaboration between marketers and creatives.

At Superside, for example, we’ve worked on ways to break through marketing and creative obstacles, producing impressive creative that outperforms traditional approaches.

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5 Key Elements of Creative Performance

Creative performance involves developing outstanding designs that deliver results.

There are some questions that can help us determine if we’re achieving the creative performance we expect. Did the creative resonate with the target audience? Did it engage the right people? Most importantly, did it positively impact revenue and foster meaningful customer interactions?

Miles DePaulDirector of Demand Generation, Superside

Here are five key questions to consider:

1. Audience engagement: How well does your creative resonate?

Engagement measures how effectively your creative captures the attention and interest of your audience. Consider the following:

• Visual appeal and messaging: Create eye-catching designs and messaging to increase clickthrough rates and interactions.
• Interaction metrics: Monitor interaction metrics like shares, comments, likes, views and clicks on social media. Focus on watch time, completion rates and comments for videos. On your website, monitor the bounce rate and time spent on each page. These metrics provide insights into how your content is being received.
• Emotional connection: Focus on creating content that resonates with your audience to build brand loyalty and long-term engagement.

2. Effectiveness: Does your creative drive the desired action?

To achieve specific outcomes, such as driving conversions or driving brand awareness, ensure you have the following:

• Clear call-to-actions (CTAs): Provide clear, prominent CTAs that complement your design and are strategically placed to capture attention quickly.
• Conversion metrics: Metrics such as click-through rates (CTRs) and conversions indicate how successful your creative is in prompting people to take action. If you want email recipients to click a link and make a purchase, for instance, your conversion rate can quickly show you whether you’ve achieved your goal.
• Alignment with objectives: To measure brand awareness, for example, use metrics like impressions and reach to gauge the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Regularly measure the performance of your creative content to ensure it still aligns with your strategic goals.

3. Scalability: Can your creative be efficiently replicated or adapted?

Maintaining brand cohesion is crucial for building successful campaigns across different formats and platforms. Focus on:

• Consistency across channels: Make sure your creative content can quickly adapt between formats. For example, you might want to repurpose video frames into static images or social media posts while maintaining brand message and identity. Plan accordingly, as brand consistency can drive revenue growth up to 20%.
• Design systems and templates: Invest in templates and design systems to establish brand guidelines, which will help you maintain consistency and enable scalability. Define color schemes, typography, layout rules, and unique brand elements in a document that can easily be shared with others on your team.
• Efficient workflows and automation: Optimize workflows for efficiency using tools like dynamic creative optimization (DCO) and AI to generate design variations quickly and at scale.

4. Adaptability: How well does your creative respond to feedback and data?

Creative performance requires constant refinement and optimization. Achieve this swiftly by employing:

• A/B testing and experimentation: Not all ideas will be well-received. Run A/B tests to compare different versions of your assets and quickly identify what works and what doesn't.
• Responsive design: In a world where over 60% of web traffic is mobile-based, you can’t afford poorly optimized design. Ensure your assets are responsive and easily adaptable to be seamlessly displayed across every platform.
• Feedback loops: Consistently evaluating ideas and designs, making data-driven decisions and seeking insights from audience testing are crucial. Tap into user surveys and hard metrics like ROI to stay adaptable, relevant and competitive.

(Note: Our in-depth guide to A/B testing outlines everything you need to know.)

5. Innovation and originality: Is your creative work standing out?

Many top-performing companies prioritize innovation. Do the same by:

• Pushing creative boundaries: Experiment with new ideas, formats and visual styles to offer something fresh and different—for example, use augmented reality (AR) to tell your brand’s story in an unconventional way.
• Balancing originality with brand consistency: Innovative ideas are refreshing, but ensure they align with your brand identity, voice and values. Look to industry leaders like Apple or Nike for inspiration on innovating while driving brand consistency.
• Tracking industry trends and consumer behavior: Stay ahead. Monitor changing consumer preferences and industry trends, and adapt your creative strategy accordingly. Use tools like industry reports, Google Trends and SEMrush to keep your finger on the pulse.

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The Intersection of Creativity and Business Goals

We’ve covered the essential elements of creative performance. Now, let’s address aligning your creative to your business goals.

1. Align creative strategies with business objectives: For creative to deliver results, it needs to be guided by clear business objectives and serve a purpose in meeting broader organizational goals. Make sure you know what these are before starting the creative work.
2. Balance artistic vision with business needs: Creativity thrives on pushing boundaries and individual expression, but keeping these ideas grounded in business needs is essential. Successful creative strategies balance creative expression, innovation and business goals.
3. Let creative and strategic teams collaborate: Effective creative performance relies on seamless collaboration between strategic and creative teams. Our guide to bridging the gap between marketing and design teams will help you achieve this during the creative process.
4. Measure success at the intersection of creativity and business goals: Use key performance indicators (KPIs) to connect assets to performance goals. Then, track and make adjustments as needed.

For instance, if your goal is to increase sales, concentrate on conversion rates, average order value (AOV) and return on ad spend (ROAS) to assess which creative has the most impact. Use real-time analytics to track KPIs, optimize strategies and maximize campaign effectiveness. Excellent tools include Google Analytics, HubSpot and HotJar.

Superside’s Approach to Elevating Creative Performance

Superside’s two-pronged approach to creative performance is unique. We create compelling content that’s captivating and high-performing.

We’re adept at producing incredible designs that drive marketing results by providing our customers with the performance data and analyses they need to improve their output continuously.

Superside is designed specifically for creative and marketing teams that need to scale their output to achieve ambitious marketing goals. With 50% of our projects directly supporting advertising and performance marketing, we offer not just beautiful design but design that drives results.

Miles DePaulDirector of Demand Generation, Superside

As an AI-powered creative partner to our customers, we combine expert AI design services with a team of creative specialists picked from the top 1% of global talent—a powerful combination that can boost your creative efficiency by as much as 60%.

Take the work we did for Boomi, for example. Tasked with revitalizing lead generation ads, our AI-enhanced approach efficiently generated three times more creative options than traditional design teams in an accelerated time frame.

The result was a creative campaign that boosted Boomi’s LinkedIn engagement rate to 24%, significantly higher than the average 1% to 3.5% for brands on LinkedIn.

(See our other Creative Performance examples here).

3 Strategies To Improve Creative Performance

Get the best out of your creative and achieve your desired outcome by applying these straightforward strategies:

1. Partner with Superside: Your AI-powered creative partner for results-driven campaigns

Superside’s data-driven approach ensures campaigns not only perform but continuously improve through, as Miles mentions:

We at Superside recognize that optimizing creative performance requires not just good data, but also a deep understanding of channels and continuous iteration. Our approach—centered on cost-effective design, rapid turnarounds and scalable production—delivers the content performance teams need. We provide multiple creative options, fast adjustments based on real-time data, and extensive expertise across performance formats, from static images to motion and video.

Miles DePaulDirector of Demand Generation, Superside

• Consistent messaging across channels: Our expertise in creative messaging ensures a consistent brand voice across all buyer stages and channels, reinforcing your value proposition and driving impactful marketing results.
• AI-powered creative and data analysis: Superside uses AI-driven insights to continuously optimize creative assets, maximizing impact and improving marketing ROI.
• Scalable creative solutions: Our top-tier creative team can bring your vision to life whether you need a single campaign or ongoing content. We focus on driving measurable results that align with your business goals.

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2. Leverage data-driven insights to refine creative output

Beyond data-driven strategies like A/B testing and performance metric monitoring, there are other ways to refine creative outputs with data. These include:

• Using audience data for targeted creativity: Gather data on your target audience’s preferences and behavior to create assets that drive engagement and conversions. Most companies have valuable customer preference data from past campaigns. Analyzing the most effective elements can guide your next campaigns.
• Analyzing customer feedback and reviews: To better understand your customers, use targeted surveys to discover their preferences and the visuals and messages that resonate with them. You can also analyze reviews to identify any marketing shortcomings.
• Using predictive analytics to stay ahead: Predictive analytics empowers creative and marketing teams to use historical data to predict future trends. Familiarize yourself with this toolset to shift your creative efforts from reactive to proactive and stay ahead of the competition.

3. Implement a cross-channel, integrated campaign approach

Creativity that drives results at every customer journey stage requires a unified approach across channels. Key considerations include:

• A consistent creative strategy: Start with a solid creative concept that aligns with your brand goals and business objectives. Adapt it for different platforms to maintain consistency and maximize impact across channels.
• Tailored content for each stage of the buyer’s journey: Adapt your creative assets based on your target customers’ typical journey. Focus awareness-stage assets on engagement and interest and later-stage assets on conversion. Tailoring your approach for each touchpoint with your brand ensures maximum relevance and effectiveness.
• Holistic campaign analytics: When analyzing your creative campaigns, don’t focus on the results of just one or two platforms. Track performance across all platforms to find trends and weaknesses. Ultimately, this will help you optimize resource allocation for greater ROI.

Common Challenges in Measuring and Enhancing Creative Performance

Boosting your assets’ performance can be challenging. As Miles mentions:

The biggest challenge with balancing creative design with marketing performance comes down to a simple truth of life: we can’t predict the future.

Miles DePaulDirector of Demand Generation, Superside

Be wary of:

• Subjectivity in creative evaluation: While one person may think a creative asset looks fantastic, it’s essential to consider the target audience’s perspective. Be mindful of personal biases and opinions and rely on tangible data to evaluate new concepts.
• Balancing creativity and data: Balancing data-driven insights with creative freedom is crucial for fostering innovation, achieving results and standing out in a crowded digital landscape.
• Managing resource constraints: Maximizing performance with limited resources can be challenging. Think of clever ways to scale production without breaking the bank.

Having the capacity to consistently generate new ideas and produce the assets to test and measure creativity trips up many businesses.

Now more than ever, we have access to data that can get us a lot closer to understanding what creative right works in any given campaign. We can look at our own past campaigns, we can run split tests on creatives, and we can now even leverage AI to make predictions about results before even launching. There will always be an element of the unknown, but the ability to understand whether your creative is going to work is now more possible than ever.

Miles DePaulDirector of Demand Generation, Superside

Fortunately, our experienced team at Superside has successfully tackled these challenges many times. We know how to guide our partners to avoid common pitfalls and maximize the impact of every creative asset. With a flexible subscription model, we also help our customers to keep their creative costs in check.

Leveraging AI and Human Creativity for Superb Designs and Real Results

Even if you’re confident in your ability to develop a creative performance strategy and campaign, it can still feel overwhelming to go it alone.

Enlisting the help of a creative partner who can meet your requirements and business goals has many benefits. Superside’s market insights, combined with our unique blend of AI-powered ingenuity and creative thinking, make us a choice companion in the creative journey to success.

We help businesses produce creative assets that look great and drive impressive results. Book a demo to discover more.

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